Books about Representational from Amazon.com

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Price: $17.19 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Issues of representation affect every aspect of scientific activity, from the encoding, display, analysis, and presentation of data to the communication of scientific concepts and information to students and the general public. The essays in this collection explore the issues involved in the creation and deployment of visual representations in both the natural and the social sciences.

Visual Cultures of Science offers a mix of theoretical analyses and revealing case studies. The latter address such topics as the technologies of visualization (from X-ray machines to films made by anthropologists), the persuasive power of the graphic presentation of data (including a critique of the work of Edward Tufte), and the distillation of data into pedagogical representations such as scientific wall charts for classroom use. With its useful mix of theory and case study, the book addresses both abstract and practical issues of representation, as well as demonstrating the importance of recognizing historicized perspectives in addressing issues of representation.

These essays, by many of the field's leading minds today, offer solid research and new information pertaining to the methods, purposes, and implications of scientific visual culture..
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Representations--in visual arts and in fiction--play an important part in our lives and culture Kendall Walton presents here a theory of the nature of representation, which illuminates its many varieties and goes a long way toward explaining its importance.

Drawing analogies to children's make believe activities, Walton constructs a theory that addresses a broad range of issues: the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, how depiction differs from description, the notion of points of view in the arts, and what it means for one work to be more "realistic" than another. He explores the relation between appreciation and criticism, the character of emotional reactions to literary and visual representations, and what it means to be caught up emotionally in imaginary events.

Walton's theory also provides solutions to the thorny philosophical problems of the existence--or ontological standing--of fictitious beings, and the meaning of statements referring to them. And it leads to striking insights concerning imagination, dreams, nonliteral uses of language, and the status of legends and myths.

Throughout Walton applies his theoretical perspective to particular cases; his analysis is illustrated by a rich array of examples drawn from literature, painting, sculpture, theater, and film. Mimesis as Make-Believe is important reading for everyone interested in the workings of representational art.

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Price: $29.70 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Written by a pioneer of this theoretical approach, this astonishing book promises to question the whole direction of social sciences methodology and makes essential reading for social sciences and humanities researchers and postgraduates. It revolves around three key functions:

• it introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience
• it questions the whole direction of social sciences, methodologically, epistemologically and ontologically
• it provides more productive approaches to the social sciences.

A groundbreaking and comprehensive introduction to this key topic, Thrift’s outstanding work brings together for the first time a body of work that has come to be known as non-representational theory. Although well-known in the social sciences, these theories have never before been assembled in one volume. Thrift’s noteworthy book therefore, makes a significant contribution to the literature in this area.

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Price: $40.30 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In this pioneering collection of essays, leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousness, which holds that consciousness always involves some form of self-awareness. The self-representational theory of consciousness stands as an alternative to the two dominant reductive theories of consciousness, the representational theory of consciousness (RTC) and the higher-order monitoring (HOM) theory, combining elements of both RTC and HOM theory in a novel fashion that may avoid the fundamental deficiencies of each.

Although self-representationalist views have been common throughout the history of both Western and Eastern philosophy, they have been largely neglected in the recent literature on consciousness. This book approaches self-representational theory from a range of perspectives, with contributions from scholars in analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and history of philosophy, as well as two longer essays by Antonio Damasio and David Rudrauf and Douglas Hofstadter. The book opens with six essays that argue broadly in favor of self-representationalist views, which are followed by five that argue broadly against them. Contributors next consider connections to such philosophical issues as the nature of propositional attitudes, knowledge, attention, and indexical reference. Finally, Damasio and Rudrauf link consciousness as lived with consciousness as described in neurobiological terms; and Hofstadter compares consciousness to the "strange loop" of mathematical self-reference brought to light by Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Contributors:
Andrew Brook, Peter Carruthers, Antonio Damasio, John J. Drummond, Jason Ford, Rocco J. Gennaro, George Graham, Christopher S. Hill, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Terry Horgan, Tomis Kapitan, Uriah Kriegel, Keith Lehrer, Joseph Levine, Robert W. Lurz, David Rudrauf, David Woodruff Smith, John Tienson, Robert Van Gulick, Kathleen Wider, Kenneth Williford, Dan Zahavi.
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Argues that representational correctness can cause critics to miss the positive work that films and television shows can perform in reducing prejudice..
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In this wide-ranging book, the author presents his critique of the contemporary portrayal of cognition, an analysis of the conceptual foundations of cognitive science and a proposal for a new concept of the mind. Shanon argues that the representational account is seriously lacking and that far from serving as a basis of cognitive activity, representations are the products of such activity. He proposes an alternative view of the mind in which the basic capability of the cognitive system is not the manipulation of symbols but rather action in the world. His book offers a different outlook on the phenomenon of consciousness and presents a new conception of psychological theory and explanation..
Price: $25.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Can neurophysiology ever reveal to us what it is like to smell a skunk or to experience pain? In what does the feeling of happiness consist? How is it that changes in the white and gray matter composing our brains generate subjective sensations and feelings? These are several of the questions that Michael Tye addresses, while formulating a new and enlightening theory about the phenomenal "what it feels like" aspect of consciousness. The test of any such theory, according to Tye, lies in how well it handles ten critical problems of consciousness.

Tye argues that all experiences and all feelings represent things, and that their phenomenal aspects are to be understood in terms of what they represent. He develops this representational approach to consciousness in detail with great ingenuity and originality.

In the book's first part Tye lays out the domain, the ten problems and an associated paradox, along with all the theories currently available and the difficulties they face. In part two, he develops his intentionalist approach to consciousness. Special summaries are provided in boxes and the ten problems are illustrated with cartoons.

A Bradford Book. Representation and Mind series.
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No two writing situations are exactly the same and skilled writers, like skilled painters, must develop the know-how to represent the objects of their writing as part of a flexible art. This special art of writing lies hidden between grammar--the well-formedness of sentences--and genre--the capacity of texts to perform culturally holistic communicative functions (e.g., the memo, the strategic report, the letter to the editor). Concealed between grammar and genre, this less visible art of writing is what Kaufer and Butler call "representational composition." Texts within this hidden art are best viewed not primarily as grammatical units or as genre functions, but as bearers of design elements stimulating imagistic, narrative, and information-rich worlds, and as an invitation to readers to explore and interact with them.

This volume presents a systematic study of the principles that underlie writing as representational composition. Drawing from student models derived from a studio method, the authors use each chapter to present a different aspect of what unfolds--across the course of the book--into a cumulative, interactive, and unified body of representational principles underlying the design of texts. They reveal what makes the textual representations achieved by expert writers worthwhile, and, at the same time, difficult for novice writers to reproduce. Extending the framework of their 1996 volume, Rhetoric and the Arts of Design, into a realm of textual design, this volume will interest students and instructors of writing, rhetoric, and information design.
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