A central thesis of Cognitive Ontology is that cognitive kinds are unlikely to reduce to neural kinds. I found one of the most exciting threads in the book to be an argument supporting this anti-reductionistic thesis, which Khalidi summarizes in today’s post, and which I’ll call “the Individuation Argument.” According …
As I mentioned in the first blogpost, one aspect of some cognitive kinds that I try to emphasize throughout the book is their externalism, or as I have put it, their “etiological-environmental individuation.” This cumbersome expression is a more accurate way of describing the taxonomic practices that I highlight. It is …
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 …
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 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 …
As I mentioned in the previous blogpost, the core of the book consists in a close look at a number of case studies of putative cognitive kinds, with a chapter devoted to each of seven theoretical constructs drawn from a variety of research programs in the cognitive sciences. In this …
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 …
