Study,
Exam, and Essay Materials
Philosophy
of Psychology, '04
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Essay
Format Guidelines
All
essays should be written in standard double-spaced 12 pt. Times New
Roman,
with one-inch margins on all sides. When page-lengths are specified,
they
indicate the maximum
amount
of space that your answer can take up. You may not need to use all the
space allotted to answer a given question. You won't be docked for
handing
in a short answer -- unless of course your answer is incorrect,
incomplete,
etc. However, any essay that exceeds the allotted space will receive 0
points and will not be read. (The idea behind a maximum space limit is
to encourage you to focus on an answer to the question, rather than
simply
writing a lot, hoping/believing that a right answer must be lurking
somewhere
in your essay.)
Your
essays will be evaluated on their clarity and accuracy. Remember, the
point
of these essays is for you to convince me that you have a solid
understanding
of correct answers to the relevant questions. Do not simply quote large
passages that you think might contain the core of an answer.
Instead, explain
what's going on.
Undergraduate
Essay Materials
Midterm exam: Please answer
the following questions. Your exam is due in class at 9:30 am on
Thursday,
Oct. 28. It is entirely your responsibility to get your exam to me by
this
time.
- Essay #1: [2 pages] Connectionist
systems take vectors (sequences of numbers) as inputs, and produce
other
vectors as outputs.How is this supposed to
represent,
say, the cognitive activity of distinguishing an orange from a pear?
- Essay #2: [2 pages] Everybody
agrees that the structures and processes in the brain are vastly better
represented by a connectionist network than by a symbolic model.
Nonetheless,
there’s a fierce debate about whether cognitive architecture should be
Connectionist or Classical. Explain precisely what
“cognitive architecture” is, and what this debate is about.
- Essay #3: [3 pages]
Explain
Fodor’s view that the causal properties of mental representations track
the
syntax of mental representations, which in turn track the
logic/semantic
properties of sentences which describe the corresponding propositional
attitudes? How does this figure into a theory of psychological
explanation?
- Extra Credit. Essay #4:
[no
page limit] In
the first paragraph on p. 22 of Elman 1990, Elman argues that the
patterns of
representations of certain types of words is not context-sensitive,
because
“these representations are composites of the hidden unit activation
patterns in
response to each word averaged across many different contexts”. In the
next
paragraph, he writes that “one might want to know whether [sc. the
various
word-type representations] are in any way artifactual.” What does he
mean here,
and what sort of objection is he addressing? [Hint: The class
average on
a test is 60% if one half of the students all score 90% and the other
half all
score 30% (and nobody scores 60%).]
Graduate
Essay Materials
Skip
to Undergraduate Essay Materials
Study Materials (from
F '03)
Language of
thought
Overview
of the language of thought (Read this!)
Class
notes on the language of thought
- You should understand the key terms of the discussion:
- Language of thought
- Folk Psychology (FP)
- mental representation
- the Representational theory of Mind (RTM)
- the Computational theory of Mind (CTM)
- proposition
- propositional attitude
- syntax (what are syntactic properties?)
- semantics (what are semantic properties?)
- content
- constituent
- productivity
- systematicity
- What are Fodor's reasons for taking FP seriously as the basis for
a
scientific
psychological theory?
- What, according to Fodor, are the three crucial properties of a
propositional
attitude psychology?
- How does RTM support a folk psychological theory of the mind?
- What are Fodor's three arguments (in the appendix) for taking the
language
of thought hypothesis seriously?
- Can two people have the same type of mental representation in
their
heads?
Can they have the same token of a mental representation?
- The language of thought is an empirical theory. Describe at
least
one way that it could turn out to be false. (You don't have to
come
up with a particularly plausible example, just one that is at least
possible.)
- What's the deal behind all this stuff about the causal properties
of
mental
representations tracking the syntax of mental representations, which in
turn tracking the logic/semantic properties of the sentences
describing
the corresponding propositional attitudes? How does this figure
into
a theory of psychological explanation?
- Is the theory of the language of thought no more and
no
less
than the representational theory of mind? (If you think the two
are
not the same, try to come up with an example that satisfies either LOT
or RTM but not the other.)
- Is the theory of the language of thought no more an
no less
than the representational theory of mind plus the computational theory
of mind? Explain your answer. (Recall that CTM, the computational
theory of mind, says that thinking is the computational processing of
symbols.)
- Does the language of thought hypothesis imply FP or
vice-versa?
