COGNITIVE SCIENCE I: MINDS AND MACHINES

The main aim of the course is to examine in detail the mechanistic hypothesis, namely the idea that mentality and intelligence can be explained as the workings of a mechanistic system like that of a computer. The second aim is to function as an introduction to cognitive science, which is the interdisciplinary attempt to explain mentality as a system of processing of natural symbolic representations. The approach followed is philosophical and historical. The difficulties of defining intelligence is discussed and then the theoretical problematique that led Alan Turing to invent the computing machine. The introduction of the first Ai programs in the 50s. The cognitive revolution, first in linguistics and the in psychology in the 60s, the classical computational approach of the 70s, the criticism of computationalism, the connectionism program of the 80s and 90s, embodied intelligence and cognitive neuroscience of the last decade.