Welcome to Philosophy 951: Approaches to Cognition
Our focus in this course will be various approaches to the study of cognition. Among these approaches will be the sort of behaviorism implicit in the Turing Test, cognitivism, internalism and externalism, connectionism, ecological psychology, evolutionary psychology, and embodied cognition. The course will evolve as we progress. This is just my way of saying that I don't have a fixed list of readings in mind, other than some classic papers, Fodor's The Modularity of Mind, and some recent books that I've been wanting to study carefully. I will provide links to the papers we will be reading. The books you will need to purchase are:
Buller, David (2005). Adapting Minds (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Fodor, J. (1983). The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press).
Reed, E. (1996). Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press).
These books are available at Underground Textbook Exchange.
Each week selected students will be responsible for presenting material. My expectation is that these presentations will quickly turn into open discussions. A research paper will be due at the end of the semester.