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The Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series presents:
"Relevance and Global Cognition"
Guest Lecturer: Sheldon Chow (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Leibniz Universitat Hannover)
Day/Date: Wednesday, October 7th
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Location: D-630
What is (and is not) relevant to (dis)confirming a hypothesis can't be determined a priori. It seems, therefore, that cognitive systems must decide, from an indefinitely large space of considerations, what to bring to bear in tasks of hypothesis (dis)confirmation. This, in rough terms, is the thesis that cognition is global. Yet humans typically enjoy reasonable levels of success in their swift judgments of what is (and is not) relevant. Understanding this characteristic human trait is a deep and longstanding problem for cognition science. In this talk I will address the extent to which cognition is global. I will argue that cognition is probably not global in the sense usually assumed, but that there is a different, subtler sense in which cognition is indeed global. This allows me to distinguish different sorts of relevance relations and to outline a working account of how humans determine what is relevant in their cognitive tasks.
Everyone welcome.
Contact:
Bev Garnett | bev.garnett@uleth.ca | (403) 380-1894 | uleth.ca/artsci/event/80149