How Words Help Us Think - by Nancy Salay (Hardcover)

About the Book

Provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary survey of the empirical support for the externalist account of intentionality.

Book Synopsis

The mainstream assumption in cognitive science, artificial intelligence and analytic philosophy is that the defining characteristic of human cognition - intentionality, the capacity to represent - is biologically fundamental. This has driven research in cognitive science increasingly inwards and downwards to focus on activity at the neural and molecular levels, which, as Nancy Salay argues, is misguided.

Revealing the central problems with this internalist idea, Salay puts forward an externalist paradigm of intentionality supported by recent empirical work in neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, animal cognition, developmental psychology, linguistics and anthropology. Drawing all of these insights together, she provides a unified framework in which to situate externalist views of intentionality, making progress towards a viable theory of cognition. Here is a comprehensive theoretical guide and a valuable empirical resource for those who view cognition through an extended and enactive lens.

Review Quotes

"A tightly argued and superbly clear analysis for why our representational and language capacities should be viewed as cultural and psychological tools that we use to do things in the world, and not innate brain-based capacities that allow us to generate a picture of the world in our heads." --Louise Barrett, Professor of Psychology, University of Lethbridge, Canada

About the Author

Nancy Salay is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and School of Computing at Queen's University, Canada.