What is Cognitive Science?

Ernest Lepore is Director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous articles in philosophy of mind and is co-author (with Jerry Fodor) of Holism (Blackwell 1991). He is editor of Truth and Interpretation (Blackwell 1989) and co-editor (with Robert Van Gulick) of John Searle and His Critics (Blackwell 1992), as well as general editor of the series "Philosophers and Their Critics", also published by Blackwell. Zenon Pylyshyn joined the faculty of Rutgers University as Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science in 1994. Pylyshyn has published over 60 scientific articles and book chapters, including a paper designated as a Science Citation Classic, What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain, Psychological Bulletin, (1973). He is on the editorial boards of eight scientific journals and on the International Scientific Advisory Board of the BC Advanced Systems Institute.

• Preface viiAcknowledgements ix1 What’s in your mind? 1Zenon W. Pylyshyn2 Explaining the infant’s object concept: Beyond the perception/cognition dichotomy 26Brian J. Scholl and Alan M. Leslie3 Rethinking rationality: From bleak implications to Darwinian modules 74Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich, and Patrice D. Tremoulet4 New foundations for perception 121Michael Leyton5 Object representation and recognition 172Sven J. Dickinson6 Does vision work? Towards a semantics of perception 208Jacob Feldman7 The brain as a hypothesis-constructing-and-testing agent 230Thomas V. Papathomas8 What movements of the eye tell us about the mind 248Eileen Kowler9 Visual dilemmas: Competition between eyes and between percepts in binocular rivalry 263Thomas V. Papathomas, Ilona Kovacs, Akos Feher, and Bela Julesz10 Linguistic and cognitive explanation in optimality theory 295Bruce Tesar, Jane Grimshaw, and Alan Prince11 Impossible words? 327Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore12 Bridging the symbolic-connectionist gap in language comprehension 336Suzanne Stevenson13 Cognitive and neural aspects of language acquisitions 356Karin Stromswold14 Connectionist neuroscience: representational and learning issues for neuroscience 401Stephen Jose HansonIndex 429

"Many of the authors are major academic figures (e.g., Fodor, Pylyshyn, Stich), and all are authoritative in their fields. The book, taken as a whole, conveys some of the excitement going on today in cognitive science. Recommended." C. Koch, Choice "Having been based on a lecture series that brought together some of the most innovative research in the field, this collection will work superbly as an introductory text. Aimed at a diverse audience, the issues are given a systematic presentation with technical concepts introduced both gradually and precisely. Lepore and Pylyshyn's edition serves as a quite complete and provocative path of entry into the science of the mind." David Kilfoyle, York University, Canada "An excellent collection of chapters by very talented investigators who truly understand the mission of cognitive science." -- Rochel Gelman, Rutgers University