Unthinkable Pasts and Undreamable Futures: A Role of History for Scientists

I am not a historian. This thought did not occur to me when I set out three years ago to write a book about my field of computational neuroscience, but it has occurred to me many times since. I knew I wanted the book be more than just be a …

Writing The Misinformation Age

Thank you to Nick and his co-editors for inviting us to contribute to this symposium on writing books for general audiences!  We have both written several books, and one of us – Weatherall – has written two other books for general audiences.  But in this post, we are going to …

Let Go of Your Expertise to Tell a Better Story

Unexpectedly, the eyeball turned out to be the problem. There I was, writing a book about the brain, a manuscript that became The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds, and I was stuck. The big picture was clear in my mind: I wanted to tell the …

Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition (4)

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my recently published book, Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition (OUP, 2020). Intuition in Philosophy Let’s call the following picture of philosophy the Standard Picture. [A] Philosophers make judgments about knowledge, freedom, wrongness, etc. based on intuitions about knowledge, …

Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition (3)

This is the third in a series of posts about my recently published book, Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition (OUP, 2020). Presentational Conservatism Part 2 of Forming Impressions develops an epistemology of experiences that manifest expertise. My approach is first to discuss the epistemology of experience in general, …

Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition (2)

This is the second in a series of posts about my recently published book, Forming Impressions: Expertise in Perception and Intuition (OUP, 2020). Birds and Physics Problems In Chapters 2 and 3 of Forming Impressions, I argue that both expert perception and expert intuition manifest themselves in experience. When an …

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