Writing and Critical Thinking: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on "Mind"

Introduction

Introduction

What is "the mind" and what is its place in the natural and cultural order of things? Do animals have "minds"? What about machines? Is "mind" just a kind of brain activity - or is it more than just the electro-chemical exchange of neurons? Can a "mind" ever comprehend itself in its act of "mind"-ing ? Or is "mind" just an archaic folk-term for a biologically evolved Operating System - a particular kind of activity-managing software program that nature has evolved to run on the hardware of brains, but one that may someday just as effectively be run on silicon ... or even on other people's brain tissue?

As minded creatures with brains ourselves, the ways in which we delimit the mind/brain relation has enormous consequences for the ongoing construction of our legal, social, medical and ethical lives. In this module, we will study how different notions of "the mind" have arisen within philosophy, neurobiology and the social sciences - and we will attempt to discover what it is about each of these disciplines that might lead them to make the claims they do regarding the "essential nature" of "mind". In each of our three units, we will learn how to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the variety of competing claims about this issue on which equally reasonable thinkers fundamentally disagree.

Course Objectives

Producing good, clear academic writing requires the development of a holistic ensemble of reading, thinking, researching and writing skills that will allow you to actively engage in the ongoing dialogue that is academic discourse. To engage is such dialogue effectively, however, you must first attain a practical mastery of its community language forms, rhetorical structures, and discourse conventions. As a student in this module, you will first learn to recognize and to identify the major elements, forms, and conventions of academic essay writing through your engagement with exemplar texts from a wide variety of academic disciplines. As in second language learning, your goal here will not be the ability to simply "parrot" such texts – but to learn how to effectively use these language practices as resources for your own thought and its expression.

Because the objective of this class is not just to learn something about brains and minds, but also to learn how serious thinkers engage with one another’s arguments in the effort to establish effective arguments of their own, together we will explore the mechanics of producing effective argumentative essays and will collaboratively develop useful models for how to best approach the writing process. You will then practice your developing skills in analyzing, comparing and creating original academic arguments. By writing multiple drafts of your essays over the course of many weeks, participating in class discussions of the topic, peer review meetings and teacher-student conferences, you will be given ongoing feedback on your increasing competence as an academic writer. Such experience will reveal to you what is at the core of all good creative writing and all good critical thinking everywhere: the generative cyclicity of process and product.

Unit 1

Unit 1: Minds in Brains

PLEASE NOTE: The readings for this class change each semester. Therefore, the readings listed on the sample syllabus listed below are provided only to give you some idea of the kinds of readings that you will be required to do in this class. The official syllabus and list of readings for the Fall 2008 version of this module will be distributed on the first day of class.

Rhetorical Objectives

  • Understanding and articulating an essay's motive
  • Understanding and articulating an essay's thesis
  • Doing a close reading that will enable a critical analysis
  • Elements of Analysis: Reading for E.0vidence (addressed and unaddressed), Assumptions (stated and unstated), Key Terms (novel and mundane) and Authorial Stance (explicit and implicit)
  • Questions resulting from a close reading of the text
  • Articulating one's own motive and thesis in writing about the text

Topical Overview: Presenting the Argument

The "mind-body problem" has been plaguing scientists and philosophers since it was introduced by Rene Descartes in the first half of the seventeenth century. That problem, simply stated, is this: Is it plausible to believe that inherently mind-less matter such as brain tissue alone can satisfactorily account for the existence and experience of what appears to be a discursive, immaterial mind? In the first unit of our module, we will review the major philosophical and neurobiological arguments for and against this claim, as well as learn some of the basic neurobiology that is at the heart of the debate between the two major approaches of "mind-brain dualism" and "mind-brain reductionism."

