Posts from the founder of Brains, Gualtiero Piccinini.
When I went to graduate school in the 1990s, the mainstream assumptions were that (1) computation properly so called is digital and its limits are defined by classical computability theory, and (2) the debate in cognitive science was between “classical” (LOT) digital computation and “nonclassical” (connectionist in the narrow sense) …
(Caveat: for the sake of exposition, at times I articulate past views in slightly anachronistic terms; I do my best to capture the gist of what Alan Turing and others meant in terms that contemporary readers should find perspicuous.) The computational theory of cognition says that cognition is largely explained …
An Online Conference and Edited Volume October 21-22 and 28-29, 2022 Venue: Neural Mechanisms Online (https://www.neuralmechanisms.org/) Submission deadline: Jun 30, 2022 Organizing Committee: Fabrizio Calzavarini, University of Bergamo and LLC, University of Turin Gualtiero Piccinini, University of Missouri – St. Louis Marco Viola, University of Turin We are pleased to …
When I was in graduate school at Pitt around the late 1990s, I hung out with some faculty and students in the Psych Department. One day I asked one of the more ambitious Psych grad students, “what’s the future of psychology?” He answered without hesitation: “cognitive neuroscience”. Since then, psychology …
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 …
