{"title":"Paul Thagard","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"how-scientists-explain-disease-book-paul-thagard-9780691002613","title":"How Scientists Explain Disease","description":"Ranging through the history of medicine, from the Hippocratic theory of humours to modern explanations of Mad Cow Disease and chronic fatigue syndrome, this book analyzes the development and acceptance of scientific ideas. At the heart of the book is a case study of the recent shift in medical understanding of peptic ulcers, most of which are now believed to be caused by infection by the bacterium, Heliobacter pylori. Among the questions asked are: how do scientists develop new explanations of disease? How do those explanations become accepted as true? How does medical diagnosis change when physicians are confronted with new scientific evidence? The book challenges both traditional philosophy of science, which has viewed science as largely a matter of logic, and contemporary science studies that view science as largely a matter of power.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49515259920657,"sku":"GOR006503725","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691002614.jpg?v=1750700062"},{"product_id":"bots-and-beasts-book-paul-thagard-9780262045940","title":"Bots and Beasts","description":"An expert on the mind considers how animals and smart machines, like AI assistants and driverless cars, measure up to human intelligence.  Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? In Bots and Beasts, Paul Thagard looks at how computers (\"bots\") and animals measure up to the minds of people, offering the first systematic comparison of intelligence across machines, animals, and humans.  Thagard explains that human intelligence is more than IQ and encompasses such features as problem solving, decision making, and creativity. He uses a checklist of twenty characteristics of human intelligence to evaluate the smartest machines--including Watson, AlphaZero, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars--and the most intelligent animals--including octopuses, dogs, dolphins, bees, and chimpanzees. Neither a romantic enthusiast for nonhuman intelligence nor a skeptical killjoy, Thagard offers a clear assessment. He discusses hotly debated issues about animal intelligence concerning bacterial consciousness, fish pain, and dog jealousy. He evaluates the plausibility of achieving human-level artificial intelligence and considers ethical and policy issues. A full appreciation of human minds reveals that current bots and beasts fall far short of human capabilities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49547246403857,"sku":"GOR013704589","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49713477452049,"sku":"GOR013134145","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49741412794641,"sku":"NGR9780262045940","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51415615209745,"sku":"CIN026204594XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51695150727441,"sku":"CIN026204594XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262542528.jpg?v=1751435409"},{"product_id":"mind-book-paul-thagard-9780262201063","title":"Mind","description":"The Boy in the Suitcase: Holocaust Family Stories of Survival is a uniquely different Holocaust book. It reads like an intriguing novel, such as the title chapter which tells the story of an infant smuggled out of Germany in a suitcase and raised in the Dominican Republic. Each chapter tells a different story of families throughout the world who have been affected by the Holocaust. This book also covers the trauma of second generation children of Holocaust survivors and the bravery of Christian families who hid Jewish children in Quaregnon, Belgium. The Boy in the Suitcase includes inspirational stories from nations such as Russia, Poland, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, and the Dominican Republic. Intelligence, courage, and the will to survive permeate each remarkable chapter. 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Social change emerges from interacting social and mental mechanisms.   Many economists and political scientists assume that individuals make rational choices, despite the abundance of evidence that people frequently succumb to thinking errors such as motivated inference. Much of sociology and anthropology is taken over with postmodernist assumptions that everything is constructed on the basis of social relations such as power, with no inkling that these relations are mediated by how people think about each other.   Mind-Society displays the interdependence of the cognitive and social sciences by describing the interconnections among mental and social mechanisms, which interact to generate social changes ranging from marriage patterns to wars. Validation comes from detailed studies of important social changes, from norms about romantic relationships to economic practices, political institutions, religious customs, and international relations.   This book belongs to a trio that includes Brain-Mind: From Neurons to Consciousness and Creativity and Natural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and Beauty. They can be read independently, but together they make up a Treatise on Mind and Society that provides a unified and comprehensive treatment of the cognitive sciences, social sciences, professions, and humanities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49724746629393,"sku":"GOR013134594","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51606511485201,"sku":"CIN0190678720VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52819629768977,"sku":"CIN0190678720G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0190678720.jpg?v=1776938103"},{"product_id":"balance-book-paul-thagard-9780231205580","title":"Balance","description":"Living is a balancing act. Ordinary activities like walking, running, or riding a bike require the brain to keep the body in balance. A dancer’s poised elegance and a tightrope walker’s breathtaking performance are feats of balance. Language abounds with expressions and figures of speech that invoke balance. People fret over work-life balance or try to eat a balanced diet. The concept crops up from politics—checks and balances, the balance of power, balanced budgets—to science, in which ideas of equilibrium are crucial. Why is balance so fundamental, and how do physical and metaphorical balance shed light on each other?  Paul Thagard explores the physiological workings and metaphorical resonance of balance in the brain, the body, and society. He describes the neural mechanisms that keep bodies balanced and explains why their failures can result in nausea, falls, or vertigo. Thagard connects bodily balance with leading ideas in neuroscience, including the nature of consciousness. He analyzes balance metaphors across science, medicine, economics, the arts, and philosophy, showing why some aid understanding but others are misleading or harmful. Thagard contends that balance is ultimately a matter of making sense of the world. In both literal and metaphorical senses, balance is what enables people to solve the puzzles of life by turning sensory signals or an incongruous comparison into a coherent whole.  Bridging philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Balance shows how an unheralded concept’s many meanings illuminate the human condition.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49743063154961,"sku":"NGR9780231205580","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231205589.jpg?v=1751442025"},{"product_id":"bots-and-beasts-book-paul-thagard-9780262548540","title":"Bots and Beasts","description":"An expert on the mind considers how animals and smart machines, like AI assistants and driverless cars, measure up to human intelligence.  