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<p>Yes, it is.</p>
<p>As for Pitzer</p>
<p>[Pitzer</a> College - Majors & Minors](<a href=“http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/majors.asp]Pitzer”>http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/majors.asp)</p>
<p>“Students may choose existing majors at the other Claremont Colleges provided that the fields are not offered as majors at Pitzer.” </p>
<p>Where did you hear otherwise?</p>
<p>^Huh, interesting. I emailed an Associate Director of Admission at Pitzer regarding a CS major and was directed toward Harvey Mudd. I quote: “Sadly, Pitzer does not offer Computer Science as a major.” I suppose that’s technically true, but one would expect an admissions officer to mention the possibility of an off-campus major. Certainly it’s less “advertised” than at Scripps; I wonder how much institutional support is available.</p>
<p>At Chicago, it seems like I could do Comparative Lit major (no minor available) + CS minor + ling minor + Core and come out to exactly 42 quarter courses. No study abroad or wiggle room, though, even if I kill myself by overloading a few times. You can apparently design majors under “Tutorial Studies” if I convince them that it’s unique; not sure about self-designed minors, though. CS major would NOT be an option because I’d take the non-science-major 4-quarter integrated Core sequence. I will wander over to the Chicago board and see how feasible the plan is.</p>
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<p>What should really raise your suspicions is that several different people are independently informing you, some more bluntly than others, that a soft, “science lite” approach to cog sci is little more than an expensive form of personal entertainment. If you are looking for a philosophy curriculum minus the classics, an interdisciplinary humanities track without the heavy reading and writing load, or a buzz-filled substitute for hard science, then this is certainly possible at many places under a cog sci rubric, but it is a dead end. Cellardweller’s postings, in particular, were very realistic.</p>
<p>Any reason you’re not looking hard at Brown? Not an LAC, but seems like a good fit for you in a lot of ways. Also, I have to believe Brown has cog sci covered.</p>
<p>dumb question-how is CogSci different from neuroscience…
in my experience, they tend to have pretty similar course requirements(at least where i’ve looked)</p>
<p>I once saw an interview with a medical researcher who had invented some wonder-drug (I don’t remember the exact context). He discussed the importance of balancing specialized research interests with flexibility and a willingness to make the best of options that don’t dovetail exactly with one’s preconceptions.</p>
<p>This came back to me while reading this thread. Some people know exactly what they want to do with their lives before leaving high school (I know a few of them). Such individuals are usually recognizable because they already have extensive experience in that area. The OP does not fit this mold at all.</p>
<p>There’s nothing wrong with looking for a school that offers a program that might be a fit - that’s actually a good way to narrow things down. But I think the OP should keep her mind a bit more open. Taking a class is not committing to study that subject for the rest of one’s life.</p>
<p>Neuroscience is more “wet” and cognitive science is more like artificial intelligence and developing computational models for thought. It answers questions like “what does it mean to think?” and “what does it mean to learn”, etc from a computational point of view. They are really different levels of abstraction. I think neuroscience is more biological based, and cognitive science is more abstract and more on the boundary between the mathematical and philosophical.</p>
<p>^^thanks!!!
I plan on majoring in Neuroscience and lot bio and psych…so that makes sense</p>
<p>That’s not to say that a cognitive scientist wouldn’t benefit from learning a little about neuroscience, and vice versa. It’s just that they are fundamentally asking different questions.</p>
<p>Furthermore, I don’t think it’s pseudoscience at all. You have this piece of machinery living on top of your shoulders with a certain size, weight and power. The laws of physics still apply. Yet it can solve problems that take supercomputers to solve or problems that supercomputers can’t even solve. It’s not a question of whether computational models are valuable, it more a question of what is the brain actually doing? What are the algorithms? etc.</p>
<p>Any 5 year-old child can produce utterances that are grammatical, yet unique. Noam Chomsky raised serious doubts that imitation can account for this universal human behavior. The alternate explanation he and his students pursued did become sort of a treadmill. So their approach has been pretty much shelved by researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing. They’ve embraced statistical techniques but those seem to have their own limitations. They have not yet resulted in machines fully imitating grammatical-yet-creative natural language behaviors. “What are the algorithms?” indeed.</p>
<p>So whatever you think of Noam Chomsky or B.F. Skinner, and regardless of the approach you follow, you’ll find a lifetime of interesting problems to solve in any field related to the mind and language. I do agree with siserune that one should try to find a rigorous program and avoid fluff. K is making a good effort to do that consistent with her own interests and personality.</p>
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Do you think the same of all/most humanities and social sciences? I’m perfectly OK with philosophy classics and a heavy reading/writing load; I’m not naturally astute in mathematics or programming, but I’m willing to test the waters with CS; what I prefer to avoid is “hard science,” yes, and I’m not ashamed of that.</p>
<p>Cellardweller believes that cognitive science without neuroscience is pseudoscience. In the same vein, would computer science without physics be pseudoscience? I would disagree.</p>
