Abstract
A new one-semester course is described in which undergraduate students in non-technical majors are shown how traditional philosophical problems of knowledge, cognition, language, and human nature can be fruitfully investigated with computer-related concepts and techniques. A series of simple experiments is used to demonstrate to undergraduates that mental phenomena are real, that they can be studied experimentally, and that they can be modeled insightfully in computational — i.e., information-processing — terms. Each experiment illustrates a basic fact or principle of cognitive science: the formal character of algorithms; creativity and the variants of the Turing test; limitations on human memories; the use of cognitive strategies; heuristic techniques of artificial intelligence; formal grammars and their associated parsers; social, societal, and anthropological dimensions of mind; and degrees of logicality in human reasoning. Students are also taught the essentials of PROLOG, a programming language that is based explicitly on formal logic, incorporating such notions as fact, database, and query, thereby lending itself readily to the description of complex relational networks of a sort not commonly expected to be amenable to computer analysis.
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