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Sep 2010
ISBN 0262014440
208 pp.
16 illus.
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The Self-Organizing Social Mind
John Bolender

In The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty-in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry. Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our social relationships.

Table of Contents
 Foreword
by Alan Page Fiske
 Gratitude
 Introductory Chapter
1 Symmetry and Its Undoing
2 Physics in Language and in the Control of Behavior
3 The Relational Models
4 Symmetry and Its Undoing in the Relational Models
5 Framing the Essential
6 Living with Platonism, if Necessary
 Concluding Chapter
 Notes
 References
 Index
 
 


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