The exam will have 6 or 7 short-answer questions taken from the following list, and a short-essay question similar to the three below.
1. What is the proposed analogy between thinking and computing?
2. According to Simon, why are computer models useful in psychology?
3. What is the difference between deduction and induction?
4. According to Johnson-Laird and Byrne, what are the three main classes of theory about the process of deduction?
5. What experiments cast doubt on the psychological plausibility of formal logic?
6. What is a rule (as a form of mental representation)? What is a linguistic rule?
7. What areas of knowledge are most plausibly described in terms of rules, and in what areas of knowledge are rules hardest to apply?
8. According to Anderson, how do production rules explain human skills such as arithmetic?
9. According to Pinker, why does the formation of past tenses in English require explanation in terms of rules?
10. Do concepts have exact definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions? If not, what is their structure?
11. How might concepts be learned? What concepts are most plausibly regarded as innate?
12. According to Medin, why must concepts be understood in terms of theories?
13. What does thinking of knowledge in terms of logic, rules, and concepts tell us about the nature of effective teaching?
14. What approach to mental representation so far discussed tells us most about the nature of language?
15. Do logic-based representations have greater or lesser representational power than rule-based representations? Do logic-based representations have greater or lesser computational power than rule-based representations?
16. How is problem solving viewed differently from the perspectives of logic, rules, and concepts?
17. How is abduction (inference to explanatory hypotheses) viewed differently from the perspective of logic, rules, and concepts?
1. How do people choose what clothes they will put on in the morning? Discuss this important kind of problem solving in terms of logic, rules, and concepts, critically assessing the usefulness of each representational-computational approach. What aspects of knowledge about clothes are not well captured by these kinds of mental representation?
2. How can your knowledge of the university (in general, not the content of particular courses) be explained in terms of mental representation? Discuss in particular the relevance of logic, rules, and concepts. What aspects of your knowledge are not well captured by these kinds of mental representation?
3. Each
term, students choose the courses they are going to take. What
are the cognitive processes that enable them to do this? Discuss
this kind of problem solving in terms of logic, rules, and concepts.
Use specific examples, and critically assess the usefulness of
each representational-computational approach. What aspects of
knowledge about courses are not well captured by these kinds of
mental representation?