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This year's topic: Philosophical, Foundational, and Methodological Issues Connected to Bayesian Approaches in Cognitive Science. Bayesian probability theory and Bayesian decision theory aim to lay out how ideal reasoners update their beliefs in the light of new evidence and make decisions based on those beliefs. But what about such apparently non-ideal agents such as ourselves? The past few decades have witnessed a rising tide of Bayesian work on perception, higher cognition, neural coding, etc. It's been accompanied by vigorous debate concerning the aims and claims of these approaches. Some see the prospect of a grand unified theory of the mind/brain; others demur. We'll examine these debates and what one can learn from them regarding more generally about approaches to modeling the mind and the nature of rationality. Readings will be drawn both from the empirical and the philosophical literature. (This course meets jointly with AS.200.316 & AS.150.476)