Bradford Books

The puzzles were much easier than I expected, thus the 3 stars. Older children will enjoy them very much, but adults may find them too simple.

This book is an easy read and presents the material clearly, but its also full of filler materials and has a ton of typos.

This book is, unfortunately, the best English book on the history of Brazil. I really wanted to learn more about the history of Brazil, so I read the whole book, and I learned a lot. However, the book is not broken down by subjects, or events, or individuals, and is just written all together as one continuous stream of thought, which makes it somewhat hard to read and follow. In addition, there is very little insight into the individuals (and their motives) who shaped Brazil. I think only Dom Pedro II got more than a paragraph. This book was clearly written by someone from the "old school." Isn't there a fresh young history professor out there looking to make a name for him or herself who could write a better book? If so, get to work, and I'll buy your book. Brazilian history is very interesting, and remains fascinating even when presented in this dull format.

Dr. Burns, at least get some better pictures and maps in your next version!

Travel guides generally should not deserve a review.
They are a tool and, more than other books, are exposed to the damage of time.

This book (first published 1963) is no exception, but it got my attention because the author, Ernle Bradford, was also an excellent writer and a passionate lover of the Mediterranean Sea.
His "Mediterranean. Portrait of a Sea" is probably the best homage ever paid to the "Mare Nostrum": passionate, informed and attentive to the many colors of its shores. Also his "The Great Siege: Malta1565" reveals this same passion.

Unfortunately this book is just the average list of islands arranged in roughly geographical order and enlivened here and there with a colorful touch.
Nothing more - nothing less.

As a traveler, I have toured extensively in the Mediterranean and enjoy as well reading about its history and traditions.

If you are reading this review, there may be a chance you're looking at this book because of my same reasons and could be interested in similar travel-related books I had the chance to read (and enjoy) about this argument:
- Predrag Matvejevic - "Mediterranean. A Cultural Landscape". Nostalgia over the shores of the dark wine sea (if interested, I have written a review on it).
- Ernle Bradford - "Mediterranean. Portrait of a Sea". Possibly the best book I read on history, culture and traditions of the Mare Nostrum.
- John Ash - "A Byzantine Journey". A poetic, fragile and luminous evocation of the Byzantine past.
- Stephen Minta - "On a Voiceless Shore". A travel on the footsteps of lord Byron: passionate, poetic and hugely learned.
- James G. Frazer - "Pausanias and Other Greek Sketches" (1900). Yes, this is the author of the famous "Golden Bough". It is a collection on short sketches about archeological walks and visit on mainland Greece. Today everything is changed, but you still can catch some of the fascination described in this book.
- Patrick Leigh Fermor - "Mani. Travels in the Southern Peloponnese" (1958). Deservedly praised for his sensibility in describing a vanishing Greece, this is one of the most touching homage ever paid to Greece. The remoteness of the Mani region is nowadays gone, but still you can enjoy the unique landscape and imagine how it must be at the beginning of the XX century.
- Robert Byron - "The Station. Athos: treasures and Men" (1928) - by the same author of "The Road to Oxiana", it is a report of a trip to Mount Athos, written by a lover of Byzantine civilization. It cast a glance on some of the less known traits of modern Greek culture, the Byzantine heritage and the orthodox faith.
- Henry Miller - "The Colossus of Maroussi". Listed here only because I read it, this is a book I greatly disliked: at least this is not the Greece I know and like... read at your own risk.
- J.B.S. Morrit - "A Grand Tour. Letters and Journeys (1794-96)". Letters posted during the author's travels through the Aegean Sea. Very colourful and passionate, it is a testimony on how Greece was before the War of Independence.

I do appreciate feedback.
You are truly welcome if you can suggest other readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.

This is a very nice book; I'm giving it only three stars because it might ultimately prove to be completely wrong...the classical cog sci vs. connectionism debate is all conjecture at this point.

There are a few things in the book I don't like, such as odd informal and arguably irrelevant scenarios involving playing basketball and feeling the need to go to the refrigerator for a beer. Also I don't like the treatment of defeasible conditionals. To my mind, "If A then, ceteris paribus, B" just means "If A then probably B". That is, E(B|A) is near one. Horgan and Teinson believe that ceteris paribus conditionals are a bona fide logical relation. I'm a non-fan of most non-standard logic. Also, as you can easily program a classical computer with any number of defeasible causal tendencies, I view this discussion as neutral re: their primary thesis.

