Doxastic Cartography

Yes I made the phrase up. But it sounds good, and is actually pretty accurate.

Phil 76700: Doxastic Cartography

Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 (in GC: 7395) CHANGED TO 6417

emandelbaum@gc.cuny.edu

Belief is a central concept in philosophical theorizing. Yet even after all the focus doxastic theories have received, it’s unclear to what extent theories of belief are even in conflict with one another. Dispositionalism and representational realism are in some conflict, but are they competitors for analytic, teleological, or psychofunctionalism? Where do principles of charity or the intentional stance or other attributional aspects interact with the metaphysics of belief? Or transparency of belief theories, or theories that belief aims at the True, or Bayesianism (normative and descriptive), or theories focusing on the norms of belief? What does Stalnakerian total belief state theorists have to do with constitutive norm theorists, and what can these theories possibly have to do with the cognitive science of belief? This course will aim to hash out these questions, ultimately serving to give the first mapping of the logical space of theories of belief. Each week will detail a different movement in epistemological theorizing, building towards a mapping of the logical space of theories of belief. You can use this course to both learn about theories of belief you didn't know, and take part in the much needed project of figuring out how these theories interface. 

There are a lot of readings. This course will serve as something like a bibliography course on belief. I have two purposes in this course: first and foremost to map how, if in any way, these different theories of belief interact with one another. Creating the logical space of belief is my number 1 goal. Secondarily, evaluating these theories could also be good, and will be natural.

As there are too many readings for pretty much anyone to do in one week I propose the following: everyone sitting in on the course (whether auditing or taking it for credit) reads the first article listed and one other article listed for the day. We will take volunteers with the idea being that all articles get coverage and discussion during the seminar.

Paper

Paper: here are the options as I see them

Option 1: I care about the paper and want something to serve as a QP or dissertation proposal or to get published!

Option 2: I don’t really care about the paper

Note: both options are fine and reasonable! You don’t have to want to work in this topic. But if you take option 2 my very strong advice is don’t turn in a late paper. If you don’t care about the course content, I highly recommend turning in a paper early, but more or less demand you not turn it in late. There’s nothing like receiving a paper two years from now that’s a throwaway bs grad seminar essay. If you can write it in a weekend two years from now, you can write it in a weekend now! Do that, and then spend your time focusing on the seminars that are in your AOS.

Either way you can write two short papers or one long one. If you write two short ones, you probably are taking option 2, but not necessarily.

How long should the papers be? Who cares! Make them long enough to be good, and no longer. Remember: no one likes reading long papers. (Pro-tip: don’t write papers that are longer than the length of papers you like to read). Don’t write a paper longer than 8k words. They are almost certainly unpublishable (we can discuss this if you want). And note: I have been known to ask for drafts just to turn around and require you to cut 25% of it.

If you take option 1, then being late is understandable. But don’t delay forever! And please remember that if you get me papers (say) in two years from now—I won’t necessarily be able to grade it right away!

 Readings:

These are suggestions, to be used as a bibliography. I don’t expect anyone to read all of these. So, what should you read? This isn’t a dumb question! It’s about what you want to learn. Do you want to publish? Work in phil mind/epistemology? Do you want to work with me? Publish with me? Do you just want to learn a bit and get a feel for the field? Do you just want to meet some dastardly requirement? All these answers dictate different strategies. I’m not here to tell you how to spend your time. It’s your graduate career! I would suggest not wasting time during grad school (yours or mine!). So, if this interests you take it seriously, use this as a bibliography to try to make it through. Setting the goal of reading 1 article a day is a solid goal anyway. You will need to do this and keep doing this for more like decades than years. If that sounds like torture…why do you want to be a professor?

Tl;dr: everyone is expected to read the top article, and then read one other one. That should give us a strong foundation of understanding as a class.

Remember: We are doing cutting edge stuff. Want to be on the bleeding edge? Try to understand as many of these as possible. Just want to be a passerby on a moving train? Read the top one.

Lastly: even the most hermetic scholar monk among us will have life intrude. People die, hearts and internets get broken, pestilence and the ravages of time and hangovers and lost loves—sooner or later, they’re all coming for you. It’s hard to plan for them. But we will get waylaid. I’ll do my best to roll with the punches, and you should do your best to get shit done early. Best to act like we’re on borrowed time, because we are.

