Principles of Cognition, Language and Action: Essays on the Foundations of a Science of Psychology

✍ Scribed by N. Praetorius (auth.)

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 497
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book addresses a growing concern as to why Psychology, now more than a hundred years after becoming an independent research area, does not yet meet the basic requirements of a scientific discipline on a par with other sciences such as physics and biology. These requirements include: agree­ ment on definition and delimitation of the range of features and properties of the phenomena or subject matter to be investigated; secondly, the development of concepts and methods which unambiguously specify the phenomena and systematic investigation of their features and properties. A third equally important requirement, implicit in the first two, is exclusion from enquiry of all other mattes with which the discipline is not concerned. To these requirements must then be added the development of basic assumptions about the nature of what is under investigation, and of principles to account for its properties and to serve as a guide as to what are relevant questions to ask and theories to develop about them.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xxi
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction to assumptions and arguments....Pages 3-25
Alternative assumptions and principles....Pages 27-44
Problems of explanations and theories of visual perception....Pages 45-68
Consequences for perception psychology and epistemology....Pages 69-88
Front Matter....Pages 89-89
The relation between language and reality....Pages 91-121
Language, concepts and reality....Pages 123-154
Situations, action and knowledge....Pages 155-164
Scientific and other descriptions of reality....Pages 165-194
Physicalism and Psychology....Pages 195-203
Context, content And reference — the case for beliefs and intentionality....Pages 205-234
Propositions about real as opposed to fictitious things....Pages 235-248
Why there still cannot be a causal theory of content....Pages 249-281
The relation between language, cognition and reality I....Pages 283-293
The relation between language, cognition and reality II....Pages 295-310
The relation between language, cognition and reality III....Pages 311-326
Front Matter....Pages 327-327
Identity and identification — same and different....Pages 329-351
Front Matter....Pages 353-361
Some consequences of epistemological idealism....Pages 363-381
Wittgenstein’s theories of language....Pages 383-404
The external world and the internal....Pages 405-438
The inter-subjectivity of knowledge and language....Pages 439-466
Front Matter....Pages 353-361
The conditions for people to be and function as persons: Summary and consequences....Pages 467-482
Back Matter....Pages 483-492

✦ Subjects

Epistemology; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Science; Cognitive Psychology