Roberto Casati and Barry Smith
Introduction to Cognitive Science
Fall Semester, 1999
Thursday 6-8
141 Park Hall
PHI
575
API
526
LIN
575
CSE
575
PSY
575
1 BS* | Sept. 2 | The Turing Test and the Chinese Room | John Searle, "The Critique of Cognitive Reason", in Alvin I. Goldman, Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1993, 833-848. |
2 BS | Sept. 9 | Philosophy and cognitive science: Historical Introduction | |
3 BS | Sept. 16 | Common sense and folk psychology | Soya, Carey and Spelke, "Ontological Categories", in Goldman 1993, 461-480. |
4 RC | Sept. 23 | Perception: The role of Objects | E. Spelke, "Object Perception", in Goldman 1993, 447-460. |
5 RC | Sept. 30 | Perception: Representative theories | I. Biederman, "Visual Object Recognition", in Goldman 1993, 1-21. |
6 RC | Oct. 7 | Perception: Secondary Qualities | C.L. Hardin, "Color Subjectivism", in Goldman, 1993, 493-507. |
7 BS | Oct. 14 | The Heritage of Gestalt Psychology | S. E. Palmer, "Modern Theories of Gestalt Perception", Mind and Language, 5, 289-323 |
8 RC | Oct. 21 | Cognition of Number | Karen Wynn, "Evidence Against Empiricist Accounts of the Origins of Numerical Knowledge", in Goldman, 1993, 209-227 |
9 RC | Oct. 28 | The Spectrum of Views on Consciousness: Special talk by Talmy | L. Talmy, "Fictive Motion in Language and 'Ception'", in Bloom, P., et al. Eds. Language and Space, MIT Press 1996 |
10 BS | Nov. 4 | Structures of Consciousness. Special talk by Dipert introducing Nov. 5-6 conference on The Metaphysics of Consciousness: David Chalmers', "The Conscious Mind", in Historical and Contemporary Perspective | N.B. This class will take place in the Center for Inquiry, 1310 Sweet Home Road, Amherst |
11 BS | Nov. 11 | Debate with Little on Eliminative Materialism | |
12 BS | Nov. 18 (nov. 25 holiday) | Ecology and Evolutionary psychology | Cosmides and Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer" |
13 RC | Dec. 2 | Artificial Intelligence: Debate with Rapaport | How to Pass a Turing Test |
14 RC | Dec. 9 | Perception: Spatial cognition and representation. | R. Jackendoff, "The Architecture of the Linguistic-Spatial Interface", in Bloom, P., et al. Eds. Language and Space, MIT Press 1996, 1-30. |
*Indicates faculty member/visitor having primary responsibility for the class indicated.
Grading: The grade for the course will be based primarily on a term paper, to be submitted on or before December 2. Additional credit can be obtained for active class participation.
Office hours: BS (Park 126) Thursday 5-6 and by appointment. RC: by appointment.
Reading: The required text for the course is Alvin I. Goldman, Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1993.