The Brains Blog

Brains Blog Symposium on Concepts at the Interface Author’s Reply to Commentaries Nicholas SheaInstitute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of Londonnicholas.shea@sas.ac.uk Reply to Sarah Fisher Turning to Sarah Fisher’s helpful commentary, she raises a challenging question about concepts in LLMs. I was very pleased to have a chance …

Brains Blog Symposium on Concepts at the Interface Author’s Reply to Commentaries Nicholas SheaInstitute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of Londonnicholas.shea@sas.ac.uk Many thanks to Eric, Johan and Gualtiero, and Sarah for their thoughtful commentaries. Their kind words about the book are also much appreciated. It’s great that they …

Distinctively HumanSarah Fisher In Concepts at the Interface, Shea offers us a compelling account of what concepts are and why they matter. His nuanced and careful treatment captures the function and feel of offline deliberation, ranging from abstract logical reasoning to building concrete suppositional scenarios. The puzzle motivating Shea’s analysis …

Predication as Structural Representation; Concepts as Information Compression-Decompression HubsJohan Heemskerk and Gualtiero Piccinini Shea’s new book, Concepts at the Interface, is a trove of important ideas. To give just a few examples: Shea draws several important distinctions that criss-cross existing categories though arguably cutting deeper – such as the distinction …

Some Roles for Language in Concept-Driven Thinking: Comments on Nicholas Shea’s Concepts at the InterfaceEric MargolisUniversity of British Columbia There are many different questions that philosophers should be asking about concepts. One of the things that makes Concepts at the Interface such a valuable book is that it recognizes that …