Philosophy 479/679M

Foundations of Cognitive Science

Fall, 1999

Professor: Paul Thagard

Office hours (HH368): M, 1-2; W, 12-12:30, and by appointment.

Email: pthagard@watarts. Phone: extension 3594.

Web page: http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/courses/phil679.html

Time: W 12:30-2:30, HH 357

News group: uw.phil.phil256

Textbook: J. Haugeland, Mind Design II.

Assignments: Everyone taking the course, including auditors, will hand in a one-page essay each week discussing the week's readings. Students taking the course for credit will write a term paper on an approved topic related to the course.

Description: Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, operating at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience. This course will discuss some of the most controversial issues that arise at the leading edge of cognitive science research, including:

• Is thinking a computational process?
• Is thinking primarily in symbols?
• Does symbolic artificial intelligence provide an explanation of mind?
• How is neuroscience relevant to understanding intelligence?
• Is the mind best understood in terms of neural connections?
• How does it matter to cognition that people have bodies situated in the world?
• Is the mind a dynamic system?
• Can consciousness be understood scientifically?
• Is emotion essential to thought?
• Can cognitive science explain creativity?
  

Week	Dates	Topic	Haugeland chapter	Other Readings
1	Sept. 15	Introduction	1
2	Sept. 22	Mind as computation	2
3	Sept. 29	Thinking as symbol manipulation	4
4	Oct. 6	Thinking as matching	5
5	Oct. 13	Critiques of AI	6,7
6	Oct. 20	Neural networks	8, 9
7	Oct. 27	Implications of connectionism	12, 13
8	Nov. 3	Embodiment	15
9	Nov. 10	Dynamic systems	16
10	Nov. 17	Consciousness		Chalmers
11	Nov. 24	Emotions		Velasquez
12	Nov. 31	Creativity		Schank

Other Readings:

Chalmers, David, "Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness," http://ling.ucsc.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html.

Schank, R., and Cleary, C, "Making Machines Creative," http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/archives/psyc/papers/199806/199806036/doc.html/creativity_article,_v2.html

Velásquez, J. 1998 "Modeling Emotion-Based Decision-Making." In: Proceedings of the 1998 AAAI Fall Symposium Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition (Technical Report FS-98-03). Orlando, FL: AAAI Press. Downloadable from http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jvelas/research.html.

Weekly discussion questions

Other Cognitive Science Resources:

http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/courses/resources.html

Back to courses.

 This page updated October 4, 1999.