Artikelomschrijving

The dominant approach of the last century to behaviour was associationism - reducing the complexity of behaviour to the homogeneous strengthening and weakening of simple connections between stimuli and responses. Chomskys devastating critique of this account of human language in the 1960s, resulted in a cease fire with humans allowed cognitive minds with more expressive machinery, and animals consigned to the graveyard of associations. As messy as all ceasefires, this one left some animal researchers thinking associationism as bad a theory for animals as for people. But the good effect was that there was a broad appreciation that no one discipline would understand the complexities of the mind, and their origins. This book brings comparative and developmental psychology, robotics, linguistics and philosophy to bear on the problem of understanding the biological continuities and discontinuities of the human mind.