In this module you are asked to prepare two essays. Suggested essay topics are given below, but you are free to devise your own. However, if you invent your own topic, please inform me and discuss your potential topic with me. You must choose a different topic for each of your two essays.
This course does not teach the prevailing views that you will find in Wikipedia, ChatGPT etc. It teaches critical thinking with respect to competing views of the person, and helps you to recognize the strengths and limitations of any one view of the person. In your essays you should make it clear that you are thinking critically, drawing on the resources of the course and class discussion.
Here are some general points. The essay serves to demonstrate that you have learned to think critically about work in cognitive science. This means you are expected to recognize and make explicit the framing assumptions of the work you discuss. Do not just adopt the jargon and worldview of any papers you consider, but frame your discussion by noting, e.g. what its assumptions about the nervous system, the body, the person, and the world of the living subject are. What are the larger uncertainties behind the work? I want to see critical thinking, not repetition of propaganda.
You are advised not to draw on too many references. You will use Google Scholar to find relevant literature, but do not decorate your text with 50 citations to work you are unfamiliar with. Instead, choose two or three specific papers, and read them! Familiarize yourself with the field they contribute to, so you can learn the specific assumptions and agenda of the researchers.
Avoid “Scientism.” Scientism is the uncritical belief that science is an oracle of truth. Do not treat “science” as an oracle. Do not say “science says”, or “science tells us”. There is no such authority.
Do not treat the brain as a magic machine. If you are going to consider the attribution of function to a part of the brain, be aware that any such attribution must be uncertain. Do not use inappropriate verbs in sentences about brains (the brain perceives…, the brain decides…, the brain chooses…). Brains do none of these things. Be careful in your language.
Each essay amounts to 50% of your grade in the module. Each essay should be about 3,000 words in length. It should use writing suited to academic discussion. You must cite (in the text) any work you refer to, and every citation should appear as an entry in a bibliography that is placed at the end of the article. Use any standard citation form you wish, but do not invent your own.
Don’t even try to submit work written by ChatGPT or similar. I know how that system thinks. I teach something different. By all means use it as a source to present the orthodoxy of ChatGPT (but make sure to label your sources!), but if you regurgitate its content as if you had written it, I will dismiss the essay.
Essay Suggestion 1: Critical reading of science journalism
Select an article from a major respectable news source (e.g. The Guardian, The Washington Post, etc) that reports some findings in an area relevant to cognitive science.
Summarize its content briefly, then subject it to critical analysis. What are the possible misunderstandings it may give rise to? Place the work in context, by referring to older and more established research. Newspapers like novelty, but our understanding increases only slowly. Inevitably, the hopes and consequences suggested by the article will be unrealistic. Make this explicit. Show that you can avoid being duped by such articles. Show that you are aware of competing paradigms that the article does not consider. What is a realistic interpretation of the reported findings (do hunt down the original research report on which the article is based and read it!)?
Essay suggestion 2: The importance of interaction
In 2023, a remarkable letter to the editor appeared in the journal Cognitive Science. It was authored by 28 different researchers from very different fields across the whole spectrum of cognitive science. It argued that cognitive science was misguided in considering cognition as something individual and internal. For different reasons, each of the researchers was of the view that interaction, and not the individual, should be the starting point for considering cognition.
The article is Dingemanse, M., Liesenfeld, A., Rasenberg, M., Albert, S., Ameka, F. K., Birhane, A., … & Wiltschko, M. (2023). Beyond single‐mindedness: A figure‐ground reversal for the cognitive sciences. Cognitive Science, 47(1), e13230. [PDF HERE]
Your task is to familiarize yourself with this argument, and then to choose one of the authors and find out more about their work and their approach. Why did the question of individual vs interaction arise for this researcher, and what are the consequences for the field they contribute to?
Essay suggestion 3: Cognitivism and embodiment
The field of cognitive science is not a unified field. By far most work done in the field is couched within the language of Cognitivism. This paradigm assumes that cognition is to be accounted for with reference to individual brains. It makes use of the notion of “mental representation”. It speaks of the human person as an input/output system. It assumes a single agent underlying all activity of a person. It uses the post-World-War-II vocabulary of computers and information processing. While such work is beloved of funding agencies, industry and the powers of social control, it is deeply problematic.
Can you see through this? Can you recognize its limitations? There are many approaches that push back against some or all of the assumptions of cognitivism. Your task in this essay is to find two contrasting papers that address some common topic, one using the assumptions of cognitivism, and one critiquing those assumptions, or starting from a different place. Contrasting approaches may label themselves as “embodied” (but be careful, this word too can be misused), or 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enacted), or any of a variety of other labels.
Try to avoid simplistic reduction to two warring camps. Rather, you should draw out the fundamental assumptions underlying the work you choose to discuss, so that they may be considered together. All scientific work in cognitive science is forced to make brave guesses as to our nature and the nature of the world. There is no single right approach. But there is an urgent need to recognize the limitations of any given paradigm.
Essay suggestion 4: Celebrating good science
Select one specific journal article that you find particularly compelling. Summarize its contribution, and then place that summary in context. Describe how the work relates to other work, to controversies and disagreements. Explain why you think this particular paper deserves respect. Don’t forget to be critical at all times. What shortcomings do you find? Place the work in history—what went before, and what was learned in getting to the point the article takes off from?
Essay suggestion 5: Science and philosophy
Cognitive science is never free of philosophical puzzles and considerations. In this essay, you will consider some specific scientific work as reported in a journal article of your choice. You will summarize the work, but then pull back to ask what philosophical questions are relevant to the work in question. Most scientific work does not do this, and most philosophy stays away from science. Here, you are encouraged to mix them up, bringing relevant technical and theoretical points to the fore.
Essay suggestion 6: Recognising divergence in theory
In this course, you encounter many approaches to studying persons. They do not all share a common understanding of what is to be explained, what an explanation should be, or even what a person is. In this essay, you are asked to pick a single empirical topic and identify at least two approaches that adopt different theoretical positions with respect to the topic. Your job is not to decide who is right or wrong. Your job is to draw out and make clear the different theoretical assumptions made by the two or more groups. How do they each characterise the problem? What assumptions do they rely upon? How do they differ in their mode of questioning? Do they differ in the consequences one might draw from their work.
There is no right answer here. You are being asked to think critically, and to assume a position that is independent of the researchers whose work you read.
I want you to make your own choices here. Pick a topic. It may be quite general (e.g. development and learning in the young) or quite specific (e.g. a specific visual illusion). We have encountered very many such oppositions, e.g. between computational and embodied approaches, individualistic and collective approaches, contrasting notions of control and coordination, language vs. languaging, and more. In each case, you are faced with different frameworks within which scientific work is pursued under specific assumptions. Your task in this essay is to illuminate such divergence.