An eminent, award-winning behavioral scientist offers a radical interpretation of how the mind works, revealing the illusion of mental depth."This is a total assault on all lingering psychiatric and psychoanalytic notions of mental depths to be plumbed. For Chater, surface is everything: we are all characters of our own creation, busily creating and improvising our behavior based on experience. Light the touchpaper and stand well back." —

Two leading behavioral scientists argue we should reject “nudge” policies and stop blaming personal failure for society’s failures"Excellent. A master class on how to blend individual psychology with institutions, so that people are encouraged to get involved and develop solutions to our urgent problems via the democratic process." —Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and author of Power and ProgressTwo decades ago, behavioral economics...

The definitive introduction to Bayesian cognitive science, written by pioneers of the field.How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? How do our minds get so much from so little? Bayesian models of cognition provide a powerful framework for answering these questions by reverse-engineering the mind. This textbook offers an authoritative introduction to Bayesian cognitive science and a unifying theoretical perspective on how the mind works. Part I provi...

This interdisciplinary new work explores one of the central theoretical problems in linguistics: learnability. The authors, from different backgrounds---linguistics, philosophy, computer science, psychology and cognitive science-explore the idea that language acquisition proceeds through general purpose learning mechanisms, an approach that is broadly empiricist both methodologically and psychologically. For many years, the empiricist approach has been taken to be unfeasible on practical a...

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we goLanguage is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the o...

A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences.Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: mo...

This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human inference is central to much cognitive science, although the commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means ...

In a radical reinterpretation of how the mind works, an eminent behavioral scientist reveals the illusion of mental depthPsychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental "surface" of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves....

Two leading behavioral scientists argue we should reject “nudge” policies and stop blaming personal failure for society’s failures"Excellent. A master class on how to blend individual psychology with institutions, so that people are encouraged to get involved and develop solutions to our urgent problems via the democratic process." --Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and author of Power and ProgressTwo decades ago, behavioral economic...

Forget the language instinct—this is the story of how we make up language as we goLanguage is perhaps humanity’s most astonishing capacity—and one that remains poorly understood. In The Language Game, cognitive scientists Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Chater show us where generations of scientists seeking the rules of language got it wrong. Language isn’t about hardwired grammars but about near-total freedom, something like a game of charades, with the o...

'BRILLIANTLY ARRANGED AND RICH WITH FRESH INSIGHTS, UNCOMMON WEALTH REMINDS US HOW THE FORGOTTEN STORIES OF EMPIRE AND DECOLONISATION CONTINUE TO IMPACT OUR DAILY LIVES IN BRITAIN - AND THROUGHOUT THE WORLD - UP TO TODAY' AKALABritain didn't just put the empire back the way it had found it.In Uncommon Wealth, Kojo Koram traces the tale of how after the end of the British empire an interconnected group of well-heeled Britis...

Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world,this audiobook is a beautiful collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared historyThe earliest scientists ground and processed minerals in a centuries-long quest for a mythic stone that would prolong human life. Michelangelo climbed mountains in Tuscany searching for the sugar-white marble that would yield his sculptures. Catherine the Great wore the wealth of Russia stitched...