Introduction to Cognitive Science: Outline of Lecture

 

1. Background on Cognitive Science

·        The delicate balance between the common-sensical and the barely-believable.

Þ     The truth of folk psychology vs the misleadingness of being the subject/object of study

Þ     Examples of folk-psychology explanations: What’s right about them & what’s wrong about them?

·        The intentionality of explanations: Need for “propositional attitude verbs” such as believes-that, fears-that, wants-that, thinks-that, imagines-that, etc and the mystery of semantic contents.

·        The seductiveness of conscious content and the ineffableness of non-conscious content and process.  Are we infallible judges of what we know or experience?

·        The need for intellectual prosthetics.  Why computing is important.  Computers:CogSci::Math:PhysicalSciences.

 

2. What is cognition?

·        Why is it hard to study cognition?

·        What’s special about intelligent behavior?

·        The Description-relativity of explanations: Equivalence Classes

Þ     Special role of meaning in explaining intelligent action

·        Central role of Representations: Examples

Þ     Compatibility with materialism: The Computational Theory of Mind (CTM)

 

3. Computational Theory of Mind

·        Tri-Level Hypothesis & The Physical Symbol System Hypothesis

·        Symbolic representation vs architecture & Capacity

·        Strong equivalence

Þ     Examples & Methods

·        Failure to distinguish capacity from representation-governed behavior: Cognitive Pentrability

Þ     Some examples: Language understanding, mental imagery