“Let me quickly wash my hands one more time”

The announcement of my contributions says that they will in part concern my recent Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Sciences of the Mind. The overriding theme of that book is the proper understanding of “representation” as it occurs in recent cognitive neuroscience, broadly understood. I argue …

Introducing Anne Jaap Jacobson

It’s my great pleasure to introduce Anne Jaap Jacobson as our next featured scholar. Anne is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston and Director of the UH Center for Neuro-Engineering and Cognitive Science. She is also a Visiting Academic at Somerville College, …

Signing off

I wanted to thank readers for reading, commenters for commenting, and Kristina Musholt for inviting me to be a guest blogger.  Three cheers for Brains! The discussions here gave me a chance to think out loud about some questions that are dangling from a book manuscript I’m circulating. It’s called *The Rationality of Perception*. Among other …

Explanatory vs. Defensive reasons

In this post I want to approach the topic of the previous post from a different angle. I raised two questions about the U&C study: whether people believe the comparative ratings (Question 1), and what inference, if any, leads them to their ultimate verdict (Question 2). Either question would be …

Rationalization, Belief, and Inference

When you were a kid, did your room ever get really messy? Of course it did. Did its messiness bother you? Quite possibly not. Lots of kids are not at all bothered by their messy rooms. (Question: Does it even look messy to them, or does it look orderly? We …

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