<p>sunmachine - I visited Brown and it just didn’t jump 0ut at me. I’ve heard some criticism of the English department. But strong cogsci/ling, so it’s really not any worse (and perhaps a better) fit than Chicago. Added to the reconsideration pool…</p>
<p>noimagination - You’re right, I am definitely not set on one path for my entire life. I’m interested in too many fields to specialize right now; at the same time, I can also safely say that I doubt I’ll suddenly develop a passion for medicine or lab science. --For economics, or anthropology, well, who knows?</p>
<p>r6l - ClassicRockerDad has delineated exactly what attracts me to cogsci–the abstractions and the philosophical study of thought, information, cognition.</p>
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<p>I wish I could take credit for that statement but I am essentially paraphrasing Skinner who stated in his last public speech before his death in 1990:</p>
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<p>Cognitive science has taken on many of the accoutrements of science especially the use of the scientific method as it has progressively migrated outside of the humanities. The main problem is that it seeks explanations of human and nonhuman behavior that invoke inner forces which cannot be substantiated or tested: intention, reason, belief, agency, executive function, and conscious awareness. In that sense it is like creationism or intelligent design seeking supra-natural explanations to behavior. </p>
<p>Cognitive science like many other interdisciplinary fields suffers from a definitional problem. the list of disciplines involved is dizzying: psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy of mind, computer science, anthropology, sociology, and biology.</p>
<p>Throw away biology and neuroscience and nothing is left that is truly testable. I would contend that is largely BECAUSE of recent advances in neurobiology that cognitive science has achieved any level of validation or scientific merit. Concepts such as memory, attention, learning, development of language have all been informed through advances in neuroscience. Neurobiology does not answer all the questions of cognitive science but it certainly provides it with a testable scientific foundation and has helped invalidate long held beliefs about left/right brain specificity, racial or gender based differences in intelligence, language acquisition or whether animals were capable of causal reasoning.</p>
<p>Throw that away and you are left with philosophical inquiries, which may be interest in themselves but have little intersection with science. That was Skinner’s whole point. To artificially limit your pursuit of the study of a field as dynamic as cognitive science because of preconceived notions of “science as boring” based on nothing more than high-school impressions is very shortsighted. I don’t buy the argument of “I don’t need to study experimental science, only theory”. My response is that if it is not testable, it simply is not science!</p>
<p>BTW the analogy is more astronomy without physics is pseudo science. Computer science is more a tool, the mathematics of program construction or algorithmics, than a separate scientific discipline.</p>
<p>^Interesting. I would, however, argue that computer science 40 years ago was decried as simply a novel interdisciplinary mash of math, physics, and “code.” And I think many computer scientists would take issue with your calling their discipline merely a “tool.”</p>
<p>Perhaps my impressions of science are misfounded; I doubt I will avoid science entirely in college, even in an open curriculum. But I assure you that being required to take science, by school or major dictates, is as likely to change my mind as it is for a premed bio major who previously hated English to suddenly fall in love with a writing-intensive composition course.</p>
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<p>I have maximum respect for humanities in the older tradition. Sanskrit and classical philology are a lot more substantial than modern linguistics, cognitive “science lite”, interdisciplinary Latest Buzz Studies, etc. Old fashioned (qualitative but erudite) social science had far more depth than the current fashion where misapplication of statistics is postured as “science”. Be very suspicious of any field that is not self-evidently quantitative and imports jargon from math and hard science.</p>
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<p>Chomsky raised creationist arguments:</p>
<p>-Personal incredulity (the eye / grammar is just too complex),
-Misunderstanding of basic math (randomness doesn’t mean uniformity, and can generate novel complex structures)
-An overestimate of the power of introspection and philosophical thought-experiments to elucidate brain function
-An overestimate of the usefulness of syntactic intuitions as an organizing principle for the combinatorics of language
-A belief, now falsified, that the combinatorics of (a few) human languages would correlate with brain structure
-A belief, now falsified, that the combinatorics of language would correlate (in a universal way) with child language learning stages </p>
<p>It is completely possible that Chomsky’s program would have been vindicated had they studied many more languages and developed a fundamentally finer-grained understanding of syntax. As it turned out, Chomsky and his intellectual descendants were too conservative; they assumed that an extension of the centuries-old approach to the grammar of a few well-studied languages would disclose the important concepts. This discouraged the study and preservation of the full range of human languages, in favor of empty buzz about “deep structure”, “principles and parameters”, and “cognitive science”. The destruction of scarce resources here has been pretty incredible.</p>
<p>It’s one thing to say that the mind is not amenable to certain methods of scientific analysis. To conclude that it “simply does not exist” is an unscientific leap. Just don’t go there. Without commiting yourself to the Chomsky Cult you can take his core arguments as a challenge.
