October 6

Introduction

Questions

• What concerns bring me to the course?
• What do I anticipate will be said?
• What relevant opinions do I already hold?
• What do I expect to do with what I learn?

Assigned Reading

• Fernando Flores and Michael Graves, Reading a Text, 1-11. Berkeley, California: Logonet, Inc., 1985.
• Winograd and Flores, Our Path (Chapter 1).
  Readings from Winograd and Flores are from the textbook, Understanding Computers and Cognition, Addison-Wesley, 1987.
• Lawrence Fisher, Fernando Flores Wants to Make You an Offer, strategy+business magazine, November 24, 2009.

October 13

Paradigms

Questions

• What relevance do paradigms have for ways of thinking outside of organized science?
• What paradigms am I trained in and at what levels?
• What paradigms shape my approach to computers and cognition?

Assigned Reading

• Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
  • Chapter II: The Route to Normal Science, 10-22
  • Chapter VI: Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, 52-65.

Additional Resources and Readings

• A short excerpt of Lakatos' article from Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970.
• Donald Stokes, Pasteur's Quadrant

The Rationalistic Tradition

Assigned Reading

• Andy Clark, Mindware: An introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science, Oxford University Press 2001
  • Chapter 1: Meat Machines 7-27
  • Chapter 2: Symbol Systems 28-42

Additional Resources and Readings

• Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search, CACM, 19:3 (March 1976) 113-126.
• Jerry Fodor, Methodological solipsism considered as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1) (1980), 63–73.

October 20

Hermeneutics

Assigned Reading

• Winograd and Flores, Understanding and Being (Chapter 3)

Additional Resources and Readings

• Hans Georg Gadamer, Sections from Philosophical Hermeneutics.
• On Gadamer and the similarities between his hermeneutics and developments in Anglo-American philosophy and cognitive science, especially that of Donald Davidson:
  • Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Parts II & III.
  • Dasenbrock, Reed W. (ed.), Literary Theory After Davidson, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993.
  • Davidson, Donald, Radical Interpretation, Dialectica, 27 (1973): 314–28
• Michael Reddy, The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. (A. Ortony, Ed.) Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 164-201.

Phenomenology

Assigned Reading

• Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992 [29]
  • "Introduction, Why study Being and Time", 1-9
  • (Optional) "Chapter 1, Heidegger's Substantive Introduction", 10-29
  • The structure of the world, from Chapter 3: Worldiness, 91-107

Additional Resources and Readings

• Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992 (the whole thing)
• Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
• Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language
• Some other Heidegger references
• Luciano Floridi (ed.), Philosophy of Computing and Information: 5 Questions, Automatic Press, 2008
  • Hubert Dreyfus, 79-88
• Hubert Dreyfus lectures at Berkeley on iTunes
  • Lecture 1 is a good place to start.
• For an alternative and influential view that emphasizes Husserl's anticipation of Heidegger:
  • Dagfinn Follesdal, Husserl and Heidegger on the role of actions in the constitution of the world. In E. Saarinen, R. Hilpinen, I. Niiniluoto and M. Provence Hintikka, eds., Essays in Honour of Jaakko Hintikka, Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1979, 365-378.
  • Take a course from Prof. Follesdal.
  • "A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand." By Dobromir G. Dotov, Lin Nie, Anthony Chemero. PLoS ONE, Vol. 5 No. 3, March 9, 2010.

Term paper

• Monday, October 26, by email to the teaching staff : A one page description of a proposed topic. More information

October 27

Mind and Metaphor

Questions

• What is the relationship between metaphors, paradigms, and world-views
• What metaphors do I use preferentially?
• Do paradigms create a language? Are they made up of language?
• Do paradigms/metaphors shape action, or are they constituted by actions?

Assigned Reading

• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980. Chapter 21, New Meaning, 139-146. [8]
• George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, Basic Books, 1999. Chapter 3, The Embodied Mind, 16-43. [28]
• George Lakoff, Cognitive Semantics, in Eco et al., Meaning and Mental Representations, Indiana U Press, 1988, 119-154

Additional Resources and Readings

• George Lakoff, The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, from Andrew Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 202-251. [50]
• See also some papers by George Lakoff on metaphor and politics.
• Interview with Terry Winograd. Three Main Ways of Interacting. In B. Moggridge (Ed.), Designing Interactions. MIT Press. Clip. Full interview.
• Donald Davidson. What metaphors mean. Critical Inquiry 5 (1).
• David Hills. Metaphor. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Language

Assigned Readings

• Winograd and Flores, Language, listening, and commitment (Chapter 5).

Additional Resources and Readings

• Jorge Luis Borges, The Analytical Language Of John Wilkins. Translated from the Spanish 'El idioma analítico de John Wilkins' by Lilia Graciela Vázquez; edited by Jan Frederik Solem with assistance from Bjørn Are Davidsen and Rolf Andersen.

November 3

Cognition and Biology

Assigned Reading

• Winograd and Flores, Cognition as a Biological Phenomenon (Chapter 4, 38-53) [16]
• Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, body, and World Together Again, Bradford/MIT Press, 1997, Chapter 4, Collective Wisdom, Slime-Mold-Style, 71-82. [12]

Additional Resources and Readings

• Andy Clark, Re-Inventing Ourselves: The Plasticity of Embodiment,Sensing, and Mind Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 32:3, 263 - 282

"I have tried to show that we humans are profoundly embodied agents: creatures for whom body, sensing, world, and technology are resources apt for recruitment in ways that yield a permeable and repeatedly reconfigurable agent/world boundary. ... Such agents are genuinely of their worlds, and not simply in them. They are not helpless bystanders watching the passing show from behind a fixed veil of sensing, acting, and representing, but the active architects of their own bounds and capacities."

