Lecture: George Kampis

The Philosophy Department would like to invite you to an endowed lecture this Friday.

Friday, February 27
4:00 p.m.
Ballantine 109

George Kampis, Department Head, History and Philosophy of Science at Eötvös University in Budapest, and the Director of the Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science will present, "Comparing Minds: Big Questions, Small Answers."

Abstract:
The difficulties of comparative cognition (as well as of epistemology) stem from the fact that we want to "compare" the known to the unkown. In the case of epistemology, we want to validate knowledge (which we know) against reality (which we don't know). In comparative cognition, we use human and animal data and theories (which we know) to talk about the minds of other species (which we don't know). This sounds like an impossible mission - and some say it is, both ways. In the first part of the lecture I discuss some of the methodological problems of the "big question", together with some optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for comparative cognition. Down on the road, however, we get into some smaller and more readily tractable issues, such the acqusition, preservation and the handling of high quality data to support the analysis - as often the latter seem to turn around having bad (or insufficient) data or bad (or insuffiecient) use of data. In the second part of the lecture, I will talk about the efforts of a new ESF project (Evolution of Social Cognition: Comparisons and integration across a wide range of human and non-human animal species (CompCog), which comprises 28 laboratories from 11 countries in Europe), where I work on the Comparative Mind Database module. Besides working on more conceptual issues, we endeavour to develop techniques and a support system for dealing with experiments, data, and conceptualizations in an operational, standardizable, community accessible way. The hope certainly is that by working on those small problems we can directly or indirectly also contribute to the discussion on the big ones.