MIT Press Publishes McMicken Authors

The exceptional quality of the college’s research and publication is demonstrated by the latest catalogue of MIT Press, the premier publisher of books in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. It advertises works by three McMicken professors, Christopher Gauker, Gerry Matthews, and Thomas Polger.

Gauker’s

Words Without Meaning

defends a novel theory of communication according to which language is a tool for social coordination and not a tool for revealing to others the contents of our minds. The book has been praised as “essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of linguistic communication” and “an important work that should influence the work of philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists.” Perhaps most revealing are the opening comments of a reviewer in

Essays in Philosophy:

“Gauker’s

Words Without Meaning

is a splendid and provocative book. And I say this in spite of the fact that I disagree with just about everything Gauker says.” An additional distinction for Gauker is that MIT will publish his third book, Conditionals in Context, in fall 2005.

Matthews'

Emotional Intelligence: Science and Myth

, co-authored by Moshe Zeidner and Richard D. Roberts, is a comprehensive survey of research on whether people differ in basic abilities in identifying, understanding, and managing emotion. The work deals with an enormously popular concept that, according to Matthews, “lacks a solid scientific basis.” The book reviews the rapidly growing body of recent research on emotional intelligence and raises crucial questions about whether it is a meaningful, measurable concept that can be related to other psychological processes and made to serve practical uses in areas such as occupational and developmental psychology. Matthews’ and his colleagues’ work is so impressive that it received an honorable mention award in the psychology category of the 2002 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition.

Natural Minds

is based on the philosophical theory that we cannot understand mind and brain apart from each other. Tom Polger argues in his book that while we must learn more about the human brain in order to understand consciousness fully, philosophers play an important role in providing complete answers to questions about the nature of consciousness. Reviews of the work describe it as “welcome and important” and “strongly recommended to anyone with a serious interest in the metaphysics of the mind.” Lawrence Shapiro, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, notes, “Perhaps even harder than coming up with a new theory of mind is saying something new and important about old theories of mind. This Polger does with remarkable clarity.”