Week 1

  • Tuesday
    Course Introduction
  • Friday
    Rene Descartes: "Meditations on First Philosophy" (Meditations One and Two, pp. 308-315 in Classics of Western Philosophy)
  • Gordon Harvey: "Elements of the Essay" (must bring to class every day) Available at: here

Week 2

  • Tuesday
    Patricia Churchland: Excerpts from Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy (pp. 1-15, 59-63, 124-125)
  • Friday
    David Chalmers: "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (pp. 1-10) Reprinted from Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3), 1995, pp. 200-219. Available at: http://www.imprint.co.uk/chalmers.html

Week 3

  • Tuesday
    Bruno Latour: "Opening Pandora's Black Box" (pp. 1-29 in Science in Action)
  • Friday
    Paul Churchland: "Eliminative Materialism" (pp. 43-49 in Matter and Consciousness)
  • Colin McGinn: "Consciousness - Still Unexplained After All These Years" (pp. 1-29 in The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World)
  • First Draft of Unit 1 Paper Due

Week 4

  • Tuesday - Friday
    Student Conferences

Week 5

  • Tuesday
    Daniel Dennett: "Why Dualism is Forlorn" and "The Challenge" (pp.33-42 in Consciousness Explained)

FINAL DRAFT OF UNIT 1 PAPER DUE

Unit 2

Unit 2: Minds in Bodies

Rhetorical Objectives

  • Introduction to Overall Essay Structure
  • Writing a Comparative Analysis
  • Gaining facility with using sources
  • Analyzing and representing other's arguments responsibly
  • Drawing implications from the juxtaposition of contrasting arguments
  • Planning the structure of a comparative analysis

Topical Overview: Extending the Argument

The last few decades' advances in cognitive science, Artificial Intelligence programming and animal ethology have taken the debate about the nature of "mind" beyond just the closed laboratory experiments of neuroscientists and the abstract realms of contemplative philosophers. For researchers into the mechanics of "the embodied mind," both mind-brain dualism and mind-brain reductionism paint overly simplistic pictures of what the state of "being minded" is. "Mind," for these researchers, is first and foremost the product of bodies acting in the world, and feeding back the results of such action to form both the motor programs and the sensory concepts that together constitute our faculty of "mind." In this unit, we will examine the "embodied mind" approach to the mind-brain problem and ask if can be the answer to the impasse between dualism and reductionism, as its proponents have asserted – or if, as its opponents have asserted, it merely combines in one framework the most problematic elements of both?

Week 5

  • Friday
    Antonio Damasio: "The Body-Minded Brain" (pp.223-244 and 247-251 in Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain).

Week 6

  • Tuesday
    George Lakoff and Mark Johnson: "The Sensorimotor Structuring of Subjective Experience" (pp. 45-63 in Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought).
  • Friday
    Andy Clark: "Where Brain, Body and World Collide" (pp.257-276, Daedalus: The Journal of the American Arts and Sciences 1998: Vol 127.2)
  • Andy Clark: "A Brain Speaks" (pp. 223-227 in Being There: Bringing Brain, Body and World Together Again)

Week 7

  • Tuesday
    SEMESTER BREAK - NO CLASS
  • Friday
    Francisco J. Varela: "More on Non-Unitary Selves and Cognitive Agents" (pp.45-63 in Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition)
  • Terrel Miedaner: "The Soul of the Mark III Beast" (pp. 109-113 in The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul) [to be distributed in class]

Week 8

Week 9

  • Mon – Thurs
    STUDENT CONFERENCES

FINAL UNIT 2 PAPER DUE 5 DAYS AFTER CONFERENCE

Unit 3

Unit 3: Mind in Social Symbol Use

Rhetorical Objectives

  • Conducting and reporting independent research
  • Orienting your reader to the debate
  • Arguing intelligently from evidence
  • Addressing counter-arguments fairly and effectively
  • Fine-tuning the elements of your essay

Topical Overview: Reconceptualizing the Argument

Having seen how brains in bodies make possible a kind of interaction in the world that neither alone could ever accomplish, the question about the uniqueness of human minds remains: How do we, of all the animals with brains in bodies, manage to not only experience reality, but to "experience ourselves experiencing it" through self-reflective thought? This last unit explores the latest approach to "mind" as a set of social practices. It examines the idea that when early human beings developed the ability to get things done through participation in a public system of "signs" for absent things and events, the door to a "virtual reality" of non-present cognition became open to us. This approach views "mind" as a symbolic way of living that comes out of the sign-dependant understandings and technologies of an increasingly sign-mediated human culture - a way of living to which our brains and bodies have in turn learned to adapt. In our final unit module, we ask if this approach will finally provide for us the answer to Descartes' question - or will it just make sensible at last Descartes' ability to even ask it?

