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This book presents a study of the problems posed by the unity and diversity of the human mind. On the one hand, as humans we all share broadly the same anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and certain psychological capabilities — the capacity to learn a language, for instance. On the other, different individuals and groups have very different talents, tastes, and beliefs, for instance about how they see themselves, other humans and the world around them. These issues are highly charged, for any denial of psychic unity savours of racism, while many assertions of psychic diversity raise the spectres of arbitrary relativism, the incommensurability of beliefs systems, and their mutual unintelligibility. The book examines where different types of arguments, scientific, philosophical, anthropological and historical, can take us. It discusses colour perception, spatial cognition, animal and plant taxonomy, the emotions, ideas of health and well-being, concepts of the self, agency and causation, varying perceptions of the distinction between nature and culture, and reasoning itself. It pays attention to the multidimensionality of the phenomena to be apprehended and to the diversity of manners, or styles, of apprehending them. The weight to be given to different factors, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, ideological, varies as between different subject areas and sometimes even within a single area. The book uses recent work in social anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, neurophysiology, and the history of ideas to redefine the problems and clarify how our evident psychic diversity can be reconciled with our shared humanity.

The present volume intends to contribute to our understanding of the grammar of spatial prepositional phrases by focusing on one particular aspect of their syntax that has remained relatively neglected: the fine-grained articulation of their internal structure. The analyses presented in the book, in spite of their being based on rather different data and considerations, reach strikingly convergent conclusions on the existence of a rich internal structure for spatial PPs. These, in addition to being introduced by (overt or covert) directional and stative prepositions comprise degree phrases, deictic, viewpoint and orientation particles, and an often nonpronounced N ‘place.’

This book reviews the psychology and neuroscience of how we find our way. It starts with a history of studies on how organisms solve mazes. This work has its origins in the efforts of behaviourists, psychologists such as John Watson, who sought a firmer scientific footing for the field by focusing on measurable phenomenon, such as how rats solve spatial mazes. The book then reviews contemporary studies of spatial cognition and the wayfinding abilities of adults and children. In children, the perception of space can be distorted but improves with development. For adults, the ability to keep track of one's orientation in the absence of landmarks is limited. Next there is a consideration of how specific parts of the brain provide a cognitive map and a neural compass. A deeply influential view is that the hippocampus — a brain structure that in humans in essential for normal memory — contains of cognitive map. Work on place cells, the element of this map, and head-direction and grid neurons is summarised. This book also considers the neurology of spatial disorientation and the tendency of patients with Alzheimer's disease to lose their way. It concludes with the proposal that we get lost because our brain's compass becomes misoriented.

This book examines the phenomenon of ‘yoof’ television programmes such as Network 7, The Word, The Big Breakfast, Snub TV, and Gamesmaster. Between 1987 and 1995 these and other related programmes formed part of a high-profile genre that in terms of both the personnel involved and their visual style continue to be influential in British television today. Examining these programmes the author reflects on the way in which the contemporary youth audience – Generation X – were being addressed. The author identifies an ambivalent viewing sensibility – ‘cynicism and enchantment’ – which encapsulates the attitude expressed by both the programmes and the audience. The distinctive aspect of the book is the way in which the author concentrates on the spatial and visual aspects of television. In particular her concern is to re-evaluate television as a specific experience, and one which has a central importance in young people's formation of identity and their sense of being in the world. Her central thesis also suggests that while television must necessarily be related to other visual media, it should be understood as having distinct aesthetic and phenomenological qualities of its own.

The debate over educational disparities across religious communities in India, especially those concerning the Muslims, is as old as the history of the modern education system in the country. This debate has yielded several explanations for educational backwardness among the Muslims which evoke a supposedly low value placed on modern education by Islamic theology, the status of Indian Muslims as a minority, and invidious discrimination against the Muslims in India. Largely cast in a polemical and impressionistic mode, this debate has long awaited empirical underpinnings. The recent upsurge in empirical studies on the topic requires an explanatory frame that admits of precision and complexity. Despite the renewed interest in this subject following the Sachar Committee Report, considerable knowledge gaps continue to exist in our understanding of the dynamics between religion and access to education. The present work brings to fore the spatially contextualized historical trajectories that have shaped educational development and various forms of disparities therein. It argues that religious communities, such as the Muslims, have to be seen as spatially and economically differentiated across regions rather than as homogeneous socio-cultural aggregates. This argument draws upon disaggregation of national-level secondary data and is supplemented by a primary fieldwork-based comparison of the educational status of Muslims in Patna and Purnia districts of Bihar. The relative educational backwardness of the Muslim community is thus seen to have underlying spatial and class patterns that are often overlooked.

Natural language allows for efficient communication of elaborate descriptions of movement without requiring precise specification of the motion. Interpreting Motion is the first book to analyze the semantics of motion expressions in terms of the formalisms of qualitative spatial reasoning, mapping motion descriptions in language to trajectories of moving entities based on qualitative spatio-temporal relationships. The book provides an extensive discussion of prior research on spatial prepositions and motion verbs, and devotes chapters to the compositional semantics of motion sentences, the formal representations needed for computers to reason qualitatively about time, space, and motion, and the methodology for annotating corpora with linguistic information in order to train computer programs to reproduce the annotation. The applications they illustrate include route navigation, the mapping of travel narratives, question-answering, image and video tagging, and graphical rendering of scenes from textual descriptions. The book is written accessibly for a broad scientific audience of linguists, cognitive scientists, computer scientists, and those working in fields such as artificial intelligence and geographic information systems.

How do things persist? Are material objects spread out through time just as they are spread out through space? Or is temporal persistence quite different from spatial extension? This key question lies at the heart of any metaphysical exploration of the material world, and it plays a crucial part in debates about personal identity and survival. This book explores and compares three theories of persistence — endurance, perdurance, and stage theories — investigating the ways in which they attempt to account for the world around us. Having provided valuable clarification of its two main rivals, the book concludes by advocating stage theory. Such a basic issue about the nature of the physical world naturally has close ties with other central philosophical problems. This book includes discussions of change and parthood, of how we refer to material objects at different times, of the doctrine of Humean supervenience, and of the modal features of material things. In particular, it contains new accounts of the nature of worldly vagueness, and of what binds material things together over time, distinguishing the career of a natural object from an arbitrary sequence of events. Each chapter concludes with a reflection about the impact of these metaphysical debates upon questions about our personal identity and survival.