Which is what? Well, Horgan and Tienson argue that the classical cognitive science approach to mental causation is committed to tractable computability of a state-transition function for mental states at the cognitive level. They then argue against this. What does this mean and why is it significant? Mental representations are (of) concepts. Plainly, the mind must be able to manipulate structured configurations of these representations in ways that respect syntactic structure. In order for a state transition function to be tractably computable at the cognitive level, one ought to be able to look just at the structure of representations being tokened at t plus memory stores and classical transition rules and figure out the structure of representations tokened at t+1. Anyway that's what it means. The question of significance requires some background.

Fodor, Pylyshyn, McLaughlin etc. argued that mental architectures that are connectionist at the cognitive level can't manipulate representations in a way that respects syntactic structure. Their arguments for the most part apply to simple connectist networks having concepts at the nodes interacting in a rather associationistic way. Connectionists say the addition of intervening nodes can result in a total system that respects structure. Classicists respond that, insofar as this happens, the system is just simulating a classical architecture at the cognitive level. Indeed, implementation aside, without a way to differentiate connectionist cognitive architecture from classical cognitive architecture, it's very difficult to even tell what the debate, on its face trench warfare between two facing dogmas, is tangibly about.

Whether or not their position ultimately proves right, Horgan and Tienson's tractable computability condition may be just such a tangible issue. That, I think, is the most significant aspect of their work here...they seem to have provided a way to see what's ultimately at issue.

Dynamical systems is an approach to studying physical systems that change over time; in contrast to the field of statistics which deals primarily with stable-state properties of systems. It is clear that both human behavior and the brain are fundamentally dynamical in nature, but despite widespread acceptance of this idea, few cognitive scientists study the brain or behavior from a dynamical perspective. This book is an attempt to demonstrate the value of applying the techniques of dynamical systems to the study of cognition.

The book is organized as a very high-level introduction to the tools and topics of dynamical systems, with simplified mathematics that are introduced gently. Unfortunately, perhaps due to its introductory nature, much of the book is spent introducing topics and surprisingly little space is given to the application of these ideas to cognitive science. Each topic (markov models, regressive processes, colored noise, chaotic systems, etc) is introduced with one to two chapters with examples from physics or other domains, followed by a comparatively short chapter on how it relates to human behavior. As a result, what is lost is the sense of how a dynamical systems approach could revolutionize the study of cognitive science. A more accurate title for this book would have been 'Introduction to dynamical systems for cognitive scientists'. This book will introduce you to the topics of dynamical systems, hint at how they apply to the study of cognition, but it will not make you an expert in the field, nor (unfortunately) will it impress you with the value of taking the time and effort to study the topics further.

The scope of Economics of Property-Casualty Insurance rests on the title phrase. Buy this book if you need a direct definition of causes, consequences, and external variables regarding actuarial mathematical conclusions. Do not buy this book if you need a brief and general overview about "the math that actuaries use to rate stuff." In addition, the passive voice and run-on sentences may lose you in a string of thoughts. However, if you understand the P-C Industry very well, you'll probably follow the process just fine.

On page 18 Pfeifer and Bongard claim that "intelligence always requires a body." They may be right but I do not find sufficiently convincing arguments in their book (How the body shapes the way we think).
Perhaps the demand for real time operation and the simultaneous need to control computational complexity result in the need for highly parallel inputs and outputs. These many input and output devices, however they might be configured, would then constitute a "body." (They could be distributed across space in a way the human body can not be. This would constitute a superiority for AIs.)

L&S's theory might be termed a "cognitivized" version of more or less standard truth-conditional semantics - more properly, a series of versions, or T-theories. The authors' strategy is first to present the basic principles; then, beginning with a model that can handle only very simple data, to add more and more structure to accommodate more and more data, and along the way, to entertain departures which are later shown to be inadequate and discarded. Thus we go through PC+ (propositional calculus plus names and predicates), PCset (in which names are singletons), PCprop (in which predicates are properties), PC+DN (in which names are descriptions), VRT (which can handle pronouns and demonstratives), PredC (which can handle quantification), GQ (replacing quantification as done in PredC with generalized quantifiers, and bringing in definite descriptions). After anaphora and tense are introduced, a final version of the theory emerges. This is a formal approach to meaning; L&S's method of imparting it makes it easier to absorb than many textbooks do. Even so, a complete truth derivation for such a sentence as "Every woman loves her car" in GQ, for example, runs to about three typed pages.

