The exam will have 7 short-answer questions taken from the following list, and a short-essay question similar to the two below.
1. What is the proposed analogy between thinking and computing?
2. What experiments cast doubt on the psychological plausibility of formal logic?
3. What areas of knowledge are most plausibly described in terms of rules, and in what areas of knowledge are rules hardest to apply?
4. Do concepts have exact definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions? If not, what is their structure?
5. What does thinking of knowledge in terms of rules, concepts, and analogies suggest about the nature of effective teaching?
6. What are the main stages in analogical thinking? What constraints figure most prominently at each of those stages?
7. What approach to mental representation so far discussed tells us most about the nature of language?
8. 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?
9. How is problem solving viewed differently from the perspectives of rules, concepts, analogies, and images?
10. How might concepts be learned? What concepts are most plausibly regarded as innate?
12. What experiments support the psychological plausibility of mental imagery? What sorts of problems can be better solved with images than with verbal representations?
13. As cognitive processes, how are similarity and analogy related?
14. How is abduction (inference to explanatory hypotheses) viewed differently from the perspective of logic, rules, concepts, and images?
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, concepts, analogies, and images, 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 rules, concepts, and analogies. What
aspects of your knowledge are not well captured by these kinds of mental
representation?