By Tillmann Vierkant, University of Edinburgh (See all posts in this symposium here.) Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say a few words about The Tinkering Mind! I have been bothered by the question of how important intentional action is for epistemic agency for a long time. I have …
Hi Everyone! Join us this week for a symposium on Till Vierkant’s exciting new book, The Tinkering Mind! Till will kick us off today with a precis, followed by commentaries from Gloria Andrada, Paulius Rimkevicius, and Ting Huang. Then, on Friday, Till will respond. Join us in the discussion board …
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 …
