The distinction between innate and acquired traits is relevant to the long-standing debate between nativists and empiricists about whether knowledge (of concepts, of language, etc.) is primarily innate or acquired. The debate can’t get off the ground if the distinction is baseless or confused. In recent years, some philosophers have …
Cite your sources and give them credit–it’s easier said than done. On one hand, it’s easy to encounter philosophy papers that fail to cite enough sources. It’s easier to cite the usual suspects that others already cite than to exercise independent judgment about who deserves to be cited. In my …
Although writing book reviews is not going to get anyone an academic job or promotion, book reviews provide a service to the community and can be worth the effort, particularly if you want to read a book closely or you have something to say about it. When I was an …
Cambridge Element Physics and Computation was published online. Free copies can be downloaded until September 3rd.
Much cognitive processing is unconscious, but some is conscious. By ‘consciousness,’ I mean phenomenal consciousness, conscious experience, what it’s like to be someone, or qualia. The relation between consciousness, computation, and cognition is a very difficult question. The two main traditional views are functionalism and the identity theory. According to …
The received view in the philosophy of cognitive science is that cognition is (largely explained by) a kind of digital computation, and computation requires representation. Therefore, if neurocognitive systems are computational, they manipulate digital representations of some sort. According to this received view, representations are unobservable entities posited by successful …
The modern computational theory of cognition began after Alan Turing (1936) published his mathematical theory of computation in terms of what are now known as Turing machines. Contrary to a popular misconception, however, it wasn’t Turing who turned his machines into a model of cognition. That step was taken by …