(If
you don't think so, then try to come up with some way that the one
could
be a true theory while the other is false.)
Connectionism
Overview
of connectionism
Connectionism
class notes
- Key terms:
- neuron
- connectionist system
- unit
- connection weight
- activation value
- input vector
- output vector
- input layer
- hidden layer
- output layer.
- Describe very generally why hidden layers are important to
cognitive
processing.
- Describe very generally how connectionist systems learn.
- Connectionist systems are supposed to describe human cognition,
and
some
sort of learning mechanism is a crucial influence on these
systems.
So what part of the world might the learning mechanism plausibly
correspond
to, and how might it work? (Here, too, just describe in general
what
the learning mechanism for a connectionist system might plausibly
represent.)
- Connectionist systems take vectors (sequences of numbers) as
inputs,
and
produce other vectors as outputs. What does this have to do with
how the mind works? (E.g., what does it have to do with me
thinking
about an apple, or thinking that the apple is yummy?)
- Describe the three Marr levels of description. Where can
connectionist
systems fit into this picture?
- Optional: It is
often thought
that connectionism and modularity about the mind do not mix: if
you
are a connectionist, you probably don’t think that the mind is (very)
modular.
Is this right? Can one reasonably be both a connectionist and yet
hold strong views about the modularity of mind?
Language
of thought and connectionism
- How might an opponent of LOT reply to the claim on p. 7 of Psychosemantics
that “when [folk-psychological] explanations are made explicit, they
are
frequently seen to exhibit the ‘deductive structure’ that is so
characteristic
of explanation in real science”?
- How might an opponent of LOT reply to the three claims about FP
made on
pp. 2 – 10 of Psychosemantics?
- In what (if any) sense(s) are classical and connectionist
theories
rivals?
How (if it is possible) might they both be correct?
Concepts
'Two
dogmas of empiricism', by Willard van Orman Quine
Class
notes on concepts
In
a story by Jorge Luis Borges, a Chinese encyclopedia divided animals
into
(a) those that belong to the Emporer, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that
are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g)
stray
dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those
that
tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones (k) those drawn with
a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just
broken
a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
[From
'The analytical language of John Wilkins']
- Know the basic terms of this discussion:
- classical view, definition
- analyticity
- prototype theory
- feature
- the similarity metric Sim(I, J).
- What are three advantages of the classical view? What are
three
disadvantages?
- What are three advantages of the prototype theory? What are
three
disadvantages?
- Classical theories are often associated with a language of
thought view
of cognitive architecture; prototype theories, on the other hand,
are often associated with connectionist architectures.
- Explain how a language of thought
theory could could contain a
classical
theory of concepts.
- Explain how a connectionist theory
could contain a prototype theory of
concepts.
- Explain one difficulty that arises
for a language of thought theory
that
attempts to contain a prototype theory of concepts.
- Explain one difficulty that arises
for a connectionist theory that
attempts
to contain a classical theory of concepts.
- How do the problems of ignorance, error, and modality present
difficulties
for classical and prototype views of concepts?
- Discuss one piece of evidence that would support a classical view
over
a prototype view.
- Discuss one piece of evidence that would support a
prototype view
over a classical view.
- In prototype theories, why did the researchers have subjects
identify
salient
properties first, and then use these properties in the construction of
prototypes?
Methodology
Overview of
theories of reference (you may need this to fully understand the
Stich
article)
Notes
on 'What is a theory of mental representation?'
- Know the basic terms of this discussion:
- Eliminativism
- mental representation
- conceptual analysis
- naturalism.
- What are the two forms of eliminativism?
- Why is eliminativism sometimes thought to be a worrisome claim?
- What are the two general sorts of projects for a theory of mental
representation?
What is the difference between them?
- What is the general form of the argument from the second of these
projects
to the claim that eliminativism is true?
- What is Stich's basic reply to this argument?
- Describe how Stich argues that the question of eliminativism
depends
crucially
on what sort of theory of reference is used.
[Extra Credit:
Explain how this thing works; please be specific.]
Leading
a discussion
Discussion leaders should prepare a visual aid (documents to be
displayed
on-screen, handouts, etc.) which contains:
- a brief outline of the paper, which includes
- the thesis or theses of the paper;
- the main points in the various arguments that occur;
- definitions of the crucial terms.
- A minimum of two discussion
questions per discussant.
Non-discussants should also come prepared to actively discuss the
readings, and they should be prepared to share their questions about
the readings.
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