Teaching

This course examines the extent to which various cognitive capacities are innate versus learned, focusing on how recent developments in artificial intelligence bear on this debate. We will explore contemporary deep learning architectures, current obstacles to improved performance, and efforts to reduce the size of these models and training datasets (such as the BabyLM challenge). We will also consider the potential for sensory grounding and multimodal integration to help solve AI's problems. In addition, the course will cover the Meno paradox; empiricism versus rationalism in the history of philosophy; current biological perspectives on heredity; estimations of the size of hereditary pathways, brains, and environmental data; the distinction between domain-general and domain-specific cognition; competence versus performance; the Chomsky hierarchy and universal approximation theorems; and poverty of the stimulus arguments.

The goal of cognitive science—and of this course—is to understand how the mind works. Trying to understand our own minds is perhaps the most ambitious and exciting (and difficult) project in all of science, and this project requires tools drawn from fields including experimental psychology, computer science and artificial intelligence, linguistics, vision science, philosophy, anthropology, behavioral economics, and several varieties of neuroscience (among others). This course will introduce you to the major tools and theories from these areas, as they relate to the study of the mind. We will employ these perspectives while exploring the nature of mental processes such as perception, reasoning, memory, attention, imagery, language, intelligence, decision-making, morality—and even attraction and love. In sum, this course will expose you to cognitive science, the assumptions on which it rests, and many of the most important and fascinating results obtained so far. 

An overview of the rise of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary field, and the fundamental debates it has engendered. Cognitive science emerged in the twentieth century as a paradigm for studying the mind.  Since its beginning, cognitive science has drawn upon formal developments in philosophy, logic, mathematics, and computer science in order to establish various frameworks for generating and testing theories of cognition.  It has sought to integrate, as well as further, the empirical findings of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and neuroscience.  The premises behind this ambitious approach have given rise to significant philosophical discussion. The first half of the course will introduce students to philosophical and empirical developments within the individual disciplines related to cognitive science and will show how they interrelate. The second half of the course is devoted to the central debates: classical computationalism versus connectionism; nativism versus empiricism; representationalism versus anti-representationalism; bottom-up versus top-down approaches; the rationality wars; and so on.

This course examines the relationship between religion and science, tracing their intertwined histories from prehistoric times to the modern era. A popular narrative suggests that ancient Greece was the first culture to shift from myth and superstition to science and reason. This supposed transition is often cited as the foundation for modern European science and offered as an argument for Western exceptionalism. In this course, we will critically examine such narratives, presenting an alternative view. Looking back to the earliest times, we'll investigate the religious incentives that prompted studies of nature and how a detailed understanding of nature shaped religious beliefs. Of interest will be the figure of the shaman, the shamanic cosmos, and the influence of such traditions on other specialized professions—such as astronomer-astrologers, builders of megaliths, blacksmiths, chymists, healers, magicians, priests, and myth-tellers. We will examine these professions’ participation in the transmission of secret knowledge of nature, and their importance to ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Greeks. We will examine to what extent Greek thinkers, and later the central figures of the “Scientific Revolution,” were not deviating from the past, but were deeply embedded within these ancient currents. It was during the Enlightenment that emerging Western narratives started etching distinct boundaries, like differentiating alchemy from chemistry, or strongly separating religion from science.

Ethical dilemmas in the practice of healthcare continue to proliferate and receive increasing attention from members of the healthcare profession, policymakers, and the general public as healthcare consumers.  In this course we will examine a number of philosophical perspectives on ethics, as well as ethical issues that arise in the context of contemporary medical practice and research.  Topics to be covered will include the physician-patient relationship, informed consent, medical experimentation, termination of treatment, genetics, reproductive technologies, euthanasia, resource allocation, and healthcare reform. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to identify and analyze different philosophical approaches to selected issues in medical ethics; gain insight into how to read and critically interpret philosophical arguments; and develop skills that will enable them to think clearly about ethical questions as future or current health care providers, policymakers, and consumers.