Spring grad seminar on non-canonical cognition: details

Phil 76700: Non-canonical cognition

Mondays 11:45-1:45 (in GC: 7395)

Here’s the description

What is thought? Is there any single set of processes or mental states that are the cognitive? Is conscious, attended, rational cognition of the same form as unconscious, unattended, and putatively irrational thought? Is infant thought continuous with adult? Do animals think and if so is it similar to the way we do, or infants do? Do plants think? How in the world are we supposed to discover this? And why start a syllabus with so many freaking questions?

Ugh, cognitive science can be breathless and confusing but you have to start somewhere. Since we’re going to examine the exotic, we first have to know what makes it exotic (assuming it even is). So, we will start by focusing on the more quotidian, starting with more ordinary processing and then moving onto the more unusual, less tread cognitive paths.  

The class will evolve as follows: we will start with some questions about how the standard cases work—e.g., examining cases of thinking when you’re an adult human paying full attention to the question at hand, and trying to do a bit of reasoning. This will give us a base to compare thought as we might be doing it right now, to unconscious thought, or thought as it appears when we are thinking while under cognitive load, or while being an infant, or a “higher animal”, or an insect, or a plant, or asleep.

Some specifics: auditors are cool with me, but we’re nearly full so please *write me before just showing up.* For one thing the rooms are rather small (and windowless!) and 20 is a tight squeeze (on the bright side: no windows to distract us!). A reading list appears below but it is very much in flux, and we’ll be changing readings both based on what we get through and what topics interest everyone.

1. Canonical thought: Structure and processes

“Required”:

Fodor, Psychosemantics: Ch 1 and Appendix (Why there still has to be a LoT)

Putnam “The Nature of Mental States”

Recommended

Block “Troubles with Functionalism”

Fodor “Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representation”

Functionalism entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/functionalism/

Language of Thought entry on the SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/

Frankland and Greene “Concepts and Compositionality: In Search of the Brain’s Language of Thought”

2. Canonical thought 2: Learning and inference

“Required”

Jerry Fodor “Present status of the innateness controversy”

JQD & Me: “Inferential Transitions”:

SEP Article on Associative Theories of Thought: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/associationist-thought/

Recommended

JQD & me “Non-inferential Transitions”

Gallistel: “Learning and Representation”

Piantadosi and Jacobs: “Four Problems Solved by the Probabilistic Language of Thought”

3. Bayesianism: Rationality, acquisition, and detractor

Required:

Nichols and Samuels “Bayesian Psychology and Human Rationality”

Read: Lieder and Griffiths: “Resource Rational Cognition”

Recommended:

Joshua Tenenbaum, Charles Kemp, Tom Griffiths and Noah Goodman: “How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction”

Piantadosi et al “Bootstrapping in a language of thought: A formal model of numerical concept learning”

Me: “Troubles with Bayesianism”

Feldman “Bayesian Models of Perception: A Tutorial Introduction”

4. Dual process models 1: Our instincts are dumb

Read:

Evans, J., & Stanovich, K. E. (2013). Dual-process theories of higher cognition advancing the debate.

Also:

Frankish: “Dual Process and Dual Systems Reasoning”

Smith and DeCoster: Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems

Frankish: “Dual Process and Dual Systems Reasoning”

Evans “In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning”

Slomin “The empirical case for two systems of reasoning” 

5. Dual process models 2: Wait a minute, maybe they’re not

Read:

Pennycook and De Neys “Logic, Fast and Slow: Advances in Dual-Process Theorizing” (If you have little time, just read this—it’s very short!)

Me: Attitude Inference Association 

Recommended

Brisson et al “Conflict Detection and Logical Complexity”

De Houwer “Moving Beyond System 1 and System 2 :Conditioning, Implicit Evaluation, and Habitual Responding Might Be Mediated by Relational Knowledge”

Bago and De Neys: ‘Advancing the specification of dual process models of higher cognition: a critical test of the hybrid model view”

Bago and De Neys:  “Fast logic?: Examining the time course assumption of dual process theory”

Pennycook et al “Base Rates: Both Neglected and Intuitive”

Trippas et al “When fast logic meets slow belief: Evidence for a parallel-processing model of belief bias”

Bago and De Neys:  “The smart System 1: Evidence for the intuitive nature of correct responding on the bat-and-ball problem.”

