Mr. Luke Kersten successfully defended his Master’s Thesis titled “Leveling the Field: Talking Levels in Cognitive Science”. The committee consisted of the following: Chair, Dr. Kasia Muldner; Co-Supervisors, Dr. Andrew Brook and Dr. Robert West; Committee Member, Dr. Vincent Bergeron, and the Internal Examiner, Dr. Craig Leth-Steensen.
Luke Kersten tackled a concept central to cognitive science, levels of analysis, and developed an entirely new approach to using levels talk that he calls pluralism. Taking Sun’s analysis of levels in computational models as an example, Kersten showed that his pluralistic approach generates a more complete set of interpretations of what is going in such models than Sun’s own account or anyone else’s to date. The examining board urged him to extract and publish a number of papers from his thesis.