By Jim Virtel Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts boldly argues for the elimination of the term “concept” from psychological literature. His argument runs as follows: individuals possess many different kinds of concepts which have very few properties in common. These concepts are used in distinct cognitive processes, so the term …
How do you like Brains’ new design?
The following is slightly revised set of questions I posted over at Words and Other Things. Since dipping my toe into Brandom’s inferential-role semantics about ten years ago, these are the questions that still linger. Most of them stem from the fact that (at least in the bits I’ve read) …
At the beginning of September, we had another (already 6th) Kazimierz Naturalism Workshop in Kazimierz Dolny, and yesterday I just got back from GAP7 and a after-GAP7 workshop on reductionism, explanation and metaphors in philosophy of mind. Though contrary to your expectations, Carl Craver wasn’t talking about mechanisms in Kazimierz …
This nice study shows the need to beware of poorly controlled fMRI studies. (In particular: predefined significance thresholds = bad, multiple comparisons correction = good.)
Male squirrel monkeys are normally red-green colorblind. They are missing one of the opsins. A group at UW added a gene for the opsin to a virus, squirted it into the retinas of two male monkeys, and after about 5 months they were able to perform discrimination tasks that required …
As one might have expected, my book Doing without Concepts is meeting some resistance, and the first reviews have raised some interesting (and some less interesting, I think) objections to the claims made there (in a more or less pleasant tone!). Although this is not really the place to answer any of these …