• Andy Clark, Embodiment and Ecological Control, Slides from online talk on Friday April 9, 2004
  • Stelarc, Stelarc, Homepage of third hand creator
  • Rick Weiss, Washington Post, Monkeys Control Robotic Arm With Brain Implants
• Humberto Maturana, Neurophysiology of Cognition [21]
• Humberto Maturana and Bernhard Poerksen, From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition, Carl-Auer, 2004
• On rules, biology, function, and representation, see Ruth G. Millikan, Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox, Philosophical Review, vol. 99, Jul. 1990, pp. 323-353.
• On realism about patterns, in particular mental states as patterns: Daniel C. Dennett, Real Patterns, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 88, 1991, pp. 27-51.

Tangible and Embodied Computing

Assigned Reading

• Paul Dourish, Getting in Touch (Chapter 2, 25-53), from Where the Action Is, MIT Press, 2001 [29]
• Hubert Dreyfus, Disembodied Telepresence and the Remoteness of the Real, from Hubert Dreyfus, On the Internet, London: Routledge, 2001, 50-72.

Additional Resources and Readings

• E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops (referenced by Dreyfus)
• Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen
• Lindsy Van Gelder The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover See comment below.
• Robert D. Putnam Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)
• Philip Auslander, Liveness (from Erica)
• Tools Are Body Parts to Brain. Scientific American. June 23, 2009.
• S.R. Klemmer, B. Hartmann, and L. Takayama, How bodies matter: five themes for interaction design. Proceedings of the 6th conference on Designing Interactive systems, University Park, PA, USA: ACM, 2006, pp. 140-149.
• On the potential advantages of telepresence and virtual reality:
  • J. Hollan and S. Stornetta, Beyond being there, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Monterey, California, United States: ACM, 1992, pp. 119-125.
  • J.N. Bailenson, N. Yee, J. Blascovich, A.C. Beall, N. Lundblad, and M. Jin, The use of immersive virtual reality in the learning sciences: Digital transformations of teachers, students, and social context, Journal of the Learning Sciences, vol. 17, 2008, pp. 102–141.

November 10

Commitment and Identity

Assigned Reading

• Winograd and Flores, Management and Conversation, Using Computers (Chapter 11)
• Flores, Conversations for Action.
• Flores, Assertions and Assessments.

Additional Resources and Readings

• Harriet Rubin, The Power of Words (Fast Company article about Flores, 1998)
• Katherine Streeter, Being and Overtime San Francisco Magazine 1997 about Flores.
• Action Technologies
• Flores, F., Graves, M., Hartfield, B., & Winograd, T. (1988). Computer systems and the design of organizational interaction. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., 6(2), 153-172. doi: 10.1145/45941.45943

Dinner with Fernando Flores

November 17

Essentialist Critique of AI

Assigned Reading

• John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Programs from Haugeland (ed.), Mind Design, Bradford Books, 1981, 282-306. [25]
• Terry Winograd, Understanding, Orientations, and Objectivity, Chapter from Preston and Bishop (eds.) Views into the Chinese Room - New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford Univ. Press 2002. Note: this link is to a pre-final draft of the chapter which contains an extended dialog with the editors that was not in the printed version.

Additional Resources and Readings

• Dennett on what a system really having beliefs, understanding, etc., involves:
  • D.C. Dennett, True believers: The intentional strategy and why it works, The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, MA, US: MIT Press, 1987, pp. 13-35.
  • D.C. Dennett, Real Patterns, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 88, Jan. 1991, pp. 27-51.
• John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science, Harvard U. Press, 1986
• Preston and Bishop (eds.) Views into the Chinese Room - New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford Univ. Press 2002.
• Related analysis of the Turing Test: Donald Davidson, Turing's test, Modelling the Mind, 1990, pp. 1-11. Reprinted in his Problems of Rationality.

Further Topic To Be Announced

December 1

Phenomenological Critique of Representation & AI

Assigned Reading

• Hubert L. Dreyfus. Why Heideggerian AI Failed and how Fixing it would Require making it more Heideggerian. Versions published in Philosophical Psychology and Artificial Intelligence.
• John Haugeland, Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea, Bradford/MIT Press, 1985. [68]
  • Chapter 1: The Saga of the Modern Mind, 15-45.
  • Chapter 3: Semantics 87-123.
• Winograd and Flores, Understanding and Being, Computers and Representation, Computation and Intelligence (Chapters 7-10)

Additional Resources and Readings

• Terry Winograd, Thinking machines: Can there be? Are We?, in James Sheehan and Morton Sosna, eds., The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 pp. 198-223. [26]
• Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Making a mind vs. modeling the brain: Artificial intelligence back at a branchpoint, 15-43. Daedalus, 117:1, Winter 1988. [29]
• An Exchange on Artificial Intelligence by Hubert L. Dreyfus, John Haugeland, Bernard Williams. In response to Williams' review of Dreyfus' book What Computers Can't Do.
• John Haugeland's essay Mind Embodied and Embedded (in: Having Thought, Harvard University Press 1998) argues against both Cartesian dualism and Simon's view of the mind as a symbolic information processing system. En route we encounter Brooks' subsumption architecture, Gibson's affordances and Dreyfus' notion of meaning.
• Rod Brooks' Elephants Don't Play Chess is an excellent indictment of classical AI. Also see his publications page.
• AI and Feminist theory: Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine, Routledge, 1998

Dinner with Hubert Dreyfus

December 8

Paper Presentations