Foundations in Cognitive Science

Foundations in Cognitive Science was a class I took Spring semester my sophomore year at Hopkins. Taught by Paul Smolensky, who, by the way, is a titan in the field, Foundations in Cognitive Science brought all spectrums of Cog Sci into one discussion intense environment. It began with philosophical works from the likes of Plato and Kant, moved up the historical ladder quickly to linguistics with Chomsky, then around to PDP(parallel distributed processing) with Rumelhart & McClelland and finally to AI (artificial intelligence) with Turing and Hofstadter. We even read a few papers by the man, Smolensky himself.

This class not only exposed us to what Cognitive Science had to offer and the history of the field, it built the skills we needed to be successful in our career paths. The class required you to read and write, a lot, probably about a 4 page paper a week, some weeks two papers. I now know techniques in what to look for and how to really get the most out of studying a research paper. And, the content was interesting, once you really delved deep into what the author was trying to say, then explored how they proved their ideas, you started to connect the dots to how their ideas contribute to how you think today, truly remarkable.

Do you remember what it was like learning about the history of the Founding Fathers, or maybe about the Ming Dynasty? These are the histories of human behavior, only a subset of man's thoughts. Cognitive Science in general is the study of thought, imagine learning about the history of how people think, and how they pursue thinking. This is what Foundations of Cognitive Science provided, the historical background into the realm of thought.

I really appreciated this class and the way Paul (he let us just call him Paul, what an awesome dude) really tied all the ideas together. The way the class was organized made it so we truly learned the history of how Cognitive Science came to be, and what the scientists of today think about the field. The Cognitive Science department at Hopkins has truly given me a wonderful experience so far and I'm glad to be a part of the Cog Sci family.



Eli