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67Pete Mandik: This is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, xiv+246, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-470-67450-5Minds and Machines 24 (3): 373-376. 2014.Pete Mandik’s This is Philosophy of Mind is the latest addition to the “introduction to the philosophy of mind textbook” literature. It is a welcome addition, as Mandik offers readers an encompassing, up-to-date and engagingly written textbook. The objective of This is Philosophy of Mind is to communicate to a wider audience the fascinating and challenging ideas discussed in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is intended as a resource useful for both students taking a course and for anybody els…Read more
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189Models, Mechanisms, and CoherenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (1): 181-212. 2015.Life-science phenomena are often explained by specifying the mechanisms that bring them about. The new mechanistic philosophers have done much to substantiate this claim and to provide us with a better understanding of what mechanisms are and how they explain. Although there is disagreement among current mechanists on various issues, they share a common core position and a seeming commitment to some form of scientific realism. But is such a commitment necessary? Is it the best way to go about me…Read more
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77Explaining social norm compliance. A plea for neural representationsPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2): 217-238. 2014.How should we understand the claim that people comply with social norms because they possess the right kinds of beliefs and preferences? I answer this question by considering two approaches to what it is to believe (and prefer), namely: representationalism and dispositionalism. I argue for a variety of representationalism, viz. neural representationalism. Neural representationalism is the conjunction of two claims. First, what it is essential to have beliefs and preferences is to have certain ne…Read more
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42Bryce Huebner: Macrocognition: A Theory of Distributed Minds and Collective Intentionality: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, x+278, $65.00, ISBN 9780199926275Minds and Machines 25 (1): 103-109. 2015.Bryce Huebner’s Macrocognition is a book with a double mission. The first and main mission is “to show that there are cases of collective mentality in our world” . Cases of collective mentality are cases where groups, teams, mobs, firms, colonies or some other collectivities possess cognitive capacities or mental states in the same sense that we individually do. To accomplish this mission, Huebner develops an account of macrocognition, where “the term ‘macrocognition’ is intended as shorthand fo…Read more
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102Why Build a Virtual Brain? Large-scale Neural Simulations as Test-bed for Artificial Computing SystemsIn D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Cognitive Science Society. pp. 429-434. 2015.Despite the impressive amount of financial resources invested in carrying out large-scale brain simulations, it is controversial what the payoffs are of pursuing this project. The present paper argues that in some cases, from designing, building, and running a large-scale neural simulation, scientists acquire useful knowledge about the computational performance of the simulating system, rather than about the neurobiological system represented in the simulation. What this means, why it is not a t…Read more
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3Olaf Sporns: Networks of the Brain: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011, xi+243, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-262-01469-4 (review)Minds and Machines 23 (2): 259-262. 2013.
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150How Authentic Intentionality can be Enabled: a Neurocomputational Hypothesis (review)Minds and Machines 20 (2): 183-202. 2010.According to John Haugeland, the capacity for “authentic intentionality” depends on a commitment to constitutive standards of objectivity. One of the consequences of Haugeland’s view is that a neurocomputational explanation cannot be adequate to understand “authentic intentionality”. This paper gives grounds to resist such a consequence. It provides the beginning of an account of authentic intentionality in terms of neurocomputational enabling conditions. It argues that the standards, which cons…Read more
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85Explanatory Judgment, Probability, and Abductive InferenceIn A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman & J. C. Trueswell (eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 432-437) Cognitive Science Society., Cognitive Science Society. pp. 432-437. 2016.Abductive reasoning assigns special status to the explanatory power of a hypothesis. But how do people make explanatory judgments? Our study clarifies this issue by asking: How does the explanatory power of a hypothesis cohere with other cognitive factors? How does probabilistic information affect explanatory judgments? In order to answer these questions, we conducted an experiment with 671 participants. Their task was to make judgments about a potentially explanatory hypothesis and its cognitiv…Read more
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59The Architecture of Cognition: Rethinking Fodor and Pylyshyn’s Systematicity ChallengePhilosophical Psychology 29 (3): 476-478. 2016.
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97Neural representationalism, the Hard Problem of Content and vitiated verdicts. A reply to Hutto & MyinPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (2): 257-274. 2014.Colombo’s (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2013) plea for neural representationalism is the focus of a recent contribution to Phenomenology and Cognitive Science by Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin. In that paper, Hutto and Myin have tried to show that my arguments fail badly. Here, I want to respond to their critique clarifying the type of neural representationalism put forward in my (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2013) piece, and to take the opportunity to make a few remarks…Read more
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128Explanatory Value and Probabilistic Reasoning: An Empirical StudyProceedings of the Cognitive Science Society. 2016.The relation between probabilistic and explanatory reasoning is a classical topic in philosophy of science. Most philosophical analyses are concerned with the compatibility of Inference to the Best Explanation with probabilistic, Bayesian inference, and the impact of explanatory considerations on the assignment of subjective probabilities. This paper reverses the question and asks how causal and explanatory considerations are affected by probabilistic information. We investigate how probabilisti…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |