Andy Wells – författare

Literacy is about 5,000 years old. Since it was invented it has transformed human societies and knowledge fundamentally. Indeed, civilisation is built on literacy. What is it about the process of making marks on paper or other surfaces that gives literacy this remarkable power? 'The Literate Mind: A Study of Its Scope and Limitations' proposes that the evolved, pre-literate qualities of the human mind combined with the representational capacities of alphabets and other symbol systems provide uniquely powerful means for the generation and storage of knowledge. The creation, storage and sharing of texts augment the social and cognitive capacities of human minds and allow us to develop social institutions within which further new knowledge can be deployed and used.Taking an approach that is equally applicable to print and digital media, the book draws on evolutionary theory and the theory of computation to explain the remarkable power of literacy and its transformational effects on human society and knowledge. It demonstrates that the universe of possible texts is infinite in extent, and proposes that the combination of a reader and a text can be treated as an ecosystem of unlimited scope.

Literacy is about 5,000 years old. Since it was invented it has transformed human societies and knowledge fundamentally. Indeed, civilisation is built on literacy. What is it about the process of making marks on paper or other surfaces that gives literacy this remarkable power? 'The Literate Mind: A Study of Its Scope and Limitations' proposes that the evolved, pre-literate qualities of the human mind combined with the representational capacities of alphabets and other symbol systems provide uniquely powerful means for the generation and storage of knowledge. The creation, storage and sharing of texts augment the social and cognitive capacities of human minds and allow us to develop social institutions within which further new knowledge can be deployed and used.Taking an approach that is equally applicable to print and digital media, the book draws on evolutionary theory and the theory of computation to explain the remarkable power of literacy and its transformational effects on human society and knowledge. It demonstrates that the universe of possible texts is infinite in extent, and proposes that the combination of a reader and a text can be treated as an ecosystem of unlimited scope.

Rethinking Cognitive Computation explores the hypothesis that the mind is a computer. The exploration is based on the pioneering work of Alan Turing and presents the first detailed exposition of his theory of computation intended specifically for psychologists. Turing's bold and beautiful theory provides an ideal perspective from which to evaluate current computational thinking about the mind. The book examines the strengths and weaknesses of symbol systems and connectionist theorising and proposes a new approach called ecological functionalism. Ecological functionalism is based on Turing's fundamental insights and extends them by drawing on contemporary theories of concurrent and distributed computation to cover a wide range of psychological domains. Ecological functionalism provides the basis for a powerful, unified theory of great scope which includes social as well as individual processes. The book is intended for teaching but will also be of interest to researchers in cognitive science, psychology and philosophy of mind.Andrew Wells is a lecturer in psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has qualifications in philosophy, psychology and computer science and has published papers on a range of psychological topics.