People have the remarkable ability to think about the world in different, yet connected, ways. Our concepts, causal knowledge, and decision-making are integrated-but-distinct processes. Unifying the Mind develops a novel cognitive architecture that explains these capabilities as arising from different processes operating on a shared set of cognitive representations. It provides a new way to understand the unified nature of the human mind.
[The MIT Press] [Amazon]
The justification or truth of scientific theories is often thought to be relatively disconnected from the processes by which those theories are generated. Scientists might have many reasons (some rational, some irrational) for developing a theory. But our tests of that theory should depend only on evidence, not those reasons. Building Theories brings together new essays from leading philosophers on the question of how theories are actually produced. Taken together, these essays provide strong arguments that the processes of building & testing theories cannot be separated so easily.