Readings, videos, and other resources will be provided for each topic. Those enrolled in the course for credit are required to watch/read those materials labeled “required,” and these are presented first. Other material is strictly optional and is provided to encourage you to read beyond the course material.
- Viewing material (required)
Please watch this 3 minute tongue-in-cheek video on the landmark figures of Heraclitus and Parmenides.
This is, of course, entirely lighthearted and comical, and not a good way to learn about these philosophers. But it serves to drive home these points:
- The principle themes with which cognitive science is concerned have been discussed as long as there has been philosophy.
- In discussing such matters as metaphysics and free will, we frequently find ourselves contrasting a presentist perspective (here and now) with an eternalist one.
2. Reading (required):
Skinner, B. F. (1948). ‘Superstition’ in the pigeon. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 38(2), 168.
This gives you a flavour of behaviourist language. Behaviourism was much more varied and rich than it might appear. The simplistic talk of stimulus and response may appear old-fashioned, but Skinner was also very sensitive to the role of context in determining behaviour, something which cognitive psychology often lacks in its characterisation of the causes of behaviour as lying almost exclusively within the head.
3. Video resource (required):
Here is a cautionary video about the third of the most famous behaviourists, John Watson. The dichotomy he explored was simplistic and dangerous. He contrasted nature and nurture, contrasting instinct and learning. This is not a productive way to interpret things, and his view of biology, or of the child, is not compatible with current understanding.
4. Video resource (required):
Please watch this 48 minute lecture by me on how computers and brains came to be associated.
5. Reading (required)
Please read this page of a research group concerned with embodiment, or 4E approaches to cognition.
6. Video (required)
Finally, watch this very brief introduction to 4E concepts by Shaun Gallagher: