| Is it possible to find perfection in the natural world? For example, are the mental faculties that underlie our capacities to acquire and use language, solve problems and navigate our way through the world optimal solutions to complex design problems? Or is natural selection a ‘tinkerer’, producing ad hoc and imperfect responses to adaptive pressures? In response to a growing body of literature in support of the first view, the conference will consider what it means to claim that the mind, or some component of it, is ‘perfect’. Is the notion of optimality compatible with what we know about evolution? Can we find examples of it in other organisms? What conditions must a system satisfy in order to be described as ‘optimal’? What place has the idea of optimality occupied in the history and philosophy of science? And what is its role in shaping how scientific research is practiced? |
| 8:30 am | Coffee and welcome |
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| 9:00 | Professor Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Arizona,
& Visiting Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard University
The Return of the Laws of Form
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| 10:30 | Noah Goodman
Computational Cognitive Science Group, MIT
Ideal Observers in Theory of Mind
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| 11:10 | Margaret Moulson
DMC Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Children's Hospital, Boston
Becoming a “Face Expert:
The Role of Early Experience
in Shaping Underlying Neural Systems
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| 11:50 | Dennis Ott
Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard University
Reverse-engineering the Language Faculty:
Origins and Implications of the Minimalist Program
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| 12:30 pm | Lunchtime panel:
Language: A Case Study in Optimality? |
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| 1:45 | Break |
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| 2:00 | David Britton
Cognitive Neuroscience Program, Dept. of Psychology, CUNY
The Presence of Mind: Optimality, Uncertainty and Consciousness in Neurons
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| 2:40 | Gary Sing
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Optimization of Structural Complexity in Motor Adaptation
Expressed
by a Simple Multi-Rate Learning Model
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| 3:20 | Lukas Rieppel
Dept. of History of Science, Harvard University
Is the Optimal Foraging Model an Optimal Model?
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| 4:00 | Break |
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| 4:15 | Professor Gary Marcus
Dept. of Psychology, NYU
How Perfect the Mind? Two Perspectives on Evolutionary Psychology
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