Franssens and De Neys “The effortless nature of conflict detection during thinking”

Johnson et al “The Doubting System 1: Evidence for automatic substitution sensitivity”

Newman et al “Rule-Based Reasoning Is Fast and Belief-Based Reasoning Can Be Slow: Challenging Current Explanations of Belief-Bias and Base-Rate Neglect”

Morisanyi and Hadley “How smart do you need to be to get it wrong? The role of cognitive capacity in the development of heuristic-based judgment”

Howarth et al “The logic-bias effect: The role of effortful processing in the resolution of belief–logic conflict”

6. Logic in babies and animals: Cute, small, and not dumb at all

Required:

Halberda: “Logic in Babies”

Mody and Carey: “The emergence of reasoning by the disjunctive syllogism in early childhood”

Cesana-Arlotti et al “Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants”

Liu et al. “Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions”

Also:

Carey and Barner “Ontogenetic Origins of Human Integer Representations”

Téglás, E., Vul, E., Girotto, V., Gonzalez, M., Tenenbaum, J. B., & Bonatti, L. L. 

Pure Reasoning in 12-Month-Old infants as Probabilistic Inference

Gweon, Tenenbaum, Schulz “Infants consider both the sample and the sampling process in inductive generalization”

Gopnik and Wellman “Reconstructing Constructivism: Causal Models, Bayesian Learning Mechanisms, and the Theory Theory”

Gweon & Schulz “16-Month-Olds Rationally Infer Causes of Failed Actions”

Cesana-Arlotti et al. “The Probable and the Possible at 12 Months: Intuitive Reasoning about the Uncertain Future”

7. Higher-end animal cognition

Required:

Pepperberg et al. Logical reasoning by a Grey parrot? A case study of the disjunctive syllogism

Sara Shettleworth: “Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology”

Camp: “A Language of Baboon Thought”

Recommended

Colin Allen: “Transitive inference in animals: Reasoning or conditioned associations?”

Sara Shettleworth: “Do Animals Have Insight, and What Is Insight Anyway?”

Josep Call: “Three ingredients for becoming a creative tool user”

Elisabeth Camp and Eli Shupe: “Instrumental Reasoning in Non-Human Animals”

Brucks and Bayern “Parrots Voluntarily Help Each Other to Obtain Food Rewards”

8. Animal LoT? (with special guest Nic Porot)

Required:

Porot:  “Some Evidence for Languages of Thought in Chimpanzees, Olive Baboons, and an African Gray Parrot”

Porot: “Minds Without Spines: Symbolic Representation in Arthropods”

Recommended

Beck: “Do Non-Human animals have a Language of Thought?”

Rescorla: “Chryssipus’s Dog as a Case Study in Non-Linguistic Cognition”

9 Low-end Animal Cognition

Required:

Camp: “Putting Thoughts to Work”

Carruthers: “Invertebrate concepts confront the generality constraint (and win)”

Recommended:

Tetzlaff and Rey: “Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigation”

Menzel and Giurfa: “Dimensions of Cognition in an Insect, the Honeybee”

Cheeseman et al: “Way-finding in displaced clock-shifted bees proves bees use a cognitive map”

Godfrey-Smith: “Mind, Matter and Metabolism”

Burge: “Perception: Where Mind Begins”

10. Plant cognition (or “cognition”)

Required:

Monica Gagliano: “Learning by Association in Plants”

Alex Morgan: “Pictures, Plants, and Propositions”

Recommended

Garzon and Keijzer “Plants: Adaptive behavior, root-brains, and minimal cognition”

William Bechtel: “Representing Time of Day Circadian Clocks”

11. Animal vs human communication 1: (with special guest Professor Dan Harris)

Harris: “What makes human communication special”

12. Animal vs human communication 2 (with special guest Professor Dan Harris):

Harris: “Intention Recognition and its Psychological Underpinnings”.

13. How arbitrary is the lexicon?

Required

Adelman et al “Emotional sound symbolism: Languages rapidly signal valence via phonemes”

Dingemanse et al. “Arbitrariness, Iconicity, and Systematicity in Language”

Monaghan et al. “How arbitrary is language?”

