Second written test

27 Maio 2026, 11:00 • David Yates

In-person exam number 2, final assessment of semester

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Revsion session

25 Maio 2026, 11:00 • David Yates

Preparation for second test

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Seminar discussion on eliminativism

20 Maio 2026, 11:00 • David Yates

Reading

Churchland, P. 'Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes' (in Chalmers, pp. 568-80)

For more on the details of ChatGPT, see: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/

For a comprehensive survey of arguments for and against eliminativism, see this article in the SEP

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Connectionism and eliminativism

18 Maio 2026, 11:00 • David Yates

The topic for this week is eliminativism, the idea that the representational states posited by common-sense psychology (beliefs, desires, wishes, hopes, etc.) are useful fictions, and do not represent true psychological reality. As we will see, many have taken connectionist models of cognition to suggest some form of eliminativism about mental states, the basic idea being that in connectionist architectures, the structure of cognitive processes does not seem to map onto the structure of common-sense psychology. We will start by focusing on ChatGPT and asking whether it can be said to have internal representations. We will also use ChatGPT to illustrate the way in which connectionist networks are naturally holistic, just as Fodor argues general cognition to be. We will then examine a deep learning model of vision to illustrate the distinction between folk psychology and sub-personal psychology. On one view, there may be representations in connectionist networks (and in your brain) but they are probably not much like the representations that we describe ourselves as having in common-sense psychology.

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Seminar discussion on connectionism

13 Maio 2026, 11:00 • David Yates

Wason selection task carried out by students to illustrate that cognition is context-sensitive

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