Dan Ryder Memorial Lecture

Dr. Eric Margolis of UBC Vancouver will present the keynote address at the inaugural Dan Ryder Memorial Lecture on October 3. His lecture, titled The Rationalism-Empiricism Debate in the Twenty-First Century, will serve as the opening of this newly established scholarly series.

Abstract

A key foundational idea in the cognitive revolution was that cognitive science can work with philosophy to reinvigorate the classical debate over innate ideas. In recent years, however, there has been a widespread tendency to think that we should just give up on this rationalism-empiricism debate on the grounds that it is fundamentally misguided. It’s widely thought that rationalists and empiricists must disagree about which is more important to development, genes or the environment, and that this makes the debate obsolete because genes and the environment are equally important.

In this talk, Dr. Margolis will argue that competing rationalist and empiricist views aren’t and never have been about genes vs. the environment—that this is an important misunderstanding—and that, far from being obsolete, the rationalism-empiricism debate remains central to understanding how the mind works.

All are welcome to attend; registration is not required.