Ken Marable's Papers

Ken Marable's Cognitive Science and Philosophy papers

Here are some of my undergrad papers. I should hopefully have a few graduate level ones up soon. Although they are more philosophy oriented than some of my undergrad ones, I still try to do multi-disciplinary slants on them. They will most likely include:

A connectionist approach to language acquisition, where I offer the foundation for a viable alternative to Chomsky's theory of natural language acqusition.
Applying Dennett's evolutionary terminology (design space, skyhooks, cranes, etc.) to genetic algorithms.
Hume's attack on mental substratum applied to contemporary philosophy of mind's study of consciousness.
A look at judgment in ethical decision making with analogies to figure skating judging and Kuhn's work on scientific theory judgment.

The Neurological and Environmental Basis for Differing Intelligences: A Comparison of Primate and Cetecean Mentality
It's a paper I wrote for a psychology independant study comparing whales & dolphins to humans & other primates, both on a physiological and evolutionary basis. I argue that the ceteceans are not only highly intelligent, but are a form of intelligence that is quite a bit different from our own.
A Subsymbolic Computationalist Reply to the Chinese Room
Originally written for a philosophy independant study (I did a lot of those), but was further polished for presentation at the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, & Letters annual meeting in spring 1995. I argue that a form of connectionism can indeed avoid Searle's conclusion, and therefore is a perfectly viable option for artificial intelligence research.
Fodor and Pylyshyn Refuted: Compositionality, Systematicity, and the Power of Distributed Representation
This is my Bachelor's thesis. It's pretty big and I've done a lot of work here, but I also am quite aware of a lot of holes in my argument (the irony of getting really in depth on a subject). I argue that Fodor and Pylshyn's critique of connectionism argues against the wrong kind of connectionist system. Connectionist systems involving distributed representations are able to support a version of language of thought.

As you can see I was rather into the "thorough" titles. Go ahead and e-mail me any comments you have. All of these projects are areas that I am still interested in, even if I haven't given them much thought recently.