Coherence in Thought and Action
This book is an essay on how people make sense of each other and the world they live in. Making sense is the activity of fitting something puzzling into a coherent pattern of mental representations that include concepts, beliefs, goals, and actions. Paul Thagard proposes a general theory of coherence as the satisfaction of multiple interacting constraints, and discusses the theory's numerous psychological and philosophical applications. Much of human cognition can be understood in terms of...
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Paul Thagard proposes a general theory of coherence as the satisfaction of multiple interacting constraints, and discusses the theory's numerous psychological and philosophical applications.
PrefaceAcknowledgments1 Coherence in Philosophy and Psychology1 Coherence in Psychology2 Coherence in Philosophy3 Why Philosophy Abandoned Psychology4 Cognitive Naturalism5 Summary2 Coherence as Constraint Satisfaction1 Constraint Satisfaction2 Coherence Problems3 Computing Coherence4 Measuring Coherence5 Summary3 Knowledge1 Haack's "Foundherentism" and Explanatory Coherence2 Analogical Coherence3 Deductive Coherence4 Perceptual Coherence5 Conceptual Coherence6 Unifying Coherence7 Objections to Coherene Theories8 Language9 Summary4 Reality1 Truth and the World2 Correspondence and Approximate Truth3 Mind and Body4 Other Minds5 God6 Summary7 Appendix' The Comparative Coherence of Materialism, Dualism, andTheism5 Ethics and Politics1 Deliberative Coherence2 Deductive Coherence3 Explanatory Coherence4 Analogical Coherence5 Making Sense of Ethics6 Putting It All Together7 The Coherence of Abortion8 Normative Issues9 Politics' Justifying the State10 What Kind of State?11 Conclusion12 Summary6 Emotion1 The Importance of Trust2 Coherence-Based Inference3 Emotional Coherence' Theory4 Emotional Coherence' Model5 Emotional Coherence and Trust6 Empathy7 Nationalism8 Metacoherence9 Beauty and Symmetry10 Humor11 Cognitive Therapy12 Evidence for Emotional Coherence Theory13 Normative Considerations14 Summary7 Consensus1 Consensus in Science and Medicine2 A Model of Consensus3Consensus and the Causes of Ulcers4 Consensus and the Origin of the Moon5 Benefits of Consensus Conferences6 Consensus in Value Judgments7 Summary8 Probability1 Two Traditions in Causal Reasoning2 Probabilistic Networks3 Translating ECHO into Probabilistic Networks4 Tracking Probabilistic Problems with ECHO5 Conclusion6 Summary9 The Future of CoherenceReferencesIndex
\ From the Publisher"...this book is certainly a competing, and capable, candidate."Metapsychology\ " Coherence in Thought and Action is certainly a competing, and capable, candidate." Metapsychology\ \ \
