Book description
Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts…
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Why read it?
2 authors picked The Origin of Concepts as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I’m interested in how mathematicians create mathematics but this book made me realize that learning mathematics is also a form of creativity. Each of us has created our understanding of mathematics as we were growing up. We are all creative!
What is amazing about this book is that even children as young as six months possess rudimentary mathematical concepts, in particular, the concept of number. (Actually, Carey shows children have two distinct ways of thinking about numbers). The concept of number is built-in. That’s amazing to me! The mastery of counting numbers, 1,2,3,… is a great creative leap in the…
From William's list on thinking, creativity, and mathematics.
Scientific concepts, like genes and germs, elude observation and intuition. So where do they come from? Carey charts the development of such concepts, from innate perceptual biases to abstract symbolic representations. She presents research investigating the evolved foundations of human knowledge (core knowledge), as well as methods for revising and reorganizing that knowledge, yielding new concepts and theories (conceptual change). This book integrates insights from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology to address longstanding philosophical questions about humans’ ability to transcend the small repertoire of concepts we are born with and grasp ideas that no other species can.
From Andrew's list on the cognitive foundations of science.
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