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 …

Modeling and the autonomy of psychology

Modeling has come to occupy a central place in philosophy of science. In recent decades, an enormous amount has been written on the practices of model construction, how models represent their targets, how models relate to simulations and theories, and how models are validated and verified.

Decomposing the hierarchy of thought

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 …

Keeping concepts in context

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 …

Representational pluralism: A brief taxonomy

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 …

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