<p>^The most appealing concentration is Natural Languages; Decision-Making and Rationality looks interesting as well.</p>
<p>Honestly, you don’t sound like you really want very much CS at all.</p>
<p>^Hah. Long story there, involving the words “Asian” and “employability.” But there are much worse things than CS, even if I have no inherent passion for it. The logic of code is sensible, if not fluent.</p>
<p>Don’t mean to hijack the thread, but does anybody have any thoughts on Penn’s cogsci program/curriculum? If I could go back in time I would definitely go for the dual degree in computer and cognitive science, but it’s too late.</p>
<p>[Institute</a> for Research in Cognitive Science](<a href=“http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/education/ba-cogsci.shtml]Institute”>http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/education/ba-cogsci.shtml)</p>
<p>I’m also considering a psych major/computer science minor.</p>
<p>I’m no expert, but Penn’s cogsci curriculum seems promising; I like the combination of both flexibility and structure (the basic concentration options are spelled out). Not at all an LAC, unfortunately for me; but for you, maybe the Computation and Cognition concentration + CS minor (you can double-count half the courses, which is generous) would be ideal. Penn also has world-class linguistics.</p>
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<p>Skinner’s position was never anything so silly, and Chomsky’s criticisms were never more than a polemical attack on straw-dummy Skinnerism conveniently set up for a pompous takedown. </p>
<p>Skinner simply reiterated the scientific-reductionist position that until and unless “feelings”, “consciousness”, “self-awareness”, etc can be defined in terms of well-defined observables, they are as good as nonexistent for purposes of building a working scientific theory. This is very different from saying that mind, feelings, consciousness and the rest don’t exist, i.e., speculating that relevant biological observables aren’t there to be found and we should never invest the effort in looking for them. Compare this with Chomsky’s dishonest takedown:</p>
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<p>It was never necessary for Skinner or his followers to demonstrate that people lack wills, impulses etc. The burden was rather on anyone claiming that “wills, impulses, feelings, purposes and the like” are useful scientific concepts, to relate (and reduce) them to observable measures of brain and behavior. The alternative approach advocated by Chomsky, introspective thought experiments based on vague and qualitative data, had been tried for 2500 years without noticeable progress. Bottom-up, messy, data driven modelling – also known as “science” – has in the meantime taken over the funding, because it is the only thing that shows any sign of working. </p>
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<p>Finding grammars to describe languages is a math problem. Understanding language processing in the brain is a biology problem. The claim for which Chomsky was celebrated (rightly or wrongly) is that analyzing the math problem with linguistic input alone would help solve the biology problem. After 50 years of further work this claim appears to be a pipe dream, but Chomsky’s intellectual stature has not yet been updated to reflect the news. This peculiar form of status maintenance is known as “politics”.</p>