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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course explores possible uses of computational technology in the study of cognition. (1) The human or animal mind-supporting brain is not in any technical sense "just" a computer, but it is relevant to stimulate various cognitive phenomena by computation in order to model their formal properties. From perception to conception, images schemas, categories, and meanings found in linguistic semantics and syntax, and from bodily motion to the processes of abstraction, intentional orientation, and spatial navigation, computational modeling can help us understand mental architecture, the interrelations between iconicity and symbolization in mental representations, and the constraints and indeterminacies at work in social cognitive networks (distributed cognition). (2) It also is relevant in this course to analyze the cognitive roles of actual computation as a social and communicational technology, mirroring certain of our mental routines on the screens we interact with and we program to manifest symbolic and iconic behaviors in ever-changing patterns of "Interface" communication, while the underlying systems control our social and technical environment. (3) Recent developments in Cognitive Robotics finally invite for an integration of semantic stimulation and the elaboration and implementation of language-based and motion-based competencies in mobile robots. Computation serves, in this perspective, the construction of a dynamic model of meaning linked to interaction (human-machine, machine-machine, and human to human).
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3.00 Credits
Urbanism is design; architecture is design; of course, the aesthetic shaping of artifacts (such as computers, cars, and coffee machines) is design. Configuring surfaces, volumes, and portions of space in special ways, creating and changing formats for things and places that allow cultural practices to unfold while delimiting them, are essential 'designing" endeavors of human civilization and are, necessarily, activities based on the cognitive capacities and constraints of our species. We 'cognize' the human world in terms and frames of 'designed' surroundings. Design is a basic expressive activity, by which we interact with our artificial and natural surroundings and create 'interfaces' between mind and reality, thus upholding and interpretable world. Landscapes and cityscapes, work spaces of all sorts, buildings and parks, exteriors and interiors of homes, factories, institutions, and temples; furniture, artifacts such as machines, tools, weapons, symbolic objects, even the configuration ('building') of our own bodies, are design. An inquiry into cultural cognition, aiming to understand how humans as socio-cultural beings think and feel, therefore needs to explore this dimension of spatial expressivity and to acknowledge it as a constitutive fact of human meaning production; it needs to study the aesthetic and pragmatic, political and historical, philosophical and religious, and simply everyday practical, semiotic aspects of this basic form of human creativity. This course will focus on spatial expressivity--design--in several primary keys and scales, including design for learning; design for verbal and technical communication, interaction, and commerce; design for expressions of authority and deliberation; and design for emotional display.
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3.00 Credits
Recent research in cognitive science challenges ethical perspectives founded on the assumption that rationality is key to moral knowledge or that morality is the product of divine revelation. Bedrock moral concepts like free will, rights, and moral agency also have been questioned. In light of such critiques, how can we best understand moral philosophy and religious ethics? Is ethics primarily informed by nature or by culture? Or is ethics informed by both? This course examines 1) ways in which cognitive science--and related fields such as evolutionary biology--impact traditional moral perspectives, and 2) how the study of moral philosophy and comparative ethics forces reconsideration of broad cognitive science theories about the nature of ethics. The course examines the concept of free will as a case study in applying these interpretive viewpoints. Interdisciplinary readings include literature from moral philosophy, religious ethics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. Offered as COGS 272, RLGN 272.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers instructors the opportunity to cover a more advanced and specialized topic in the field of cognitive science for third and fourth year students. Topics will vary from year to year.
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3.00 Credits
This course takes a look at the discipline of cognitive science by exploring the methods that cognitive scientists use in their research. We'll discuss how different methods reflect different approaches and traditions of thought and how they provide different answers to particular questions. We'll also discuss the process of translating research into writing and talk about how different kinds of writing reflect the many different methods used in cognitive science. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 102, COGS 201, COGS 202.
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3.00 Credits
This course takes a look at the discipline of cognitive science by exploring the current controversies that impact cognitive scientists in their research. We'll discuss how different controversies effect different approaches and traditions of thought and how they elicit different answers to particular questions. We'll also discuss the process of translating research into writing and talk about how different kinds of writing reflect the many different controversial issues presented in cognitive science. Recommended preparation: COGS 101, COGS 102, COGS 201, and COGS 202.
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3.00 Credits
Conceptual Integration, otherwise known as "blending", is a defining feature of higher-order human cognition, indispensable for all behaviors typically taken as distinctive to human beings. This course presents the cognitive mechanisms of conceptual integration, the constraints on its operation, and its deployment and expression in a range of human behaviors such as learning, invention, mathematical and scientific discovery, language, art music, gesture, social understanding, institutional performance, reasoning, decision, judgment, choice, design, and engineering. A student in the class will work on an individual research project in any of a variety of fields, including engineering (e.g. designing with blends), computer science, the arts, the humanities, the social sciences, cognitive neuroscience, and linguistics. Only one of COGS 304 and COGS 404 can be taken for credit within any degree program. Offered as COGS 304 and COGS 404.
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3.00 Credits
Cognitive Science is essentially interdisciplinary, and this seminar will focus on deep issues that lie at the intersection between science and philosophy. The class will explore how, and to what extent, science might both shape our ethical judgments and help us to understand them. We will also consider what, if anything, our deep moral intuitions, as evidenced by strong sentiments such as disgust or repugnance, tell us about the nature of morality. Current scholarship in moral psychology, moral neuroscience, and moral philosophy are shedding new light on these issues. We will focus on moral boundaries: distinctions between things that have powerful ethical and emotional significance, at least for some people. We will consider the following boundaries: -Male/female and moral responses to homosexuality; -Human/animal and moral responses to bestiality and stem cell research that inserts human stem cells into animals; -Life/death and moral responses to euthanasia; -Human/machine and the moral responses to artificial intelligence, robots, and the use of steroids to enhance athletes and warfighters. In addition to learning and writing about relevant psychological and neuroscientific research, the course contains two other essential aspects. First, students will engage with relevant philosophical issues and arguments. Are there moral facts? If so, what is their basis? Second, the course will include experiential aspects--students will be asked to examine their own ethical responses, and to reexamine them in light of what they are learning. Recommended Preparation: (any two of following pre-requisites) COGS 101, COGS 102, COGS 201, COGS 202.
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3.00 Credits
This course covers special topics in the field of cognitive linguistics. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Offered as COGS 313 and COGS 413.
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4.00 Credits
This course examines the notions of intelligence, cognition, reasoning, consciousness, and mental content as they appear in the philosophical views and empirical studies of animals in individual and social contexts. We will review scientific findings that suggest striking likenesses and intriguing differences in the (apparent) thought processes of humans and animals, and ask whether the research techniques that brought us these results are fully adequate to measuring such unobservable entities as conscious experience and thought. Techniques of measurement range from naturalistic observation, to the processing of vocalizations, to memory and problem solving tasks, and the imaging of brain processes through fMRI scans, etc. Students will face the challenges and rewards of practicing these techniques and reworking philosophical theories in the service component of the course. Students will participate in veterinary or shelter work to provide needed animal care while studying animal behavior using cognitive ethological methods. We will compare methods for measuring consciousness and intelligence in animals to those used for human beings, and ask questions about the possibility of machine consciousness and the emergent property of group consciousness. Offered as BIOL 314, COGS 314, PHIL 314 and PHIL 414.
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