Upon completion of this course:
- You can explain when knowledge qualifies as scientific knowledge.
- You can adequately use the most important scientific-philosophical terms.
- You can evaluate the scientific status of the formation of psychological theories.
- During psychological debates, you can identify the philosophical theories on which they are based.
- You can predict or demonstrate how (implied assumptions about) philosophical stances leave their mark on questions, experiments and conclusions.
- You can reverse operational processes; you can examine experimental design in order to deduce which concepts of consciousness, free will, or cognition the researcher is using.
- You can set paradigms side by side and devise alternatives; you can relativise the “correctness” of a particular theory.
- You can formulate your stances, verbally and written, in accurate and concise form.
- You can identify and avoid fallacies in your own work and that of others.
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This course is centred on the philosophical questions that directly touch the field of psychology. The first lecture is devoted to the question of what constitutes science. We will outline the most important positions of scientific philosophy and will extensively consider the idea of a scientific paradigm.
In the following two lectures we will examine the basic positions of philosophical thought concerning what makes up the human mind, and discuss how this is linked with behaviour and realised in the brain. These theories are the background for three more specific themes to be discussed in the last three lectures: free will, consciousness, and embodied and situated cognition.
Examinations
- Six written assignments: you will be admitted to the multiple choice examination if you have completed the written assignments.
- Multiple-choice examination.
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