Recommended:

Perlman et al. “Iconicity can ground the creation of vocal symbols”

Aryani et al “Why ’piss’ is ruder than ’pee’? The role of sound in affective meaning making”

Blasi et al. “Human sound systems are shaped by post-Neolithic changes in bite configuration”

Bowers: “Swearing, Euphemisms, and Linguistic Relativity”

Haugeland “Representational Genera”

Schmidtke “Phonological Iconicity”

Louwerse & Xu “Estimating valence from the sound of a word: Computational, experimental, and cross-linguistic evidence”

Brand et al “The Changing Role of Sound-Symbolism for Small Versus Large Vocabularies”

Winter et al. Cognitive factors motivating the evolution of word meanings: Evidence from corpora, behavioral data and encyclopedic network structure.

Winter and Wedel “The Co-evolution of Speech and the Lexicon: The Interaction of Functional Pressures, Redundancy, and Category Variation”

Dingemanse “Advances in in the Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones”

Blasi et al “Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages”

14. May 11 Optional day on plants or Cognitive Maps or Fake News or…(map day listed)

Achille Casati & Roberto Varzi: Parts and Places: Structures of Spatial Representation, ch. 11

Elisabeth Camp: “Thinking with Maps”

Camp: “Why Cartography is Not Propositional”

Michael Rescorla: “Predication and cartographic representation,”

Rescorla: “Cognitive Maps and the Language of Thought,”

Steven Franconeri et al.: “Flexible cognitive resources: competitive content maps for attention and memory”

Kent Johnson: “Maps, languages, and manguages: Rival cognitive architectures?”

Grad Seminar: Non-canonical Thought: Structure and Processes

Here’s the description for my spring grad seminar at the GC

This class will examine thought in dark places. We'll start with some canonical modes of thought, and then focus on the patterns of deviation, investigating how thought and reasoning works in infants, animals, and the unconscious mind. Topics include reasoning in chimps, baboons and parrots; signaling in whales, dolphins, monkeys, and bees; the question of plant cognition; the evolution of reasoning and higher order thought; tool use in birds; honeybee navigation and math; the role of phonetics in expressing meaning in slurs and in the evolution of language; the role of thought under duress; unconscious belief acquisition and propaganda transmission; and unconscious logic and economic behavior. Readings will be taken from philosophy, cognitive psychology, comparative psychology, evolutionary and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, and social psychology. In the end we should have a firmer grasp on the nature and structure of our concepts, beliefs, and supposedly dumb system 1 faculties, as well as a fuller understanding of the cognitive achievements of our evolutionary ancestors.

Agnoiology, the seedy cousin of epistemology (Spring Grad Seminar Syllabus)

Agnoiology--the study of ignorance--hasn't quite caught on as epistemology has. Epistemology has been one of the main pillars of philosophy, whereas pretty much no one has worked seriously of agnoiology (also rebranded as 'agnotology'). But that is what we'll do here. The reading list is on the syllabus from the last post. If you're auditing, come on the first day and I'll add you to the dropbox account.

Ignorance and Stupidity Seminar

Here's the syllabus for the course on Ignorance. For course auditors, email me and I'll send you the readings. Here's the course description:

When explaining behavior, we are often caught between two uncomfortable poles: interpreting the actors as either stupid or evil. Although ascribing actions to evil may come easier (and is more satisfying), the safe bet is on stupidity. What might first look like a vast conspiracy turns outs to be due to bungling bureaucrats and diffusion of responsibility. What appear to be the worst-laid plans turn out to be no plans at all. One cannot underestimate the vast idiocy of the human psyche.

And yet the notion of ubiquitous idiocy is in deep tension with the core of cognitive science: Chomsky has forever been pointing out how deeply creative people are, instantly and effortlessly generating and parsing novel sentences; Bayesians are constantly stressing how accurate our judgments of probabilities are and how excellent we are at using scant information; perceptual psychologists’ main job is uncovering unconscious mechanisms that allow perception to automatically solve terribly difficult problems. How can we, as Rationalists like Chomsky suggest, be (innately and unconsciously) sensitive to formal and logical aspects of reasoning and yet also display such striking irrationality?

Reconciling base stupidity with our impressive problem-solving faculties will be a goal of the course. Along the way we’ll try to understand exactly what ignorance and stupidity are, as well as why we think we are smarter and less biased than others, why we think groups we belong to are better than groups we don’t, why we are so bad at telling when we are being daft, why we fall for propaganda so easily, why flowery nonsense often sounds profound, why people believe in the supernatural and paranormal, why people believe they have more free will than others do, why we double check to see if we locked the door even when we know it’s locked, and why we ignore probabilities and base rates. In sum, we will look at our reasoning capacities as well as our metacognitive capacities, touching on the traditional philosophical topics of belief and rationality.