Octopuses can open jars to get food, and chimpanzees can plan for the future. An IBM computer named Watson won on Jeopardy! and Alexa knows our favorite songs. But do animals and smart machines really have intelligence comparable to that of humans? 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Paul Thagard argues that evidence requires the abandonment of many traditional ideas about the soul, free will, and immortality, and shows how brain science matters for fundamental issues about reality, morality, and the meaning of life. The ongoing Brain Revolution reveals how love, work, and play provide good reasons for living. Defending the superiority of evidence-based reasoning over religious faith and philosophical thought experiments, Thagard argues that minds are brains and that reality is what science can discover. Brains come to know reality through a combination of perception and reasoning. Just as important, our brains evaluate aspects of reality through emotions that can produce both good and bad decisions. Our cognitive and emotional abilities allow us to understand reality, decide effectively, act morally, and pursue the vital needs of love, work, and play. Wisdom consists of knowing what matters, why it matters, and how to achieve it. The Brain and the Meaning of Life shows how brain science helps to answer questions about the nature of mind and reality, while alleviating anxiety about the difficulty of life in a vast universe. 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The history of science contains dramatic episodes of revolutionary change in which whole systems of concepts have been replaced by new systems. Thagard provides a new and comprehensive perspective on the transformation of scientific conceptual systems. Thagard examines the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions and the emergence of Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's oxygen theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum theory, and the geological theory of plate tectonics. He discusses the psychological mechanisms by which new concepts and links between them are formed, and advances a computational theory of explanatory coherence to show how new theories can be judged to be superior to previous ones.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49925931139345,"sku":"GOR005793588","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52104303477009,"sku":"CIN0691024901G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52816335274257,"sku":"CIN0691024901VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0691024901.jpg?v=1751394198"},{"product_id":"brain-and-the-meaning-of-life-book-paul-thagard-9780691142722","title":"The Brain and the Meaning of Life","description":"Why is life worth living? What makes actions right or wrong? 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It is suitable for classroom use by students with interests ranging from computer science and engineering to psychology and philosophy.Thagard's systematic descriptions and evaluations of the main theories of mental representation advanced by cognitive scientists allow students to see that there are many complementary approaches to the investigation of mind. The fundamental theoretical perspectives he describes include logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images, and connections (artificial neural networks). The discussion of these theories provides an integrated view of the different achievements of the various fields of cognitive science.This second edition includes substantial revision and new material. Part I, which presents the different theoretical approaches, has been updated in light of recent work the field. Part I, which treats extensions to cognitive science, has been thoroughly revised, with new chapters added on brains, emotions, and consciousness. Other additions include a list of relevant Web sites at the end of each chapter and a glossary at the end of the book. 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Paul Thagard presents a unified, brain-based theory of cognition and emotion with applications to the most complex kinds of thinking, right up to consciousness and creativity. Neural mechanisms are used to explain mental operations for analogy, action, intention, language, and the self.  Brain-Mind develops a brilliant account of mental operations using promising new ideas from theoretical neuroscience. Single neurons cannot do much by themselves, but groups of neurons work together to accomplish powerful kinds of mental representation, including concepts, images, and rules.   Minds enable people to perceive, imagine, solve problems, understand, learn, speak, reason, create, and be emotional and conscious. Competing explanations of how the mind works have identified it as soul, computer, brain, dynamical system, or social construction. This book explains minds in terms of interacting mechanisms operating at multiple levels, including the social, mental, neural, and molecular. Unification comes from systematic application of Chris Eliasmith's powerful Semantic Pointer Architecture, a highly original synthesis of neural network and symbolic ideas about how the mind works.   This book belongs to a trio that includes Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions and Natural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and Beauty. 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Thagard discusses the psychological processes of discovery and acceptance, the physical processes involving instruments and experiments, and the social processes of collaboration, communication, and consensus that brought about this transformation in medical knowledge. How Scientists Explain Disease challenges both traditional philosophy of science, which has viewed science as largely a matter of logic, and contemporary science studies that view science as largely a matter of power. Drawing on theories of distributed computing and artificial intelligence, Paul Thagard develops new models that make sense of scientific change as a complex system of cognitive, social, and physical interactions. This is a book that will appeal to all readers with an interest in the development of science and medicine. It combines an engaging style, significant research, and a powerfully original argument.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50357228667153,"sku":"CIN069105083XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/069105083X.jpg?v=1751168202"},{"product_id":"conceptual-revolutions-book-paul-thagard-9780691087450","title":"Conceptual Revolutions","description":"This study draws on the history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a theory of conceptual change capable of accounting for all major scientific revolutions. In addition to examining the Copernican and the Darwinian revolutions, Thagard turns his attention to the emergence of Newton's mechanics, Lavoisier's oxygen theory, Einstein's theory of relativity, quantum theory and the geological theory of plate tectonics. He discusses the psychological mechanisms by which new concepts and links between them are formed, and advances a computational theory of explanatory coherence to show how new theories can be judged to be superior to previous ones. To assess whether the field of psychology has undergone revolutions similar to those in physics, chemistry, biology and geology, he describes the nature and growth of behaviourism and cognitivism. 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