This chapter provides an introduction and an overview of computational cognitive sciences. Computational cognitive sciences explore the essence of cognition and various cognitive functionalities through developing mechanistic, process-based understanding by specifying corresponding computational models. These models impute computational processes onto cognitive functions and thereby produce runnable programs. Detailed simulations and other operations can then be conducted. Understanding the human mind strictly from observations of, and experiments with, human behavior is ultimately untenable. Computational modeling is therefore both useful and necessary. Computational cognitive models are theoretically important because they represent detailed cognitive theories in a unique, indispensable way. Computational cognitive modeling has thus far deepened the understanding of the processes and the mechanisms of the mind in a variety of ways.

This essay investigates pre-battle omens and portents through three interpretative lenses: the ontological turn in anthropology, literary and historiographical criticism, and the cognitive science of religion. The Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC is used as a case study because Xenophon, Ephorus of Cyme, and Callisthenes of Olynthus recorded a uniquely large number of portents. Given that Leuctra fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Greek world, the various omens and portents described by our sources are fully consistent with the normative Greek worldview that signs were sent by the gods before important events. Scholars have been much more open to accepting that, despite some literary embellishment, the Greeks recognized omens retrospectively, but prospective omens are not improbable in a culture that was continually on the lookout for god-sent signs. The likelihood of prospective omens is confirmed by a comparative study of the omens that appeared to members of the Seventh Cavalry and to their Arikara scouts before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. We must avoid projecting a post-Enlightenment understanding of reality onto other cultures, thus devaluing the human dependence on communication with supernatural powers that was so central to the experience of the ancient Greeks.

While Wallace’s fiction is famously “about what it means to be a fucking human being,” there is a consistent strain of posthumanism in his writing that has formed a rich thread of scholarship, from Hayles’ technological lens and Giles’ sentimental reading through to Hayes-Brady’s consideration of the body as object, Hering’s examination of the self as a spatial nexus and Vermeule’s Schopenhauerian reading of mind/body dualism. Indeed, it is difficult to encounter Wallace at all without a consideration of the post-ness of his humanism. At the heart of this posthumanism is an ambivalence about the locus of the self in a deeply networked yet alienating world, where telephones and roads are as much a barrier to communion as they are conducive. Beginning with the most disembodied characters – Wallace’s many ghosts – the chapter draws attention to the ways in which the disembodied self in Wallace’s work – pure consciousness – is limited and impotent. The chapter also examines the representation of the most deeply embodied characters – babies – as the other side of this coin, incoherent and narcissistic. Engaging philosophies of dualism and embodiment as well as drawing on the more recent neuroscientific turn in literary studies, this chapter argues that consciousness for Wallace involves imagining the mind in and of the body. This chapter connects this section with the following one, reminding us that for Wallace the self exists always and only within the world.

Science has become increasingly interdisciplinary, marked by the rapid expansion of social science fields melding with ‘natural’ sciences previously considered less relevant for the study of humans. Psychology in particular now depends heavily on insights from medicine, biology, sociology, genetics and cognitive science and has done so for years. By grounding itself in evolutionary theory, moreover, psychology has moved towards a more mature science of human mind and behaviour. The crime sciences – criminology and criminal justice – are poised to make similar progress. While already interdisciplinary fields, we make the case that the evolutionary and cognitive sciences can unify existing knowledge about crime and justice, can help to pose new and interesting questions to study and can push the fields forward in ways that will benefit not only the scientific world, but society in general as well.

Chapter 1 looks at how historically the concept of economic agent developed within mainstream economics, and how the concept of artificial agent emerged while cognitive science became the successor of behaviorism. Then, considering that artificial economics tries to build realistic models of artificial agents, it introduces the main models of mental architectures that derive from cognitive science, and some recent advances in neuroscience (specially within neuroeconomics, social neuroscience, and neurosociology) that relate directly to the economic and social behavior of individuals. Finally, it reviews some models and approaches that try to capture the cognitive, neurological, emotional, and social aspects of agents in an integrated way.

The chapter introduces the shared workspace framework for dialogue and other cooperative joint activities.

Chapter 11: This chapter surveys intersections between views of acting and paradigms of science, and addresses views of the human. The chapter begins with a brief historical overview, starting with Plato and Aristotle and proceeding to early twentieth-century scientists such as Pavlov and Freud. The focus is on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cognitive sciences and neuroscience, which provide the actor with concrete, material information about how body and brain work. This helps to eliminate misapprehensions about how different aspects of the self operate and offers insight into imagination, intellect, emotion, memory, and language, among other aspects of our experience. The discussion addresses the fact of actors as complex processes, inextricably connected to each other and their environments, and how the actor might utilize the findings of science.

In this introductory chapter we sketch the role that the notion of habit has played in the work of pragmatist authors such as James, Peirce and Dewey, and give an account of its ambivalent role in the development of psychology and cognitive sciences from James's introspectionism, through behaviorism and computationalism, up to 4E cognition and the rediscovery of a pragmatist action-oriented stance to cognition. We then investigate how the abandonment of the notion of habit in the second half of the twentieth century was paralleled by the adoption of a dualism between automatic routine and intelligent action and by an approach to cognition based on the notion of mental representation. We explore how habit formation has been investigated within contemporary neuroscience in a dynamic perspective based on the interplay between automatism and goal-oriented behavior. Subsequently we show that the adoption of the dualism between rational action and mechanical routines also influenced the development of twentieth-century sociological thought, and is nowadays being reconsidered by social theory. Finally, we provide an overview of the book and a chapter-by-chapter summary.

The final chapter moves beyond historical examples of wayward reading to current pedagogical praxis. It examines recent psychological studies of how modern readers self-report their identificatory experiences, and how interpretation of these experiences remains conditioned by Victorian rhetoric and assumptions. The discourse of anxiety that surrounded women’s reading in the nineteenth century has shifted direction in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Now cultural consternation is leveled at boys’ deficiency in reading engagement. The chapter closes with examples and suggestions of ways in which we might counter these embedded expectations of identification and lack thereof, especially by surmounting essentialist gender stereotypes. Considering the implications of current research on the cognitive dynamics of reading, the chapter argues that students can learn to interrogate their supposedly “natural” or spontaneous identification with texts or resistance to them. Pedagogical techniques are recommended that prompt readers to control and shift their identifications in order to navigate their own way through a text. Although no longer “wayward” outside of the Victorian context, these techniques of identification equip students for the consciously active mode of reading to which women were, and boys now are, thought to be essentially averse.