Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2014: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time: Fri 12:30-3:30 Place: Stewart S2/2

Instructor: Stevan Harnad Office: W7/3 Office hours: TBA Phone: 514-285-4948 Skype: sharnad google+hangout amsciforum@gmail.com E-mail: harnad@uqam.ca (dont use my mcgill email address because I dont check it regularly) Open to students interested in Cognitive Science from the Departments of Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Computer Science, or Neuroscience. Overview: What is cognition? It is what happens in our brains when we think, enabling us to learn and act adaptively, survive and reproduce. Cognitive science tries to explain the mechanism that generates that know-how. The brain is the natural place to look for the explanation, but thats not enough. Unlike the mechanisms generating the capacities of other bodily organs such as the heart or the lungs, the brains capacities are too vast, complex and opaque to be read off by direct observation or manipulation: Computational modeling and robotics try, alongside behavioral neuroscience, to design and test mechanisms that can generate our cognitive capacities, thereby explaining them. The challenge of the celebrated "Turing test" is to scale up to the point where we can no longer distinguish the models performance from our own. Our model must generate not only our sensorimotor capacity -- able to do with the objects and agents in the world exactly what we can do with them -- but it must also be able to produce and understand language, as we do. What is language, and what was its adaptive value such that we are the only species that possesses it? And consciousness? Objectives: This course will outline the main challenges that cognitive science, still inchoate, faces today, focusing on the capacity to learn sensorimotor categories, to name and describe them verbally, and to transmit them to others, concluding with cognition distributed on the Web. 0. Introduction What is cognition? How and why did introspection fail? How and why did behaviourism fail? What is cognitive science trying to explain, and how? 1. The computational theory of cognition (Pylyshyn, Turing) What is (and is not) computation? What is the power and scope of computation? What does it mean to say (or deny) that cognition is computation?

Readings: 1a. Pylyshyn, Z (1989) Computation in cognitive science. In MI Posner (Ed.) Foundations of Cognitive Science. MIT Press 1b. Harnad, S. (2009) Cohabitation: Computation at 70, Cognition at 20, in Dedrick, D., Eds. Cognition, Computation, and Pylyshyn. MIT Press http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12092/ 2. Searle's Chinese room argument (against the computational theory of cognition) Whats wrong and right about Searles Chinese room argument that cognition is not computation? Readings: 2a. Searle, John. R. (1980) Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-457 2b. Harnad, S. (2001) What's Wrong and Right About Searle's Chinese RoomArgument? In: M. Bishop & J. Preston (eds.) Essays on Searle's Chinese Room Argument. Oxford University Press. http://cogprints.org/1622/ 3. The Turing test Whats wrong and right about Turings proposal for explaining cognition? Readings: 3a. Turing, A.M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49 433-460 http://cogprints.org/499/ 3b. Harnad, S. (2008) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing,Machinery and Intelligence. In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12954/ 4. What about the brain? Why is there controversy over whether neuroscience is relevent to explaining cognition? 4a. Rizzolatti G & Craighero L (2004) The Mirror-Neuron System. Annual Review of Neuroscience 27L 169-92 4b. Fodor, J. (1999) "Why, why, does everyone go on so about thebrain?" London Review of Books 21(19) 68-69. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/jerry-fodor/diary

5. The symbol grounding problem What is the symbol grounding problem, and how can it be solved? (The meaning of words must be grounded in sensorimotor categories.) Readings: 5. Harnad, S. (2003) The Symbol Grounding Problem. Encylopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7720 [Google also for other online sources for The Symbol Grounding Problem] 6. Categorization and cognition That categorization is cognition makes sense, but cognition is categorization? (On the power and generality of categorization.) Readings: 6a. Harnad, S. (2005) ToCognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization, in Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization. Elsevier. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11725/ 6b. Harnad, S. (2003) Categorical Perception. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/7719/ 7. Evolution and cognition Why is it that some evolutionary explanations sound plausible and make sense, whereas others seem far-fetched or even absurd? Readings: 7a. Confer, Jaime C., Judith A. Easton, Diana S. Fleischman, Cari D. Goetz, David M. G. Lewis, Carin Perilloux, and David M. Buss (2010) Evolutionary Psychology Controversies, Questions, Prospects, and Limitations. American Psychologist 65 (2): 110126 7b. Bolhuis JJ, Brown GR, Richardson RC, Laland KN (2011) Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology. PLoS Biol 9(7) 8. The evolution of language Whats wrong and right about Steve Pinkers views on language evolution? And what was so special about language that the capacity to acquire it became evolutionarily encoded in the brains of our ancestors and of no