Week 9

  • Friday
    Bruno Latour: "Do You Believe in Reality?" (pp. 1-10 in Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies)
  • Alisdair MacIntyre: "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy Of Science" (pp. 454-64 Reprinted from The Monist, 1974, Vol.60)

Week 10

  • Tuesday
    Leslie Brothers: "Exile's End" (pp. 143-146 in Friday's Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind)
  • Michael Tomasello: "Culture as Ontogenetic Niche" (pp. 78-93 in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition)
  • Friday
    John Heritage: "Maintaining Institutional Realities - Case 1: Agnes and the Institution of Gender" (pp.180-198 in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodogy)
  • Harvey Sacks: "On Doing Being Ordinary" (pp. 413-422 in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis)

Week 11

  • Tuesday
    Terrence Deacon: Excerpts from "The Reference Problem" (pp.64-93 in The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain)
  • Friday
    Terrence Deacon: Excepts from "Symbol Minds: Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On" (pp.433-37; 450-54 and 463-64 in The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain)
  • Epilogues:
    Scott McCloud: Excepts from Comics: The Invisible Art
    Loren Eisley: "The Brown Wasps" (pp. 227-236 in The Night Country) [to be distributed in class]

Week 12

  • Tuesday
    Group A Student Presentations
  • Friday
    Group B Student Presentations
  • First Draft of Unit Paper 3 Due

Week 13

  • Mon - Fri
    Student Conferences
  • FINAL UNIT 3 PAPER DUE ONE WEEK AFTER CONFERENCE

Week 14: READING PERIOD

Course Policies

Course Policies

Grading and Assessment

Your grade for this course is based on 100% continuous assessment by the instructor. It is therefore critical that you attend all class sessions fully prepared to engage in discussion of the assigned material. Because our class size is small and our seminar format interactive, any absence on your part will impact negatively on the rest of the class, as well upon your own ability to make progress in the course. For these reasons, only properly documented absences due to illness or family tragedy will be allowed. All other absences will be considered "unexcused" and every unexcused absence after the second one will result in the lowering of your final grade by one full letter.

In class, you will be expected to have read all of the material assigned each day, and to come prepared to discuss these materials in a thoughtful and well-informed manner. Only in this way will we be able to discover as a class what makes for effective argumentation and how to discuss complex issues clearly and productively. Participation in the online IVLE Forum will help you both prepare for class discussion and to hone your critical thinking skills. Each student will therefore be expected to contribute to IVLE throughout all of the three module units. Both IVLE postings and in-class discussions will be evaluated by me and, along with some short in-class writing exercises and peer review work, will comprise 20% of your final grade.

The remaining 80% of your grade will based on your production of three short essays, and here I emphasize the word "production." What I mean by this is that you will be graded on the effort that you put in to the process of essay writing, and not just on the final product. This process includes (but is not limited to): your proposal of an essay topic and explanation of its motive and thesis; a mandatory first draft to be discussed in class and/or in conference with me; evidence of revision based on these discussions; and a properly formatted final draft handed in on time and in accordance with the requirements detailed in a handout that will be provided to you. The totality of the effort you display as having put into this process will comprise your final essay grade, with each unit’s production counting towards your final class grade as follows:

  • Essay 1 (4-5 page comparative analysis of two texts): 20%
  • Essay 2 (3-4 page close reading of a single text): 25%
  • Presentation for Essay 3: 5%
  • Essay 3 (7-9 page research paper using multiple texts): 30%

Additional course policies regarding deadlines (strictly observed) and plagiarism (strictly prohibited) will be distributed on a handout and discussed explicitly on the first day of class.

Required Texts

Required Texts

All USP Writing and Critical Thinking modules use Gordon Harvey's (1998) Writing with Sources and The Elements of the Essay as writing guides.

Writing with Sources may be provided to you by the Writing Programme at no charge, pending the availability of printed copies. Alternatively, you may download a copy of this work (also free of charge) at:
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~expos/sources

The Elements of the Essay is available here:
http://usp.nus.edu.sg/writing/resources/elements_of_essay.html

All other readings for this class will be made available via IVLE as e-documents.

IVLE

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