Gordon Bower Lecture in Cognitive Science! 

Professor Susan Carey, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

We are delighted to announce that Prof. Susan Carey (Harvard) will deliver this year’s Gordon Bower Lecture in Cognitive Science! Susan will spend Friday, May 26th in the department, meeting with students, postdocs, and faculty throughout the day.

The Bower Lecture is be a wonderful way to celebrate and remember Gordon's remarkable contributions to the field, our department, and Stanford, along with our friendships with Gordon and Sharon. Throughout his time at Stanford, Gordon was deeply committed to the graduate students in his lab and our program, and one context in which Gordon's mentoring was consistently evident was FriSem. In recognition, the Bower Lecture is held on a Friday afternoon and brings a field-leader to campus to share their science and engage with us. The Bower Lecture is broadly advertised to the Stanford community and includes a post-talk reception.

The Bower Lecture is supported by a generous donation from Sharon Bower and the Bower family. Many of us are friends with Sharon and know that she was there with Gordon, contributing in so many ways to the department. Our deepest thanks to Sharon and family for their generosity in establishing this lectureship.

Title:  The ontogenesis and phylogenesis of logically structured thought: case studies of the logical connectives or, not, possible.

Abstract:  Ever since Descartes, philosophers have debated whether non-linguistic creatures have the capacity for logical reasoning that depends upon propositional representations and logical connectives.  Many (e.g., Descartes, Davidson) argued that these capabilities depend upon language, and are therefore absent in non-linguistic creatures and pre-linguistic human infants.  Others (e.g., Fodor) argued that a language of thought with these properties is manifest at least as far back in evolution as the common ancestor to insects and humans.  This is not a question to be settled from the philosophers' armchair.  It is a straightforward empirical question; depending upon the joint theoretical project of characterizing the nature of logically structured thought and developing methods for assessing the presence or absence of such thought in non-linguistic creatures.  Here I sketch my view of the current state of the art in addressing this empirical question, concentrating on interrelated case studies of the logical connectives or, not, and possible.