What’s (episodic) memory good for anyway?

What makes episodic memory stand out from the motley array of memory types, running the gamut from working memory through to procedural memory (with many more waiting in the wings!)? Following Muhammad Ali Khalidi, we can cleave episodic memory from its family of related capacities thanks, in part, to its …

Cognitive Ontology – Part 3: Episodic Memory

In this third of four blogposts, I’m going to introduce another theoretical construct from cognitive science, episodic memory, that I discuss in my book, and I will try to summarize my argument that it is a cognitive kind (and describe what kind of kind it is). First explicitly identified and …

Concepts: Pluralism, Etiology, and Neural Implementation

Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. As understood by cognitive scientists, they are items in semantic memory that are deployed in higher cognitive processes including inference, categorization, and judgment. In Chapter 2 of his excellent book Cognitive Ontology, Khalidi examines whether concepts form a unified kind, whether they are based …

Marr’s Levels and Ontology

Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s book Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences offers a compelling non-reductionist approach to understanding the furniture of the mind: the ‘real kinds’ of cognitive science. This book is a thoughtful and timely addition to current debates over the ontology of the mind-brain sciences. In these …

Cognitive Ontology – Part 1

This week the Brains Blog is hosting a symposium on Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s new book Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press). Over the next four days, we will have four posts from Khalidi summarizing central arguments within the book as well as four commentary posts …

Reply to Commentaries on Thinking in Images

Authors love when their books are being read. They love it even more when their books are being discussed. I’ve happily been in this position where the commentators have taken their time and effort to read my book and share their ideas. I am very grateful to Marcin Milkowski, Mariela …

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