Cognitive Science to the Faculty of Arts 2017

Cognitive Science's Situation 31.10.2016

Cognitive science will, in the Big Wheel reform, transfer to the Faculty of Arts after all, not to the Faculty of Science as was preliminarily planned. This decision was made, among other reasons, because there was more interest in cognitive science at the Faculty of Arts and thus more willingness to fund it in the future.

Cognitive science will be placed in the LingDA program (Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Age) at the turn of the year, at least for the next academic year 2017-2018. A separate cognitive science module of some scope will be organized in LingDA for this time, containing those contents that belong to the current degree requirements (and which current students will study going forward). Otto Lappi will plan this module and its scope together with LingDA representatives. Cognitive science will not necessarily be a very large program in LingDA, and it is not intended to take new major students yet, but it is still open to, for example, minor students.

During this initial phase, a new master's program is to be planned in the middle ground between LingDA and the philosophy master's program, which would include cognitive science, digital humanities, and phonetics, perhaps also language technology. In this entity, cognitive science may have a large role in the future, possibly even its own program. The new master's program is supposed to start at the latest when the current degree requirements expire in 2020, but hopefully earlier alongside the LingDA placement. Physically, cognitive science will be located in Metsätalo next year, and the move appears to begin as early as next spring. In November, there will be a more official information session about the transfer, with representatives from both the Faculty of Arts and Behavioural Sciences.