COGS 311 - Seminar in Cognitive Science

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2026/27a: How Minds Align: Everyday Language. Each mind only experiences the world from its own perspective, yet minds manage to align every day using language. In this course, we read foundational texts from philosophy of language alongside empirical work from linguistics, psychology, computer science, and sociology to understand what it is about language and our minds that makes this possible. Crucially, we apply these theories to language at its site of use: everyday conversation. Using recordings of conversations from our lives, we analyze language use with frameworks spanning semiotics, conversation analysis, discourse pragmatics, and speech act theory, and using computational techniques from natural language processing. Our work is to uncover from messy, idiosyncratic conversational behavior the stable principles of communication that allow language to be learned, used, and maintained. Claire Augusta Bergey.

Topic for 2026/27b: Cognitive Science as Complexity Science. Cognitive Science is the study of agents and agency, but what is the right framework for organizing that work? The field has always embraced techniques and theories drawn from a wide range of traditional disciplines, from the philosophical and analytical to the experimental and empirical. We acknowledge that good cognitive science must examine how mind and behavior work at levels that reach from the microscopic implementations of agents to their abstract functions and purposes. The project is clearly quite complicated, but is approaching it as complicated sufficient for truly deep understanding? A growing number of cognitive scientists are convinced that agents and agency aren’t best described as complicated but should instead be thought of as complex. This seminar explores that idea, beginning with a dive into the literature that explores what it means for a system to be complex rather than just complicated. We explore examples from the domains of both artificial and biological agents, including a consideration of whether we have actually managed to build artificial agents that qualify as complex. A central theme is whether thinking about agents and agency as complex systems requires that we at least expand, and maybe rethink more completely, how cognitive research is most effectively done. Each student is asked to select a phenomenon within the domain of cognitive science, use what we learn to propose new ways to study that phenomenon, and present the results in both presentation and written forms. Ken Livingston.

Prerequisite(s): At least one 200-level course in Cognitive Science and permission of the instructor.

May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS