Welcome to the New Brains
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Keeping score of pragmatic inferentialism
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) …
Mechanisms everywhere
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 …
dead salmon categorizes human emotions
This nice study shows the need to beware of poorly controlled fMRI studies. (In particular: predefined significance thresholds = bad, multiple comparisons correction = good.)
Colour blindness corrected by gene therapy : Nature News
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 …
Doing without Concepts: The Controversy
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 …
Czech science in danger
In Czech Republic, due to the financial crisis, the government wants to liquidate research institutions of Czech Academy of Science as well as to stop funding all basic research (including philosophy). Here is the website where you can help Czech scientists by signing a petition and read more.