We are pleased to have David Pereplyotchik (Kent State University) blogging this week on his book Psychosyntax: The Nature of Grammar and its Place in the Mind (Springer, 2017).
To view his posts on a single page, click here.
CFP: Topoi Special Issue “Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation”
Philosophical Perspectives on Confabulation TOPOI Special Issue – Call For Papers https://www.springer.com/philosophy/journal/11245 Guest editors Sophie Stammers and Lisa Bortolotti (University of Birmingham) Deadline for manuscript submission: 31 July 2018 Numerous psychological studies establish that we are unaware of information that is relevant to the occurrence of an event, but we …
Symposium on Pendaran Roberts, Keith Allen, and Kelly-Ann Schmidtke’s “Folk Intuitions about the Causal Theory of Perception”
Welcome to our fourth Ergo symposium, featuring Pendaran Roberts (University of Warwick), Keith Allen (University of York), and Kelly-Ann Schmidtke’s (University of Warwick) “Folk Intuitions about the Causal Theory of Perception” with commentaries by Eugen Fischer (University of East Anglia) and John Schwenkler (Florida State University). I’d like to thank …
4. Conceptual Emergence and Neural Networks
Conceptual emergence occurs when, in order to understand or effectively represent some phenomenon, a different representational apparatus must be introduced at the current working level. Such changes in representation are common in the sciences but it has usually been considered in connection with changes in synchronic representations. Here, I’ll consider …
3. Two Types of Fundamentality
Today’s entry addresses a type of argument that will be familiar to most of you, the argument that all higher level natural facts in our world logically supervene on the fundamental physical facts.[1] Consider a very simple world, which we can call Checkers World. It behaves exactly like a game …
2. The Origin of the Universe Argument
Yesterday we saw, via an example from social psychology, that diachronic approaches to emergence can avoid some of the major problems of synchronic approaches. That motivating example is not wholly convincing as an example of transformational emergence. Here is what I believe is a more robustly ontological example. The Standard …
1. Transformational Emergence
I thank the editors of the Brains Blog for extending this invitation, despite the fact that I am not an expert in neuroscience and related areas of philosophy. This week I am going to present a friendly challenge to the readers by arguing that the emphasis on synchronic approaches to …