Research Seminar on Mind and Language: Concepts, Representation and Mental States

RESEARCH SEMINAR ON
LANGUAGE AND MIND
Offered Spring 2004

Concepts, Representation and Mental States

The research seminar on Language and Mind will be conducted for the Spring of 2004 by Jerry Fodor and Christopher Peacocke. Visitors to the seminar on this interdisciplinary area will include both philosophers and psychologists. We will meet in the Seminar Room of the Philosophy Department on Tuesdays 4:00 to 7:00pm. A preparation session, restricted to students enrolled in the course, will meet on Mondays from 4:00 to 5:00pm. Papers to be discussed at the Tuesday meetings will be available one week in advance, and will be distributed at the preceding seminar. Copies will also be available at the Philosophy Department, Silver Center, Room 503, 100 Washington Square East. Many of the papers will also be available for downloading from this web page. Unless otherwise noted, these papers are in PDF form.

Please note that the time of the preparation session has changed from 5:00 to 4:00 PM.

Schedule of Visitors:

January 20, 2004:	Jerry Fodor Rutgers University and NYU "Revenge of the Given"; "Distributed Representations; Enough Already".
January 27, 2004:	Christopher Peacocke NYU "Mental Action and Mental Concepts".
February 3, 2004:	Austen Clark University of Connecticut "Feature-placing and Proto-objects". (A version that prints on fewer pages can be found here.)
February 10, 2004:	Robert Brandom University of Pittsburgh "No Experience Necessary: Empiricism, Non-inferential Knowledge, and Secondary Qualities" (primary reading); "The Centrality of Sellars' Two-Ply Account of Observation to the Arguments of 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'".
February 17, 2004:	Elizabeth Spelke Department of Psychology, Harvard University "What Makes Us Smart? Core Knowledge and Natural Language" in Language in Mind edited by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow.
February 24, 2004:	John Campbell Oxford University "Molyneux's Question and Cognitive Impenetrability"; "Manipulating Colour".
March 2, 2004:	Zenon Pylyshyn Department of Psychology, Rutgers University "Visual Indexes and Nonconceptual Reference".
March 9, 2004:	Charles Ransom Gallistel Department of Psychology, Rutgers University "Insect Navigation: Brains as Symbol-Processing Organs" electronic preprint of "Symbolic Processes in the brain: The case of insect navigation" in D. Scarorough and S. Sternberg (eds.) Methods, models and conceptual issues. Vol. 4 of An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Second Edition. (D. Osherson, General Editor.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
March 23, 2004:	Sean Kelly Princeton University "Preface to Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty". "Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty".
March 30, 2004	Susan Carey Department of Psychology, Harvard University The Origin of Concepts, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3. Chapter 3 is the most important, Chapter 2 informs Chapter 3, and Chapter 1 simply gives and overview of the book from which these chapters come. Concentrate on Chapter 3: pp 1-13 and 17-28, Chapter 2: pp. 1-19, 23-28, and Chapter 1: 2-7.
April 6, 2004:	José Bermúdez Washington University, St. Louis Thinking Without Words (2003), Chapter 8 and Chapter 9; "Review of Thinking Without Words" by Jerry Fodor.
April 13, 2004:	Fred Dretske Duke University "Perception without Awareness".
April 20, 2004:	Alan Leslie Department of Psychology, Rutgers University "Belief-Desire Reasoning as a Process of Selection" by Alan Leslie, Tim German, and Pamela Polizzi; "Mechanisms of Belief-Desire reasoning; Inhibition and Bias" by Ori Friedman and Alan Leslie.
April 27, 2004:	Jane Heal University of Cambridge "Minds, Brains, and Indexicals"; "Reasoning about Thought".

updated 11/5/03
philo.web@nyu.edu