Computation & Cognition

The seminar will investigate the philosophical foundations of contemporary cognitive science as it has emerged over the last 60 years. Proceeding in rough chronological order, we will work through a number of writings by philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, and psychologists. Arguably, the keystone of this scientific movement is the hypothesis that human and animal cognition can be profitably explained by models originally developed in the theory of computation. This hypothesis will be the central topic of the seminar. Just as computational processes can be described at multiple levels of abstraction, psychologists in the computational tradition have found it natural to distinguish multiple levels of explanation within psychological theories, and to attribute multiple levels of representation to psychological subjects. A goal of the course will be to understand the philosophical significance of such levels. Of special interest for us will be the relationship between syntactic levels of explanation and representation, and semantic levels of explanation and representation.