How the Mind Works"A model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear." —New York Review of Books In this Pulitzer Prize finalist and national bestseller, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists tackles the workings of the human mind. What makes us rational—and why are we so often irrational? How do we see in three dimensions? What makes us happy, afraid, angry, disgusted, or sexually aroused? Why do we fall in love? And how do we grapple with the imponderables of morality, religion, and consciousness? How the Mind Works synthesizes the most satisfying explanations of our mental life from cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and other fields to explain what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and contemplate the mysteries of life. This edition of Pinker's bold and buoyant classic is updated with a new foreword by the author. |
From inside the book
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... Visual Cognition (ed.) Connections and Symbols (ed., with Jacques Mehler) Learnability and Cognition Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (ed., with Beth Levin) The Language Instinct How the Mind Works Steven Pinker B W. W. Norton.
... a category, the category disintegrates. Leaving aside slippery concepts like “beauty” or “dialectical materialism,” let's look at a textbook example of a well-defined one: “bachelor.” A bachelor, of course, 12 HOW THE MIND WORKS.
... machinery it takes to be good but how slippery the concept of goodness is to start with. And what about the most caring motive of all? The weak-willed computers of 1960s pop culture were not tempted only by selfishness Standard Equipment ...
... concept of an allpowerful protoplasm with the concept of functionally specialized mechanisms. The organ systems of the body do their jobs Standard Equipment 27.
... concept of uncaused free will that underlies moral responsibility. Either we dispense with all morality as an unscientific superstition, or we find a way to reconcile causation (genetic or otherwise) with responsibility and free will. I ...