Course Descriptions

 Course Title: Phil of Mind: Superstructures: Perspectives and Other Large-Scale Cognitive Phenomena (Cross-listed with Cog Sci)
 

An enormous amount of work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science (including both of ours) has fixated on representational formats: schemes that take meaningful bits and combine them in constrained ways to yield complex meaningful structures. Many theorists endorse a happy pluralism, according to which there are many formats in the mind with different kinds of meaningful bits and combinatorial procedures (iconic, discursive, maplike, graphlike, etc.).

But is that all there is in the mind, just a bunch of formats bumping into each other to produce behavior? This course explores another possibility: the mind not only composes bits into complex representations, but also deals in larger structures that can’t be captured through combinatorial procedures of the familiar sort. Our goal is to examine the aspects of cognitive organization that lie between individual structured representations and behavior: what we call “superstructures”. Superstructures are, in our view, necessary to bridge the explanatory chasm between tokening representations and producing intelligent behavior. Examples potentially include:

• Perspectives: holistic dispositions to categorize, store, synthesize and respond to information;
• Memory organizations: relations between memory locations that carry information about relations between stored pieces of information;
• Understanding: enriched conceptual representation that exceeds mere concept possession and enables competent deliberative thought;
• Cognitive analysis: the recovery of implicit information in explicit form, including extracting discrete constituents from non-discrete forms of combination;
• Deliberation: the kind of conscious, focused stream of thought that seems to elude traditional cognitive models.

The readings will include some unpublished work by both Liz and Jake.