COGS 311 - Seminar in Cognitive Science

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The topic of the seminar varies regularly, but is always focused on some aspect of thought, language, perception, or action considered from the unique, synthetic perspective of cognitive science. The seminar is team-taught by faculty members in the program. May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Topic for 2015/16b: One Culture. In 1959 novelist and physicist C. P. Snow delivered a prescient lecture entitled The Two Cultures in which he decried the increasing separation between the sciences and the humanities in Western education, warning of the problems that could arise in a society that lost the ability to speak the languages of both science and the arts. This seminar will address this issue in several ways by bringing to bear the multidisciplinary techniques of cognitive science on a set of key questions. Is there a fundamental difference between artistic and scientific thought and practice? Is there, in fact, a cultural divide? If so, what are the nature and source of that difference in various cognitive processes, and what are the obstacles to transcending it? If not, then how and why have the two cultures become so divided? A major focus of the course will be on hands-on projects designed to explore what happens when the methods and perspectives of science and the humanities are brought together in pursuit of understanding of various phenomena. Ms. Broude and Mr. Livingston.

Prerequisites: permission of the instructor, and COGS 100 and one relevant 200-level course such as COGS 215 .

One 3-hour period.