World without weight: Perspectives on an alien mind - Couverture souple

Povinelli, Daniel

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0198570961 ISBN 13 : 9780198570967

Editeur : Oxford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

In every domain of reasoning-from time and space, to mental states and physical illness-humans deploy an exceedingly diverse range of intuitive 'theories' about how the world works. Children from diverse cultures always seem to arrive at a few, common folk theories as they hone their developing brains against roughly similar interactions with people and objects. The result is an impressive panoply of folk notions that the human species uses to explain, predict, and just plain talk about everything from why the sky is blue, to why we catch a cold when we stand out in the rain. Unquestionably, all of this "higher-order" reasoning rests upon a diverse and complex tool-kit of "lower-order" neural and bodily mechanisms, much of which humans share in common with other species (and which, collectively, are quite clever in their right). But this book asks a different question: Are humans alone in trying to make sense of the world by postulating theoretical entities to explain how the world works?

Povinelli and his colleagues approach this highly controversial territory by investigating the seemingly prosaic topic whether chimpanzees wield roughly the same commonsense ideas about weight that human do. When it comes to the physical world, they ask if chimpanzees reinterpret a broad range of primary experiences-lifting objects, seeing objects fall or collide, observing the differential effort others exert when they move objects-in terms of a common, causal mechanism which, in our everyday parlance, we refer to as 'weight.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Daniel Povinelli received his BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1986 and his PhD in physical anthropology from Yale University in 1991. Later that year, he established a center at the University of Louisiana for the comparative study of human and ape cognitive development which he directed for nearly twenty years. His research has consistently focused on identifying the unique aspects of human cognition. His work has been recognized by a Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution from American Psychological Association, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and a $1 Million James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in Human Cognition. He was appointed as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and and is a current fellow of the Association for Scientific Psychology the Institute for Leadership and Service at Augustana College.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Oxford University Press
• Date d'édition: 2011
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0198570961
• ISBN 13: 9780198570967
• Reliure: Broché
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 376
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Ufficio Anagrafiche Messaggerie; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italie