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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... 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.
... symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on ...
... symbol; it can “stand for” that state of affairs. But as a piece of matter, it can do other things as well—physical things, whatever that kind of matter in that kind of state can do according to the laws of physics and chemistry. Tree ...
... symbols and output symbols could correspond, depending on the details of the machine, to any one of a vast number of sensible interpretations. The machine consists of a tape divided into squares, a read-write head that can print or read ...
... symbols that make some kind of sense—are buildable, indeed, easily buildable. The computer scientist Joseph ... symbol-processor. Not long after his discovery, more practical symbolprocessors were designed, some of which became IBM and ...