Announcements
I (JM) will hold office hours as usual the week of 5/7. On Tuesday 5/15, I’ll have office hours from 12 to 2.
Topics for the second paper are now available on the Assignments page. Note that the due date has been changed to Thursday, May 3.
Instructions for the peer review assignment are now available on the Assignments page.
I’ve put together a digest of important passages from Chapter Two of Quine’s Word and Object. It’s available under Handouts. In “Ontological Relativity,” focus on pp. 26–41, 48–51. You should also read Hookway’s article, which is a clear and insightful discussion of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis and the arguments for it.
There’s a typo in the Hookway article in your reader. p. 148, 2b, should be: “That stage in the history of a rabbit is the same as the one I saw yesterday.”
The topics for the first paper are now available on the Assignments page.
Burge’s article “Individualism and the Mental” is quite long: concentrate on sections IIab, IIIbcd, IVc (p. 109). In Searle’s chapter “Are Meanings in the Head?”, you need only read section I.
Here’s a link to a discussion by Ned Block of “The Mind as the Software of the Brain”, which you may find helpful background for the Turing, Block and Searle readings.
Here is a javascript version of Weizenbaum’s ELIZA program that you can play with. You can reprogram it by editing the file
eliza.htmlin any text editor. Here are some more sophisticated Chatbots you can talk to using a web browser: Alice and Lava girl. Here is some information on the Loebner Prize, which stages the Turing Test every year. Here’s an online version of John Conway’s Game of Life.I’ve adjusted the schedule on the syllabus to reflect the fact that we are now one lecture behind, due to the canceled lecture last Thursday. We will cover Searle and Lewis on Tuesday (1/30), then continue as before, catching up later in the term.
A list of section times is available here. When rooms are assigned, they will be listed in the same place. You should receive an e-mail on Sunday, January 21 regarding your section assignment. Sections will begin meeting the week of January 22.
Here’s a link to an online version of the first reading, Grice’s article “Meaning”. Note that you can get a PDF of the whole article by clicking the “Download” link at the top of the page.
A list of study questions that must be answered in writing for the study question assignment can be found here.
Here is the table of contents for the course reader, which will be available at Copy Central on Bancroft the first week of class.