([The</a> Case Against B.F. Skinner, by Noam Chomsky](<a href=“chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website”>chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website))
More at: [A</a> Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, by Noam Chomsky](<a href=“chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website”>chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website)
A grammar is testable. Attributing the grammar to structures in the brain is (as far as my little brain can figure) speculative and not testable.
Agree. Putting together a coherent, rigorous program requires discipline and good mentoring.
Agree. Give biology, chemistry, physics another chance especially if you have the opportunity to study with a gifted instructor.
Statistical Natural Language Processing can generate novel complex gibberish that occasionally resembles grammatical, meaningful language. Google has come up with a statistical machine translation system. If you feed some documents to a Google MT server farm and let it run for 2 weeks, now and then you will get 1 or 2 sentences in a row of really convincing output. It’s not like evolutionary biology, which has satisfying explanations for how randomness leads time and again to observable structures and behaviors. </p>
<p>Anyway, I don’t want to hijack a college counselling thread to debate issues we’re not going to resolve here. I think one take-away message (where siserune, cellardwellar and I seem to agree) is that you are treading into deep waters with a risk of being sucked into academic fads (yes, like the Chomsky Cult of the 60s and 70s). If you commit to getting a solid grounding in areas such as statistics, foreign language mastery, computing techniques, or phonetics, you should be safe. You can leave room in your courses for speculation and wonder but be sensitive to the boundaries between science and untestable conjectures.</p>
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Sounds great.</p>
<p>One hopes that LAC advising is as good as it’s made out to be; I certainly intend to make full use of it. And I’m open to dabbling in a “non-science major” course in bio or the like; but for now, I don’t want to constrain myself into doing so.</p>
<p>It occurs to me also that a better analogy would be CS-math to cogsci-psych. In both cases, some grounding is essential; but not all CS majors will enjoy math (or even all math majors–I had a math teacher who was brilliant at applied/discrete math but failed calculus 3 times), and not all cogsci majors will enjoy psychology. I do think that it’s important for all cogsci majors to study some psych.</p>
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My point is that you cannot afford to let a course or two scare you away from an outstanding program. Cognitive science is one of the most interdisciplinary fields imaginable. You certainly should be able to approach it from the perspective you described above, but realize that others with whom you are working may come from a diverse variety of backgrounds. It’s not just biology - I know of an electrical engineer going into the field. Sitting in an ivory tower of theoretical perfection is probably not a good approach. You may choose to specialize on the more mathematical linguistics end, but knowing a little bit of neuroscience would probably make your skills far more useful.
The fundamental flaw with your CS/math comparison is the idea that all of mathematics is fundamentally alike and that one can either like “math” or not. For what it’s worth, most good programmers solve problems in a rather similar vein to a pure mathematician working on a proof.</p>
<p>Just as all cogsci majors ought to have some base in psychology, I would argue that they should all have some base in the physical processes that work in the brain. I don’t really know enough about cogsci to say whether grad school is a common option, but if it is I would recommend decreased specialization as an undergrad. A more general major would leave your options open.</p>
<p>^There is a difference between taking a course in a weaker (as in more difficult for me) subject area voluntarily and taking it because otherwise I can’t graduate. Ahem, MIT. I’ve had plenty of core requirements in high school, regardless of the quality of the courses, and I’m loath to go through that again. I believe that I can become a well-rounded, liberally educated person without distribution requirements or a core curriculum; clearly, some colleges agree with me.</p>
<p>If the work I will do in cogsci will require me to have college-level knowledge of biology, then knowing that, I’ll probably choose a different major, because I wouldn’t be happy in a lab doing bio-related work. (And yes, I do have some lab experience with independently designed research… it’s as much of a slog as lab assignments.) There is a reason, after all, that I started out with an interest in “Symbolic Systems” before doing anything more than smiling and nodding at “Cognitive Science.” </p>
<p>I’m essentially looking for a cogsci program where I can take the equivalent of symsys. More empirically based programs are a negative–though I might end up with one, and be happy with it, I’d prefer not.</p>
<p>Looking at the Stanford SymSys website, which of the concentrations appeal to you?</p>