Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Psychology and Neuroscience (NP 101 or 102)
The purpose of this subject is to enable you to study topics in the philosophy of science in general, and topics in the philosophy of psychology and neuroscience in particular.
In the broadest sense the philosophy of science is concerned with the theory of knowledge and with associated questions in metaphysics. What is distinctive about the field is the focus on “scientific” knowledge, and metaphysical questions - concerning space, time, causation, probability, possibility, necessity, realism and idealism - that follow in their train. As such it is concerned with distinctive traits of science: testability, objectivity, scientific explanation, and the nature of scientific theories.
The philosophy of psychology and neuroscience addresses questions that arise from the scientific study of the mind. (The philosophy of mind, in contrast, starts from our ordinary everyday thinking about mental matters.) Some of the questions addressed are extremely general and are closely connected with topics, such as explanation and reduction, that you will cover in the philosophy of science part of the course. Other questions relate to key notions that are used in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as representation, computation, tacit knowledge, implicit rules and modularity. There are also questions that focus on specific aspects of contemporary research into topics such as consciousness, perception, memory, reasoning and the way that cognitive abilities break down after brain damage. It is not necessary for you to be studying neuroscience or experimental psychology; nor do you need expertise in statistics. What is important is that you should enjoy reading about psychology and neuroscience and that you should be interested in the relationship between scientific and philosophical ways of approaching questions about the mind.
Don Gillies, Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century (Blackwells); Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge) chs. 1-3.
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