Cog Sci 1

Front 1

Aristotle

Back 1

Blank slate

Front 2

Plato

Back 2

Innate knowledge, Plato's problem - explaining the gap from experience to knowledge with "poverty of stimulus"

Front 3

Locke

Back 3

No innate, white paper, experience

Front 4

Leibniz

Back 4

Experience is necessary but not sufficient to account for knowledge; necessary truths;
seeds of eternity; beasts are purely empirical; veins in the marble.

Front 5

Aristotle

Back 5

Catalog the valid syllogisms, as special case of deductive reasoning.

Front 6

Boole

Back 6

propositional logic, classes or sets, xy = x and y. xx = x is the foundational rule of the
system: in ordinary algebra it is true only for x=0 and x=1. Can cast Aristotle’s “principle of
contradiction” (nothing can both belong to and not belong to class x) in these terms: x(1-x)=0.
“All plants are alive”: P = PL. Can verify validity of Aristotelian syllogisms using Boole’s logic.

Front 7

Frege

Back 7

Begriffsschrift; propositional vs. predicate logic; quantification. Truth tables. Aristotle in
predicate logic. Possible worlds, models of a formula.

Did NOT provide a procedure that will tell you whether or not a
conclusion C follows from premises P.

Front 8

Russell

Back 8

Wrote a letter to frege about self inclusion

Front 9

Cantor

Back 9

Diagonal method and infinity (rational challenge to empiricism)

Front 10

Hilbert

Back 10

Decision problem (The Entscheidungsproblem asks for an algorithm that will take as input a description of a formal language and a mathematical statement in the language and produce as output either "True" or "False")

Front 11

Turing

Back 11

Turing machine; a
negative answer to Hilbert, and a proof that Leibniz’s dream is not fully attainable

Front 12

Descartes

Back 12

Duelism: I can doubt the existence of my body and of the
senses generally. But I cannot doubt the existence of my mind.

Front 13

Wundt

Back 13

introspection, reaction times, complication apparatus, pendulum, apperception, inferring
an unobserved mental process from observed behavioral data. “Brass instrument psychology”.
Subjective element in introspection: unusual in science, uncomfortable.

Front 14

Ebbinghaus

Back 14

not introspection, measured memory retention: do you or do you not remember a
given experience? Exponential forgetting curve. Spacing effect.

Front 15

Behaviorism

Back 15

John Watson, analysis of behavior, not mind. Deliberate rejection of introspection.
Emphasize role of environment – blank slate empiricism. No dividing line between man and
brute – contrast with Leibniz.

Front 16

Pavlov

Back 16

Classical Conditioning

Front 17

Operant conditioning

Back 17

Active: associate your actions with resulting reward or punishment. Cats
in puzzle boxes.
Little albert

Front 18

Skinner

Back 18

radical behaviorist, sought to dispense with talk of mental states entirely. An inversion
of Cartesian skepticism: privilege the senses, not the mind. Skinner box.

Front 19

Tolman

Back 19

challenge to behaviorism, originally from within the camp. Insight in rats: latent
learning, not driven by reinforcement. Cognitive maps, a mental representation of the maze.
Mental representations as central to cognitive science, a key feature that distinguishes cogsci from
behaviorism.

Front 20

Newell and Simon

Back 20

Logic Theorist, a realization of Leibniz’s dream, the first AI program, found
proofs of mathematical facts, used heuristics (e.g. work backwards) to explore an extremely
large search space.

Front 21

Miller

Back 21

magic number 7, chunks

Front 22

Lashley

Back 22

Hierarchical structure of plans.

Front 23

Chromsky

Back 23

hierarchical structure of language.
Said Skinner's application of verbal behavior was stupid

Front 24

Whitehead

Back 24

Mentor of russel, challenged skinner at a dinner table for an empiricist explanation of "I do not see a black scorpion", language is special