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53Olaf Sporns: Discovering the Human Connectome: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012, xii+240, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-262-01790-9 (review)Minds and Machines 24 (2): 217-220. 2014.The “father of skyscrapers” and “father of modernist architecture” Louis Henry Sullivan (1856–1924) wrote that “[a]ll things in nature have a shape, … a form, an outward semblance, that tells us what they are, that distinguishes them from ourselves and from each other,” adding “Form follows from function.” But structure shapes function too.The biological world offers a myriad of examples where this is apparent. One such example, perhaps not the most intuitive, is the brain: a network with a comp…Read more
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42For a Few Neurons More: Tractability and Neurally Informed Economic ModellingBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 66 (4): 713-736. 2015.There continues to be significant confusion about the goals, scope, and nature of modelling practice in neuroeconomics. This article aims to dispel some such confusion by using one of the most recent critiques of neuroeconomic modelling as a foil. The article argues for two claims. First, currently, for at least some economic model of choice behaviour, the benefits derivable from neurally informing an economic model do not involve special tractability costs. Second, modelling in neuroeconomics i…Read more
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139Constitutive relevance and the personal/subpersonal distinctionPhilosophical Psychology (ahead-of-print). 2012.Can facts about subpersonal states and events be constitutively relevant to personal-level phenomena? And can knowledge of these facts inform explanations of personal-level phenomena? Some philosophers, like Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell, argue for two negative answers whereby questions about persons and their behavior cannot be answered by using information from subpersonal psychology. Knowledge of subpersonal states and events cannot inform personal-level explanation such that they cast l…Read more
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857Bayesian Cognitive Science, Unification, and ExplanationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2). 2017.It is often claimed that the greatest value of the Bayesian framework in cognitive science consists in its unifying power. Several Bayesian cognitive scientists assume that unification is obviously linked to explanatory power. But this link is not obvious, as unification in science is a heterogeneous notion, which may have little to do with explanation. While a crucial feature of most adequate explanations in cognitive science is that they reveal aspects of the causal mechanism that produces the…Read more
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4Paul M. Churchland: Plato’s Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals : MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012, x+289, $35.00, ISBN 9780262016865 (review)Minds and Machines 23 (2): 263-268. 2013.
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95Moving forward (and beyond) the modularity debate: A network perspectivePhilosophy of Science 80 (3): 356-377. 2013.Modularity is one of the most important concepts used to articulate a theory of cognitive architecture. Over the last 30 years, the debate in many areas of the cognitive sciences and in philosophy of psychology about what modules are, and to what extent our cognitive architecture is modular, has made little progress. After providing a diagnosis of this lack of progress, this article suggests a remedy. It argues that the theoretical framework of network science can be brought to bear on the tradi…Read more
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71Experimental Philosophy of Explanation Rising: The Case for a Plurality of Concepts of ExplanationCognitive Science 41 (2): 503-517. 2017.This paper brings together results from the philosophy and the psychology of explanation to argue that there are multiple concepts of explanation in human psychology. Specifically, it is shown that pluralism about explanation coheres with the multiplicity of models of explanation available in the philosophy of science, and it is supported by evidence from the psychology of explanatory judgment. Focusing on the case of a norm of explanatory power, the paper concludes by responding to the worry th…Read more
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88The predictive mind and chess-playing: A reply to ShandAnalysis 74 (4): 603-608. 2014.In a recent Analysis piece, John Shand (2014) argues that the Predictive Theory of Mind provides a unique explanation for why one cannot play chess against oneself. On the basis of this purported explanatory power, Shand concludes that we have an extra reason to believe that PTM is correct. In this reply, we first rectify the claim that one cannot play chess against oneself; then we move on to argue that even if this were the case, Shand’s argument does not give extra weight to the Predictive Th…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |