The Brains Blog

In this third of four blogposts, I’m going to introduce another theoretical construct from cognitive science, episodic memory, that I discuss in my book, and I will try to summarize my argument that it is a cognitive kind (and describe what kind of kind it is). First explicitly identified and …

Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. As understood by cognitive scientists, they are items in semantic memory that are deployed in higher cognitive processes including inference, categorization, and judgment. In Chapter 2 of his excellent book Cognitive Ontology, Khalidi examines whether concepts form a unified kind, whether they are based …

As I mentioned in the previous blogpost, the core of the book consists in a close look at a number of case studies of putative cognitive kinds, with a chapter devoted to each of seven theoretical constructs drawn from a variety of research programs in the cognitive sciences. In this …

Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s book Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences offers a compelling non-reductionist approach to understanding the furniture of the mind: the ‘real kinds’ of cognitive science. This book is a thoughtful and timely addition to current debates over the ontology of the mind-brain sciences. In these …

This week the Brains Blog is hosting a symposium on Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s new book Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press). Over the next four days, we will have four posts from Khalidi summarizing central arguments within the book as well as four commentary posts …