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1416The Embedded Neuron, the Enactive Field?In John Bickle (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and neuroscience, Oxford University Press. 2009.The concept of the receptive field, first articulated by Hartline, is central to visual neuroscience. The receptive field of a neuron encompasses the spatial and temporal properties of stimuli that activate the neuron, and, as Hubel and Wiesel conceived of it, a neuron’s receptive field is static. This makes it possible to build models of neural circuits and to build up more complex receptive fields out of simpler ones. Recent work in visual neurophysiology is providing evidence that the classic…Read more
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225Explanation in Computational Neuroscience: Causal and Non-causalBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (3): 849-880. 2018.This article examines three candidate cases of non-causal explanation in computational neuroscience. I argue that there are instances of efficient coding explanation that are strongly analogous to examples of non-causal explanation in physics and biology, as presented by Batterman, Woodward, and Lange. By integrating Lange’s and Woodward’s accounts, I offer a new way to elucidate the distinction between causal and non-causal explanation, and to address concerns about the explanatory sufficiency …Read more
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49Why the “stimulus-error” did not go awayStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 56 33-42. 2016.
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44Perceptual Pragmatism and the Naturalized Ontology of ColorTopics in Cognitive Science 8 (4). 2016.This paper considers whether there can be any such thing as a naturalized metaphysics of color—any distillation of the commitments of perceptual science with regard to color ontology. I first make some observations about the kinds of philosophical commitments that sometimes bubble to the surface in the psychology and neuroscience of color. Unsurprisingly, because of the range of opinions expressed, an ontology of color cannot simply be read off from scientists’ definitions and theoretical statem…Read more
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674Extending, changing, and explaining the brainBiology and Philosophy 28 (4): 613-638. 2013.This paper addresses concerns raised recently by Datteri (Biol Philos 24:301–324, 2009) and Craver (Philos Sci 77(5):840–851, 2010) about the use of brain-extending prosthetics in experimental neuroscience. Since the operation of the implant induces plastic changes in neural circuits, it is reasonable to worry that operational knowledge of the hybrid system will not be an accurate basis for generalisation when modelling the unextended brain. I argue, however, that Datteri’s no-plasticity constra…Read more
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45The Red and the Real: An Essay on Color OntologyInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 24 (3): 339-342. 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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207Minimal models and canonical neural computations: the distinctness of computational explanation in neuroscienceSynthese 191 (2): 127-153. 2014.In a recent paper, Kaplan (Synthese 183:339–373, 2011) takes up the task of extending Craver’s (Explaining the brain, 2007) mechanistic account of explanation in neuroscience to the new territory of computational neuroscience. He presents the model to mechanism mapping (3M) criterion as a condition for a model’s explanatory adequacy. This mechanistic approach is intended to replace earlier accounts which posited a level of computational analysis conceived as distinct and autonomous from underlyi…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |