A live online lecture by Susan Carey, Harvard University

Wednesday, October 29th, 7 PM Oslo time (CET), 1 PM EST,  19.00 – 20.45 on Zoom

Video Recording:

Abstract:

Cognitive science was born in the 1950s with the adoption of the computational/representational theory of mind. The cognitive revolution enabled empirical progress on foundational issues that had been debated since the time of the Greek philosophers, including new formulations of the rationalist/empiricist debate and new principled distinctions among representational systems. I sketch the current state of the art, as I see it, concerning distinctions in representational formats between fully implicit vehicles of content and explicit representational vehicles and also between iconic representations and symbolic representations. I sketch evidence for the proposal that prelinguistic representations, including those in perception those in core knowledge (rich abstract systems of representation attested in infancy and in non-human animals of many species), are fundamentally different in both format and content from linguistic representations. I sketch evidence for a speculation both ancient and modern in philosophy (e.g. Descartes, Davidson), as well as more recent within cognitive science: namely, prelinguistic representations do not support propositional reasoning. If concepts are atoms of propositions, there are no innate concepts. Innate support for logical thought is part of the human adaptation for language and emerges in ontogenesis in the course of acquiring language.

Susan Carey in an eminent cognitive psychologist and professor at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children’s development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. Carey received a PhD from the Harvard Psychology Department in 1972, taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Brain and Cognitive Science Department from 1972 to 1996, at New York University (NYU) in the Psychology Department from 1996-2001, and at Harvard in the Psychology Department from 2001-2023. She retired from teaching in 2003 and is now a Research Professor at Harvard and a Visiting Scholar at NYU in Psychology and Visiting Scholar at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center in Cognitive Science.