Teleological Functions: Fixing the Goal-Contribution Account

In my previous post, I mentioned that mechanistic explanations are functional. What I mean by that is that mechanisms and their component parts have functions and such functions contribute to mechanistic explanation because, by performing their functions, components contribute to the activities of the whole mechanism. The notion of function …

Composition, Realization, and Constitutive Explanation: An Ontologically Egalitarian Account of Multilevel Mechanisms

Thanks to Dan Burnston and Nick Byrd for this opportunity to introduce Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological Cognition (OUP 2020). This book is the culmination of my main research program over the last 20+ years; it offers a comprehensive foundation for the science of biological cognition. In these posts, I’ll outline …

Commentary by Jonathan Gilmore on Explaining Imagination

By Jonathan Gilmore Peter Langland-Hassan’s Explaining Imagination is a bracing attack on what approaches orthodoxy in the study of the imagination – that, in its myriad roles in explanations of human thought and behavior, it is a sui generis cognitive attitude.  Dissenting from the consensus, Langland-Hassan argues that invocations of …

Commentary by Alon Chasid on Explaining Imagination (with reply)

By Alon Chasid Peter Langland-Hassan’s Explaining Imagination (hereafter: EI) presents a reductive thesis: imagining is not a sui generis mental state or attitude, but one of the basic folk- psychological attitudes such as beliefs, judgments (i.e., occurrent beliefs), desires, intentions, etc., or combinations thereof. At first sight, this novel thesis …

Imagination Between Bats and Cats: Commentary by Margherita Arcangeli on Explaining Imagination (with reply)

By Margherita Arcangelia Imagination is clearly “a dense and tangled piece of country” (Furlong 1961: 15). The last decade, however, saw considerable philosophical work aimed at mapping this terrain of the mind. Peter Langland-Hassan’s book is a sophisticated and thought provoking atlas, whose purpose is to show that where other …

Book Symposium: Explaining Imagination — Précis

Greetings Brains Blog readers!  I am very pleased to begin a weeklong Brains Blog symposium on my book, Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020).  The entire book is available as an open access download HERE, for those interested in following along at home.  I begin today with a précis articulating the book’s …

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