This final post addresses an obvious puzzle: why is reflective thinking sensory based? We can, after all, think about all sorts of abstract nonsensory topics. We think about God, the size of the universe, the mental states of other people, the validity of arguments, arithmetical facts and other mathematical entities, …
Many thanks to John Schwenkler for this opportunity to talk about some of my recent work, especially my book The Centered Mind: What the Science of Working Memory Shows Us About the Nature of Human Thought, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. In this post I’ll sketch the …
The 2014 volume of the Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication is co-edited by Edouard Machery and Jesse Prinz. It’s available here, and looks great! All of the papers are free to access, without license or subscription.
Like other social animals, humans are status-conscious creatures, obsessed with hierarchy and rankings. This is obvious in the realm of finance, the entertainment industry, and academic reputation-chasing, but it also turns up in the more staid realms of theory. Psychology and ethology make frequent reference to the distinction between the …
Conceptual pluralism is the view for any category that we can think about, we typically possess many different concepts of it—that is, many different ways of representing that category in higher cognition. Different kinds of concepts encode their own specific perspective on the target category, and each one can be …
Thanks very much to Kristina and John for inviting me to post here at Brains. I’m hoping to take this opportunity to revisit and update a few past themes in my research, and sketch some lines of inquiry that I’m either pursuing now or hope to take up in the …
In standard approaches to folk psychology, our folk psychological reasoning is taken to be a species of causal reasoning. And while there is some attention to other kinds of reasoning in the developmental literature, notably teleological reasoning, most of the research I’ve run across on children’s social reasoning and explanations …
