Phil 246: Foundations of Cognitive Science

USC Cognitive Science undergraduate core course (latest: Spring 2024): This course is an introduction to the foundational questions animating the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. For example: How much of what we know is learned (i.e., based in experience), and how much is innate? How much of what we’re able to do with our minds is the result of just plain smarts, as opposed to faculties ‘designed’ to carry out certain tasks? How is what we know represented or recorded in the mind, and how do we come to speak what we know? Are our minds really different from those of other animals? Can we build an artificial mind? We begin to explore these questions as they play out across philosophy, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science. Along the way, we gain experience and familiarity with formal, experimental, and computational tools used to shed light on their eventual answers. Students should emerge from the course with a deeper appreciation of the richness (and sometimes strangeness) of minds, as well as an understanding of how experience depends on the concepts, categories, and processes in one’s ‘mind design’. In Lab Sections, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the basic concepts, theories, and research methods in cognitive science.