Cognitive Science

Given Instruction: For your final essay, you will generate a topic yourself. The only constraint on the topic is that it must relate in a significant way to the course material. If you have any doubt about whether your topic is sufficiently related to course content, please contact me. Your essay should make a novel and challenging argument for a specific thesis. By ‘novel’, it mean that the argument you provide for your thesis should differ from arguments presented by your sources. This does not mean the conclusion you come to needs to differ from those defended in the literature, but your specific argument should be your own. By ‘challenging’  your thesis should be at least somewhat controversial. A thesis like ‘cognition is difficult to understand’ is not challenging, because no one would doubt it. It will be formatted in APA style, which means in-text citations with page numbers, and an abstract of around 200 words. The abstract should describe your topic, thesis about the topic, and a rough outline of your argument for your thesis. The essay should begin with a title page, with an informative title, and the date of submission. The final essay will be approximately 3000 words (+/- 10%) not including abstract and bibliography. It is recommended that your essay be divided into sub-sections, to help clarify its structure. The introduction should explain briefly how the remainder of the paper will be structured. Your essay should include citations to at least 10 reputable scholarly sources. To clarify, that means primarily journal articles and scholarly books. Anything accessible from within the UofT library catalog will be considered a scholarly source. Citations should be in APA format, and should not cite the URL where the article or book was retrieved (see the bibliography below for examples). Only one website will be considered a scholarly source: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Instructions on how to cite the SEP can be found here: https://plato.stanford.edu/cite.html