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Reading Group

By mixingmemory on December 5, 2007.

The reading group has been showing signs of activity, if not real activity, over the last few days, and I've also gotten a few emails recently suggesting that I start it back up again. So I thought I'd toss the idea out there, and see how many people might be interested.

If we decide to do it, there are a few secondary decisions to make. The first is, what do we read? My impression is that the average level of cog sci knowledge among Mixing Memory readers has gone up a bit since the last time we did this, which makes picking a book a bit more difficult. Then there's the issue of format. Also, I'm busy as hell, and will be for a while, so my own participation will be somewhat limited.

So, what do you think? Comment here or over at Yahoo. Or both. Or perhaps somewhere else entirely. It's up to you.

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Just a few suggestions...

I would second In God's We Trust or some other book concerning the psychology of religion.

Linguistic relativity might also work as topic, maybe Language in the Mind as specific book. Also as a post suggestion, I would really like to hear your thoughts on Pinker's criticism of linguistic relativity hypotheses in The Stuff of Thought. While I think his criticism is informative I get the sense he is being overly dismissive of the field because of how he brushed it off years earlier in The Language Instinct. It would be nice to see some positive yet critical views of what genuine progress linguistic relativity researches have made.

By sobriquet-defect (not verified) on 05 Dec 2007 #permalink

I'll vote for "In God's We Trust" too. Its about religion and cognitive science, two favorite topics of the blogosphere, Chris has certainly read it before, making it easy on him, and I've read it before, making it easy on me.

As long as we are putting titles up for discussion, I will also nominate Jason Slone's "Theological Incorrectness".

I've been meaning to read that Atran book for a long time. I would love to start reading William James (the big one) with a group, but that's probably too big of a commitment for most, no?