other surviving species about 300,000 years ago? (It gave our species a unique new way to acquire categories, through symbolic instruction rather than just direct sensorimotor induction.) Readings: 8a. Pinker, S. & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences13(4): 707-784. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/papers/Pinker%20Bloom%20199 0.pdf 8b. Harnad, S. (2010) Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language: From Show to Tell. In: Origins of Language. Cognitive Sciences Institute. Universit du Qubec Montral, June 2010. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21438/ 9. Chomsky and the poverty of the stimulus A close look at one of the most controversial issues at the heart of cognitive science: Chomskys view that Universal Grammar has to be inborn because it cannot be learned from the data available to the language-learning child. Readings: 9a. Pinker, S. Language Acquisition. in L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson (Eds.), An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Ed. Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/pinker.langacq.html 9b. Pullum, G.K. & Scholz BC (2002) Empirical assessment of stimulus poverty arguments. Linguistic Review 19: 9-50 http://www.ucd.ie/artspgs/research/pullum.pdf 10. The mind/body problem and the explanatory gap Once we can pass the Turing test -- because we can generate and explain everything that cognizers are able to do -- will we have explained all there is to explain about the mind? Or will something still be left out? Readings: 10a. Dennett, D. (unpublished) The fantasy of first-person science. http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/chalmersdeb3dft.htm 10b. Harnad, S. (unpublished) OnDennett on Consciousness: The Mind/Body Problem is the Feeling/Function Problem. http://cogprints.org/2130 10c. Harnad, S. (2002) Doing, Feeling, Meaning and Explaining

10d. Harnad, S. & Scherzer, P. (2008) Spielberg's AI:Another Cuddly No-Brainer. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 44(2): 83-89 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14430/ 10e. Harnad, S. (2012) Alan Turing and the hard and easy problem of cognition: doing and feeling. [in special issue: Turing Year 2012] Turing100: Essays in Honour of Centenary Turing Year 2012, Summer Issue 11. Distributed cognition and the World Wide Web Can a mind be wider than a head? Collective cognition in the online era: the Cognitive Commons. Readings: Clark, A. & Chalmers, D. (1998) The Extended Mind. Analysis. 58(1)http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/andy/TheExtendedMind.pdf Dror, I. & Harnad, S. (2009) Offloading Cognition onto CognitiveTechnology. In Dror & Harnad (Eds): Cognition Distributed: How Cognitive Technology Extends Our Minds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16602/ X. For Psyc 743 grad students only: Readings: Chalmers, D.J. (2011) "A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition". Journal of Cognitive Science 12: 323-57 Harnad, Stevan (2012) The Causal Topography of Cognition. Journal of Cognitive Science. 13(2): 181-196 [commentary on: Chalmers, David: A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition] Chalmers, D.J. (2012) "The Varieties of Computation: A Reply to Commentators". Journal of 12. Overview Drawing it all together. Evaluation: Midterm (1 hour) 6 questions out of 15: 10 marks Final (3 hours) 6 questions out of 15: 40 marks Blog skywriting quote/commentary on all 24 readings: 30 marks Class discussion: 20 marks

Cognitive Science, 13:211-48.

Course website: http://mcgill2.blogspot.ca Use your gmail account to comment, and either use your real name or send me an email to tell me what pseudonym you are using. Every week, everyone does at least one blog comment on at least one of that (coming) weeks papers. In your blog comments, quote the passage on which you are commenting (italics, indent). For samples, see summer school: http://turingc.blogspot.ca