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        • Explanation and Cognition
        Explanation and Cognition

        Explanation and Cognition

        Edited by Frank C. Keil and Robert A. Wilson

        • $50.00 Hardcover

        406 pp., 6 x 9 in,

        • Hardcover
        • 9780262112499
        • Published: June 22, 2000
        • Publisher: The MIT Press

        $50.00

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        These essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual change in adults, and reasoning in human and artificial systems.

        Explanations seem to be a large and natural part of our cognitive lives. As Frank Keil and Robert Wilson write, "When a cognitive activity is so ubiquitous that it is expressed both in a preschooler's idle questions and in work that is the culmination of decades of scholarly effort, one has to ask whether we really have one and the same phenomenon or merely different cognitively based phenomena that are loosely, or even metaphorically, related."

        This book is unusual in its interdisciplinary approach to that ubiquitous activity. The essays address five basic questions about explanation: How do explanatory capacities develop? Are there kinds of explanation? Do explanations correspond to domains of knowledge? Why do we seek explanations, and what do they accomplish? How central are causes to explanation? The essays draw on work in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the development of concepts in children, conceptual change in adults, and reasoning in human and artificial systems. They also introduce emerging perspectives on explanation from computer science, linguistics, and anthropology.

        Contributors
        Woo-kyoung Ahn, William F. Brewer, Patricia W. Cheng, Clark A. Chinn, Andy Clark, Robert Cummins, Clark Glymour, Alison Gopnik, Christine Johnson, Charles W. Kalish, Frank C. Keil, Robert N. McCauley, Gregory L. Murphy, Ala Samarapungavan, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Thagard, Robert A. Wilson

        Bradford Books imprint

        Frank C. Keil is Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology at Yale University, where he is also a member of the Cognition and Development Lab. He is the author of Developmental Psychology: The Growth of Mind and Behavior and other books.

        Robert A. Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University, the author of Genes and the Agents of Life, and coeditor of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences and of Explanation and Cognition (MIT Press). He directed the project that built EugenicsArchive.ca and is a director and the executive producer of the documentary Surviving Eugenics.

        Sample Chapter

        Preface

        Index

        Related Books

        The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS)
        Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development
        The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS)
        Wonder
        Efficient Cognition
        The Entangled Brain
        How to Stay Smart in a Smart World
        The Pragmatic Turn
        Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths
        Reconstructing Reason and Representation
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