Tom Ziemke - Böcker

The first volume of the two-volume set Body, Language and Mind focuses on the concept of embodiment, understood in most general terms as "the bodily basis of phenomena such as meaning, mind, cognition and language". The volume offers a representative, multi- and interdisciplinary state-of-the-art collection of papers on embodiment and brings together a large variety of different perspectives, from cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, semiotics and artificial intelligence. Being envisioned as a reader of sorts in theoretical and empirical research on embodiment, the book revolves around several core issues that have been addressed previously, to a large degree independently, in various disciplines. In particular the volume illustrates the diversity of notions of embodiment that has arisen in various disciplines over the last twenty years, and addresses the question how these different interpretations relate to each other, i.e. are they different aspects of or different perspectives on the same phenomena, or do they actually contradict each other? For this purpose, several aspects of cognition and language, such as phenomenal experience, perception, action, conceptualization, communication, meaning creation, social interaction and culture, are illuminated from the perspective of different theories of embodiment. The contributions are integrated through cross-connections between individual authors’ papers and through an introductory essay that identifies the different strands of research, the central issues that they share, and the synergies that can be gained from addressing embodiment from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The contributions contained in the second volume of the two-volume set Body, Language and Mind introduce and elaborate upon the concept of sociocultural situatedness, understood broadly as the way in which minds and cognitive processes are shaped, both individually and collectively, by their interaction with socioculturally contextualized structures and practices; and, furthermore, how these structures interact, contextually, with language and can become embodied in it.Drawing on theoretical concepts and analytical tools within the purview of cognitive linguistics and related fields, the volume explores the relationship between body, language and mind, focusing on the complex mutually reinforcing relationships holding between the sociocultural contextualisation of language and, inversely, the linguistic contextualisation of culure. Stated differently, the notion of sociocultural situatedness allows for language to be seen as a cultural activity and at the same time as a subtle mechanism for organizing culture and thought. The volume offers a representative, multi- and interdisciplinary collection of new papers on sociocultural situatedness, bringing together for the first time a wide variety of perspectives and case studies directed explicitly to elucidating the analytical potential of this concept for cognitive linguists and other researchers working in allied fields such as AI, discourse studies and cognitive anthropology. The book brings together several core issues related to the notion of sociocultural situatedness, some of which have been addressed previously, although to a large degree sporadically and from a variety of disciplinary perspectives without fully exploring the possible analytical advantages of this concept as a tool for investigating the role of culturally entrenched schemata in cognition and language. In short, this is the first comprehensive survey of sociocultural situatedness theory.

This two-volume set contains the papers presented at ICANN 98, the 8th International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Skovde, Sweden, from the 2nd to the 4th September 1998. This meeting covered all aspects of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) related research. It includes papers from researchers in Europe, the USA and Japan. It should be of interest to anyone working in the theory or mathematics of ANN modelling and its use in the following areas: neuroscience, brain theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, machine learning, robotics, autonomous agents, and adaptive behaviour modelling. It will also provide valuable reading material for industrial developers, engineers and researchers using ANNs in application areas such as financial forecasting, signal processing, control, industrial robotics, computer vision, image processing and related areas of engineering.