Cost, expected benefits, and risks are paramount in grant agencies' decisions to fund scientific research. In Cognitive Economy, Nicholas Rescher outlines a general theory for the cost-effective use of intellectual resources, amplifying the theories of Charles Sanders Pierce, who stressed an “economy of research.” Rescher discusses the requirements of cooperation, communication, cognitive importance, cognitive economy, as well as the economic factors bearing on induction and simplicity. He then applies his model to several case studies and to clarifying the limits imposed on science by economic considerations.

The social sciences study knowing subjects and their interactions. A "cognitive turn", based on cognitive science, has the potential to enrich these sciences considerably. Cognitive economics belongs within this movement of the social sciences. It aims to take into account the cognitive processes of individuals in economic theory, both on the level of the agent and on the level of their dynamic interactions and the resulting collective phenomena. This book is a result of a three-year experiment in interdisciplinary cooperation in cognitive economics. It has the advantage of reflecting joint, long-term work between economists, specialists in cognitive science, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists. The main aim of the book is to enable any researcher interested in cognitive economics, whatever his or her original speciality, to grasp essential landmarks in this emerging field. Part I of the book provides disciplinary bases, Part II is focused on advanced research.

Over the past three decades, there has been a rapid development of research on human thinking and reasoning. This volume provides a comprehensive review of this topic by looking at the important contributions Paolo Legrenzi has made to the field, by bridging the gap from Gestalt ideas to modern cognitive psychology. The contributors, including some of the most distinguished scholars of reasoning and thinking in Europe and the USA, reflect upon the ways in which he has influenced and inspired their own research, and contributed to modern approaches to human inference. This volume draws on both traditional and new topics in reasoning and thinking to provide a wide-ranging survey of human thought. It covers creativity, problem-solving, the linguistic and social aspects of reasoning and judgement, and the social and emotional aspects of decision making through telling examples, such as the cognitive mechanisms underlying consumers' attitudes towards herbal medicines. It considers a series of key questions, such as how do individuals who are unfamiliar with logic reason? And how do they make choices if they are unfamiliar with the probability calculus and decision theory? The discussions are placed throughout within a wider research context and the contributors consider the implications of their research for the field as a whole, making the volume an essential reference for anyone investigating the processes that underlies our thinking, reasoning, and decision-making in everyday life.

Perkins reveals the common misguided strategies students use and offers teachers and parents advice on how they can help their children. Although there has been a great deal of impassioned debate over the sad state of American education today, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. But, as David Perkins demonstrates, we cannot solve our problems in this area simply by redistributing power or by asking children to regurgitate facts on a multiple choice exam. Rather we must ask what kinds of knowledge students typically acquire in school. In Smart Schools, Perkins draws on over twenty years of research to reveal the common misguided strategies students use in trying to understand a topic, and then shows teachers and parents what strategies they can use with children to increase real understanding.

This volume brings together classic key concepts and innovative theoretical ideas in the psychology of judgment and decision-making in social contexts. The chapters of the first section address the basic psychological processes underlying judgment and decision-making. The guiding question is "What information comes to mind and how is it transformed?" The second section poses the question of how social judgments and decisions are to be evaluated. The chapters in this section present new quantitative models that help separate various forms of accuracy and bias. The third section shows how judgments and decisions are shaped by ecological constraints. These chapters show how many seemingly complex configurations of social information are tractable by relatively simple statistical heuristics. The fourth section explores the relevance of research on judgment and decision making for specific tasks of personal or social relevance. These chapters explore how individuals can efficiently select mates, form and maintain friendship alliances, judiciously integrate their attitudes with those of a group, and help shape policies that are rational and morally sound. The book is intended as an essential resource for senior undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and practitioners.

In a career extending over almost six decades, Nicholas Rescher has conducted researches in almost every principal area of philosophy, historical and systematic alike. In this extraordinary volume, two dozen scholars join in offering penetrating discussions of various facets of Rescher’s investigations. The result is an instructively critical panorama of the many-faceted contributions of this important American philosopher. Born in Germany in 1928, Nicholas Rescher came to the U.S. at the age of nine. He is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department and as director (and currently chairman) of the Center for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six decades, he has established himself as a systematic philosopher of the old style. His work represents a many-sided approach to fundamental philosophical issues that weaves together threads of thought from continental idealism and American pragmatism. And apart from this larger program Rescher has made various specific contributions to logic (the conception autodescriptive systems of many-sided logic), the history of logic (the medieval Arabic theory of modal syllogistic), to the theory of knowledge (epistemetrics as a quantitative approach in theoretical epistemology), and to the philosophy of science (the theory of a logarithmic retardation of scientific progress). Rescher has also worked in the area of futuristics, and along with Olaf Helmer and Norman Dalkey is co-inaugurator of the so-called Delphi method of forecasting. Ten books about Rescher’s philosophy have been published in four languages. Rescher earned his doctorate at Princeton in 1951 while still at the age of twenty-two—a record for Princeton’s Department of Philosophy. He has served as a President of the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and of the American Metaphysical Society. He was the founder of the American Philosophical Quarterly. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Royal Society of Canada, the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, he has been awarded fellowships by the Ford, Guggenheim, and National Science Foundations. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated from English into other languages, he is the recipient of eight honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007.

Reconciles armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. This book concerns with the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. It also explores the links between moods and forces. It looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.

Applying the hot new area of psychological and behavioural economics to notions of economic growth and development, Bertin Martens' new book is a unique and impressive volume.

This book proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human problem solving, choice, decision-making and change, to explain economic transactions, and the nature and evolution of organisations and institutions.

Over the past century, educational psychologists and researchers have posited many theories to explain how individuals learn, i.e. how they acquire, organize and deploy knowledge and skills. The 20th century can be considered the century of psychology on learning and related fields of interest (such as motivation, cognition, metacognition etc.) and it is fascinating to see the various mainstreams of learning, remembered and forgotten over the 20th century and note that basic assumptions of early theories survived several paradigm shifts of psychology and epistemology. Beyond folk psychology and its naïve theories of learning, psychological learning theories can be grouped into some basic categories, such as behaviorist learning theories, connectionist learning theories, cognitive learning theories, constructivist learning theories, and social learning theories. Learning theories are not limited to psychology and related fields of interest but rather we can find the topic of learning in various disciplines, such as philosophy and epistemology, education, information science, biology, and – as a result of the emergence of computer technologies – especially also in the field of computer sciences and artificial intelligence. As a consequence, machine learning struck a chord in the 1980s and became an important field of the learning sciences in general. As the learning sciences became more specialized and complex, the various fields of interest were widely spread and separated from each other; as a consequence, even presently, there is no comprehensive overview of the sciences of learning or the central theoretical concepts and vocabulary on which researchers rely. The Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning provides an up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the specific terms mostly used in the sciences of learning and its related fields, including relevant areas of instruction, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, and especially machine learning and knowledge engineering. This modern compendium will be an indispensable source of information for scientists, educators, engineers, and technical staff active in all fields of learning. More specifically, the Encyclopedia provides fast access to the most relevant theoretical terms provides up-to-date, broad and authoritative coverage of the most important theories within the various fields of the learning sciences and adjacent sciences and communication technologies; supplies clear and precise explanations of the theoretical terms, cross-references to related entries and up-to-date references to important research and publications. The Encyclopedia also contains biographical entries of individuals who have substantially contributed to the sciences of learning; the entries are written by a distinguished panel of researchers in the various fields of the learning sciences.