Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists (Princeton Legacy Library, 292) - Softcover

"An invaluable accompaniment to a standard text and an excellent educated layman's introduction to some of the more computational issues in the science of the mind."--Richard Cooper, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"Enough food for thought to satisfy the most hungry of intellects."--New Scientist

"These edited interviews of prominent workers in the cognitive science arena reveal lively disagreement on basic concepts, particularly between the two dominant camps. . . . A multiperspective overview of the evolution and objective of this relatively new discipline."--Booklist

"The editors, Peter Baumgartner and Sabine Payr, have done a brilliant job. Enough food for thought to satisfy the most hungry of intellects."--New Scientist

"The frank and friendly style of the interviews makes the book both an invaluable accompaniment to a standard text and an excellent educated layman's introduction to some of the more computational issues in the science of the mind."--Richard Cooper, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"The authors' goal was not simply to produce another text that serves to introduce cognitive science but rather to give readers a feeling of the excitement of the field by helping them understand the personal commitment of these researchers and their connections to the work and thoughts of others in the field. They were clearly successful."--Choice

Few developments in the intellectual life of the past quarter-century have provoked more controversy than the attempt to engineer human-like intelligence by artificial means. Born of computer science, this effort has sparked a continuing debate among the psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers,and linguists who have pioneered--and criticized--artificial intelligence. Are there general principles, as some computer scientists had originally hoped, that would fully describe the activity of both animal and machine minds, just as aerodynamics accounts for the flight of birds and airplanes? In the twenty substantial interviews published here, leading researchers address this and other vexing questions in the field of cognitive science.

The interviewees include Patricia Smith Churchland (Take It Apart and See How It Runs), Paul M. Churchland (Neural Networks and Commonsense), Aaron V. Cicourel (Cognition and Cultural Belief), Daniel C. Dennett (In Defense of AI), Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cognitivism Abandoned), Jerry A. Fodor (The Folly of Simulation), John Haugeland (Farewell to GOFAI?), George Lakoff (Embodied Minds and Meanings), James L. McClelland (Toward a Pragmatic Connectionism), Allen Newell (The Serial Imperative), Stephen E. Palmer (Gestalt Psychology Redux), Hilary Putnam (Against the New Associationism), David E. Rumelhart (From Searching to Seeing), John R. Searle (Ontology Is the Question), Terrence J. Sejnowski (The Hardware Really Matters), Herbert A. Simon (Technology Is Not the Problem), Joseph Weizenbaum (The Myth of the Last Metaphor), Robert Wilensky (Why Play the Philosophy Game?), Terry A.Winograd (Computers and Social Values), and Lotfi A. Zadeh (The Albatross of Classical Logic). Speaking Minds can complement more traditional textbooks but can also stand alone as an introduction to the field.

Originally published in 1995.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.