There are more educated people now than ever before, and yet we live in the dumbest of times. This especially stupid time demands reflection; hence, this course on the cognitive science of ignorance and stupidity.

In essence, we’ll start out work on ‘agnoiology’ —the study of ignorance. Agnoiology (also rebranded as ‘agnotology’) was coined as the dual to epistemology. It has, to put it lightly, not caught on like epistemology. But it is at least as important. What we’re doing here is trying to set the foundation for a serious study of ignorance. As it is there is just no real trail for us to follow, so we’ll make it up as we go along.

 

Cognitive Architecture Graduate Seminar Fall 2016

In Fall 2016 Ned Block and I will be reprising our act from two years ago and coteaching a seminar. This time it's on Cognitive Architecture proper, and not just perception. Overall the focus is somewhat similar (e.g., we didn't stop caring about the perception/cognition border), but the class will be completely different. A quick description appears below; a more thorough description and syllabus is here: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/courses/perception2016/ . It'll meet M7-9 at NYU. Please do drop me a line if you're interested in attending but cannot register. Last time we taught the course it was uncomfortably packed and knowing how many people will attend will help us know how (and where) to pitch it.

Title: Topics in the Philosophy of Mind: Cognitive Architecture

Broadly speaking, this course will cover theories of cognitive architecture. It will proceed from perception to the perception cognition border, through cognition. Issues discussed will include modularity, evolutionary psychology, fragmentation of cognition, Bayesian models of the mind, models of the structure of thought, and the nature of belief. Guest speakers include Susan Carey, Shaun Nichols, Andy Egan, Eric Schwitzgebel, Jesse Prinz, and Chaz Firestone. Readings will come from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. 

Advice for Undergraduates

Advice for Undergraduate Students

Sometimes I teach in a business school, and I hear the question "Why should I study philosophy" or "Why should I study cognitive science"? I'm not much inclined to answer--people should do whatever they want. But I also teach many students who come from immigrant families or are immigrants themselves and have to worry about making money. I had the same worries, from a similar background. The fact is only a very few things one can study can come close to providing a straightforward path to a middle-class existence. If you find these things interesting--say engineering, or accounting--then OK, do that. Still when you're in college, you are given an opportunity you rarely get anywhere else--to be able to think about whatever you'd like and expose yourself to things you wouldn't otherwise get exposure to. Thus regardless of what one majors in I'd recommend taking classes outside of your comfort zone and knowledge base (whether in philosophy, psychology or art history or geology--you never know what will catch your attention). You'll be exposed to a broader array of subjects in college than at any other time in your life--take advantage of the opportunity.

Most people don't know what they want to do, and most people who do something very interesting with their life didn't get their by following a straightforward path. Even if you take a rather straightforward path--say you go to law school--you aren't guaranteed any job, and you are most likely to have huge loans (also I know many lawyers, but very few happy lawyers). Skills are what matters. I'd recommend getting statistical or programming skills, as they are useful in a host of fields. Equally useful is thinking clearly and not being a moron--that is eminently transferrable (except in politics). I think that's a pretty good reason to study philosophy, but I see no reason to be dogmatic about it. But I'm sort of pained to add: philosophy students do better than most other majors on many metrics people deem important. I won't rehash the data here, but see Dan Kelly's page where he walks you through a bunch of links and data to this effect.

Lastly, I cannot help but add this thoroughly unoriginal opinion: I find David Foster Wallace's advice in his commencement speech (republished as This is Water) heartbreakingly accurate. Evolutionarily speaking, negativity biases make sense: it's more important to be sensitive to negative stimuli than an equally arousing positive one [in absolute value terms]. But this makes one's instinctual dispositions lead to an awfully sad existence. Being self-centered is bad for one's own flourishing, but not being self-focused is hard work. Figuring out how to keep these dispositions at bay by giving yourself other things to think about is a central part of staving off the misery that plagues so many of us. DFW's insight--that we all worship regardless of whether we have made a conscious choice about what we are worshipping--is one I find insightful and empowering. At its best education allows us to consider step back and consider why we are worshipping what we are, and opens up other options. I'll leave you with his words, since they are weapons-grade eloquent:

“And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.”