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In this brilliant, beautifully written
account -- the first full-scale history of cognitive science
-- the renowned cognitive psychologist and author Howard
Gardner chronicles a new and crucial scientific chapter
in the perennial quest for mind. An exciting interdisciplinary
effort, cognitive science seeks, through the most sophisticated
conceptual tools, to solve the classic problems of Western
thought: the nature of knowledge and how it is represented
in the mind.
Howard Gardner begins his narrative with
the revolt against behaviourism, the pioneering work of
Lashley, Turing, von Neumann, and Wiener, and the dawn of
the computer age. He then cogently traces the relevant history
of the constituent cognitive sciences -- philosophy, psychology,
artificial intelligence, linguistics, and the border disciplines
of anthropology and neuroscience -- demonstrating their
parallel and converging developments.
Finally, drawing on scores of interviews
with leading cognitive scientists, Gardner illustrates the
full flowering of the field through major current work on
visual processing, mental imagery, classification, and rationality.
Appraising cognitive science, he finds much to admire and
much to question, including the adequacy of computer models
and the ability of the field to forge connections with both
culture and brain science.
Breathtaking in scope, this is no less than a comprehensive
tour, in lucid and fascinating detail, of much of our own
intellectual universe by a scholar and writer of matchless
breadth and artistry.
Howard Gardner, a MacArthur Prize Fellow,
is affiliated with Harvard University, Boston University
School of Medicine, and Boston Veterans Administration Medical
Center. His most recent book, Frames of Mind: The Theory
of Multiple Intelligences (Basic Books,1983), won the
National Psychology Award for Excellence in the Media.
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