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This course surveys some of the major contemporary philosophical views about the foundations of cognitive psychology. We will consider such questions as: What is the best way to represent the general structure of cognitive activities like entertaining beliefs and reasoning? Do we think in a language, or is cognition based on the simultaneous processing of many tiny bits of information? What sort of things are the concepts that we use to form our thoughts? What does it mean to say that we are simply born already possessing certain kinds of information? How is this different from acquiring the information by learning it? How can we best understand the methodology and goals of constructing a theory of human cognition? Readings will include papers by Jerry Fodor, Randy Gallistel, Paul Churchland, Stephen Laurence and Eric Margolis, Jeffrey Elman, Karin Stromswold, Steven Stich, and others.
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