A series of blog posts featuring scholars in the philosophy and science of mind.
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.
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 …
I am pleased to introduce Dan Weiskopf as our next Featured Scholar. Dan is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Georgia State University, as well as an associate faculty member in the Neuroscience Institute.
Among philosophers, autonomous agency usually requires having some kind of metacognitive awareness that permits thinking about one’s reasons for action and being self-governing. Autonomous agency, then, requires metacognition. But it requires metacognition of a certain sort, namely beliefs about beliefs. The question about whether any other animal is metacognitive has …
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 …
