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 …
You may (or may not) have noticed that Pete Mandik and Richard Brown (me) have started a podcast, called SpaceTimeMind, where we talk about tax law updates for 2014, uh, I mean, er, we talk about space and time and mind! The first episode is up now (and has been …
Brains people interested in representational and computational theories of mind will be interested in this talk by Frances Egan, which is coming out soon in Philosophical Studies. If you post questions or comments in the next week or so, Frances will try to respond to them.
In my most recent paper, we report on work in which we trained rats to discriminate among infrared (IR) light sources (normally invisible to the rat). We coupled the output of a head-mounted IR detector to microstimulators in the whisker region of primary somatosensory cortex. The rats initally respond to …
The mind-body problem asks: How are mental states related to physical states of the brain, the body, and behavioral states more generally? Functionalists claim that mental states are identical with functional roles, defined as relations between environmental impingements, external behaviors, and other mental states.Analytic functionalists contend that these identities are imposed …
Collective Intentionality VIII University of Manchester August 28-31, 2012 Collective Intentionality VIII – as the name suggests! – is the eighth in a series of large-scale international events on joint and/or cooperative action, reasoning, decision, intention, attention, and associated mental and agential phenomena, topics that impact on issues in ethics …
