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?”