The central claim, and at the same time the central problem, with this book - aiming as it does at a cognitive theory - has to do with the concept "interpretivity." A T-theory is interpretive, according to L&S, if the connective "is true iff" yields the same pairings of object-language sentences and metalanguage sentences as the connective "means that." At first they say for example that PC+, PCset and PCprop are all interpretive; later they qualify this, because of ontological commitments. PCset commits us to the existence of sets and PCprop to the existence of Platonic forms: by using these on the right-hand sides of T-theorems, it could be argued, we lose interpretivity. We are saying, for example, that "John sings" means that "the individual named John is a member of the set of singers." We are attributing implicit knowledge of sets to speakers. L&S do not resolve the issue, but suggest that these ontological commitments are not so bad. We cannot formally discuss the meanings of quantifiers, or even develop PC+, without sets. The authors go on to argue that people talk, at least, as if they also assumed the existence of properties & relations. Ultimately, the ontological commitments made by a semantic theory do not clearly provide grounds for accepting or rejecting it.

Since L&S want to make their approach relevant to cognitive science, the problems of coextensive proper nouns and empty proper nouns have to be dealt with; names are assigned "dossiers" which contain what speakers believe about their referents, and dossiers are connected to "concepts." The issue of what a concept is, is not resolved, but by the middle of the book we are assured that "what appears on the right-hand side of an axiom for a proper noun is an individual concept." (Taken literally, of course, this would mean that the meaning of "Socrates jumped over the moon" is "The concept of Socrates jumped over the concept of the moon.")

The book proceeds at an even pace, has good exercises and very good notes, and presents the material clearly. The fundamental papers by Alfred Tarksi and Donald Davidson should ideally be read and discussed before beginning the book.

Ken Miner

Cummins' book is basically a very dense investigation of the various theories of mental representation. Cummins presupposes that the reader already has a solid repertoire of knowledge of the philosophy of mind and language. Thus, he has not written MMR as an introductory text. However, the book will provide several useful distinctions and illuminating insights for those who have a background in the aforementioned disciplines. What follows is a quick overview of the various chapters. Chapter 1 distinguishes the problem of representations from the problem of representation. The former has to do with the kinds of things that can be mental representations--they could be images, symbols, neurophysiological states, or what have you; the latter is the problem with which Cummins is concerned. The problem of representation is one of figuring out the nature of mental representations or, in the form of a question, how do mental representations work? According to Cummins, there are 4 possibilities: similarity, covariance, adaptational role, and functional role. Cummins concludes chapter 1 with a brief on the representational theory of mind and the language of thought hypothesis. He concludes that the computational theory of cognition is the framework with which any theory of mental representation must be compatible. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between mental representation and meaning by giving a short account of neo-Gricean theories and their concomitant woes. Chapter 3 touches on the notion of mental representation as similarity. Roughly, a representation r represents x and not y if r is more similar to x than r is to y. Problems with this theory abound. One such problem has to do with representing general classes like animals and vegetables, whose members differ dramatically along many dimensions. The problem, then, is that it is impossible to rule out resemblance in irrelevant respects. Chapter 4 is a solid investigation of Lockean covariance. The idea is that an organism O has a representation r of x if and only if x's cause r in O. Cummins goes on to sharpen this idea so that it can account for misrepresentation. Chapter 5 is a review of Jerry Fodor's account of covariance, which includes the theory of asymmetrical dependence that is supposed explain misrepresentation. Chater 6 ends the discussion of covariance with a look at Fred Dretske's theory of representation that he set out in "Knowledge and the Flow of Information". It is proof of the density of Cummins' work that he explains and analyzes Dretske's theory in a mere 9 pages. I will add to what I mentioned earlier by admonishing potential readers of MMR to read Dretske, Fodor, Locke, and others first. Chapter 7 deals with Ruth Millikan's teleological theory, which Cummins discredits based on its incompatibility with the computational theory of cognition. Chapter 8 provides a detailed discussion of interpretational role semantics, which is a species of the topic in Chapter 9, functional role semantics. In terms of organizational structure, the information would flow much better if chapters 8 and 9 were switched. At any rate, interpretational semantics is the theory of mental representation Cummins wants to argue for. He takes up objections to the theory in Chapter 10. Chapter 11 is a sketch of a theory of mental representation within a connectionist--rather than computational--theory of cognitive architecture. Overall, the book is a fairly useful read for those who want to further clarify their understanding of the various positions within the study of mental representation. For beginners, it will surely frustrate and disappoint.