The Logical Foundations of Cognition

by John Macnamara, Gonzalo E. Reyes

Overview

This important book presents seminal contributions to the emerging synthesis of logic and cognitive psychology. In collaboration with several colleagues, editors Gonzalo E. Reyes, an eminent logician, and John Macnamara, a leading cognitive and developmental psychologist, have developed a landmark semantic theory for natural languages. The theory -- which takes the form of a term logic to supplement the standard propositional logic -- has already led to the solution of some long-standing problems in semantics. It has also advanced our understanding, for example, of the processes involved in the learning of proper names, common nouns, adjectives, and negations, opening the way for exciting new experimental possibilities. Authored by an outstanding collection of distinguished theorists and researchers across disciplines, the book uses this new theoretical perspective to detail the inadequacies of classical logic in its handling of ordinary language and to reveal the prospects for applying a symbiosis of logic and psychology to cognitive psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, the philosophy of language, as well as logic itself. Both scholarly and engaging, The Logical Foundations of Cognition will be of interest to psychologists, philosophers, linguists, and computer scientists alike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195092158
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/13/1994
Series:	|c NDCS |t New Directions in Cognitive Science , #4
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

McGill University

University of Montreal

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments
	Contributors
I.	Theoretical Orientation
1.	Introduction	3
2.	Logic and Cognition	11
3.	Logic and Psychology: Comment on "Logic and Cognition"	35
4.	Tools for the Advancement of Objective Logic: Closed Categories and Toposes	43
II.	Logic
5.	Category Theory as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Cognition	57
6.	Reference, Kinds and Predicates	91
III.	Psychology
7.	Foundational Issues in the Learning of Proper Names, Count Nouns and Mass Nouns	144
8.	Prolegomena to a Theory of Kinds	177
9.	How Children Learn Common Nouns and Proper Names	212
10.	Mental Logic and How to Discover It	241
IV.	Linguistics
11.	The Semantics of Syntactic Categories	264
12.	Some Issues Involving Internal and External Semantics	282
V.	Intentionality
13.	Husserl's Notion of Intentionality	296
14.	Referential Structure of Fictional Texts	309
15.	How Not to Draw the de re/de dicto Distinction	325
16.	Cognitive Content and Semantics: Comment on "How Not to Draw the de re/de dicto Distinction"	354