Explaining without language
It’s natural to think we need language to explain—after all, isn’t an explanation an answer to a why question? It can be, but it can also be a resolution of a wondering why state.
Category: Featured Scholar
A series of blog posts featuring scholars in the philosophy and science of mind.
Pluralistic Folk Psychology
In our daily interactions with people—driving down the street, coordinating childcare, figuring out how to hide from an old girlfriend, buying a nice gift—we rely on folk psychology, our unschooled understanding of other people. These abilities are often attributed to a single mechanism often thought to be unique to the …
Language is so distracting
Thanks for the invitation to be a featured scholar on Brains. It’s good timing for me, since I just turned in proofs for my second book (The Animal Mind, with Routledge) and I’m on sabbatical. This means I may actually have the time to write up some of my talks …
Introducing Kristin Andrews
I am pleased to be able to introduce Kristin Andrews as our next Featured Scholar. Kristin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University (Toronto) and works on the nature of social cognition in humans and non-human animals, human social relations and our relations to non-human animals.
Consciousness in the predictive mind
The prediction error minimization (PEM) account of brain function may explain perception, learning, action, attention and understanding. That at least is what its proponents claim, and I suggested in an earlier post that perhaps the brain does nothing but minimize its prediction error. So far I haven’t talked explicitly about …
Prediction error minimization and embodiment
One of the anonymous reviewers of my book manuscript remarked, with approval, that it contained very little discussion of embodied, extended and enactive (EEE) cognition. Probably this omission stems from my Kantian gut feeling that an explanation of mind and cognition must appeal only to what happens after sensory input …
Is prediction error minimization all there is to the mind?
The prediction error minimization theory (PEM) says that the brain continually seeks to minimize its prediction error – minimize the difference between its predictions about the sensory input and the actual sensory input. It is an extremely simple idea but from it arises a surprisingly resourceful conception of brain processing. …