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2Erratum to: The Organizational Account of Function is an Etiological Account of FunctionActa Biotheoretica 64 (2): 119-120. 2015.
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154The Information-Processing Perspective on RepresentationPhilosophy and the Mind Sciences. forthcoming.I introduce a novel framework for theorizing about representations in cognitive science, which relies on two theses. First, representations are, primarily, signals for information transmission, not as a side effect of other functions these signals may have, but for its own sake. Second, these signals aim at efficiently trading-off three cognitive budgets: rate (or transmission and storage costs), distortion (or faithfulness of the transmitted information), and computational complexity of coders.…Read more
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30Mental RepresentationOpen Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. 2025.Cognitive scientists often try to provide explanations of how a human, animal, or artificial cognitive system manages to perform a certain cognitive task. For this, they often find it useful to postulate the existence of entities, localized somewhere within that cognitive system, that stand for, or are about others, often localized outside of it. These are the entities that are called mental representations. Explanations of cognitive function try to work out how computations over these represent…Read more
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272Structural Representation as Complexity ManagementIn Gualtiero Piccinini (ed.), Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind. forthcoming.Cognition can often be modeled as the transformation of a set of variables into another. At least two kinds of entities are needed in this process: signals and coders. Representations are usually taken to be signals, but sometimes they are the coders: sometimes the computational complexity of variable transformations can be strikingly reduced by relying on a structure that mirrors that of some task-relevant entity. These kinds of coders are what philosophers call structural representations.
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343Evoke: A Python package for evolutionary signalling gamesJournal of Open Source Software 9 (103): 6703. 2024.Evoke is a Python library for evolutionary simulations of signalling games. It offers a simple and intuitive API that can be used to analyze arbitrary game-theoretic models, and to easily reproduce and customize well-known results and figures from the literature.
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285Synergy Makes Direct Perception InefficientEntropy 26 (8): 1-22. 2024.A typical claim in anti-representationalist approaches to cognition such as ecological psychology or radical embodied cognitive science is that ecological information is sufficient for guiding behavior. According to this view, affordances are immediately perceptually available to the agent (in the so-called “ambient energy array”), so sensory data does not require much further inner processing. As a consequence, mental representations are explanatorily idle: perception is immediate and direct. H…Read more
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256Grahek-style imperativismBelgrade Philosophical Annual 36 (2): 59-70. 2023.I explore some of the connections between Grahek's model of asymbolic pain, as developed in Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, and the contemporary intentionalist discussion over evaluativist and imperativist models of pain. I will sketch a Grahekian version of imperativism that is both true to his main insights and better at confronting some of the challenges that his theory has faced since its publication.
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766The Information‐Processing Perspective on CategorizationCognitive Science 48 (2). 2024.Categorization behavior can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the trade‐off between as high as possible faithfulness in the transmission of information about samples of the classes to be categorized, and as low as possible transmission costs for that same information. The kinds of categorization behaviors we associate with conceptual atoms, prototypes, and exemplars emerge naturally as a result of this trade‐off, in the presence of certain natural constraints on the probabilistic distribution o…Read more
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929The informational profile of valence: The metasemantic argument for imperativismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.Some mental states have valence—they are pleasant or unpleasant. According to imperativism, valence depends on imperative content, while evaluativism tells us that it depends on evaluative content. We argue that if one considers valence’s informational profile, it becomes evident that imperativism is superior to evaluativism. More precisely, we show that if one applies the best available metasemantics to the role played by (un)pleasant mental states in our cognitive economy, then these states tu…Read more
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982Gradualism, bifurcation and fading qualiaAnalysis 84 (2): 301-310. 2024.When reasoning about dependence relations, philosophers often rely on gradualist assumptions, according to which abrupt changes in a phenomenon of interest can result only from abrupt changes in the low-level phenomena on which it depends. These assumptions, while strictly correct if the dependence relation in question can be expressed by continuous dynamical equations, should be handled with care: very often the descriptively relevant property of a dynamical system connecting high- and low-leve…Read more
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1098The Experience of DysmenorrheaSynthese 201 (173): 1-22. 2023.Dysmenorrhea, or menstrual pain, is regularly suffered by 45 to 95% of menstruating women. Despite its prevalence, and despite the philosophical importance of pain as a general phenomenon, dysmenorrhea has been all but completely overlooked in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. This paper aims at rectifying this situation. We single out three properties of what is often considered the paradigmatic case of painful experience, what we call injury-centered pains, and argue that dysmenorrhea…Read more
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1009Many-to-One IntentionalismJournal of Philosophy 121 (2): 89-107. 2024.Intentionalism is the view that perceptual phenomenology depends on perceptual content. The aim of this paper is to make explicit an ambiguity in usual formulations of intentionalism, and to argue in favor of one way to disambiguate it. It concerns whether perceptual phenomenology depends on the content of one and only one representation (often construed as being identical to a certain perceptual experience), or instead depends on a collection of many different representations throughout the per…Read more
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988Imperative TransparencyMind 131 (522): 585-601. 2022.I respond to an objection recently formulated by Barlassina and Hayward against first-order imperativism about pain, according to which it cannot account for the self-directed motivational force of pain. I am going to agree with them: it cannot. This is because pain does not have self-directed motivational force. I will argue that the alternative view—that pain is about dealing with extramental, bodily threats, not about dealing with itself—makes better sense of introspection, and of empirical r…Read more
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52A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics, by Karen NeanderNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2019. 2019.
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1162Neural Oscillations as RepresentationsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 74 (3): 619-648. 2023.We explore the contribution made by oscillatory, synchronous neural activity to representation in the brain. We closely examine six prominent examples of brain function in which neural oscillations play a central role, and identify two levels of involvement that these oscillations take in the emergence of representations: enabling (when oscillations help to establish a communication channel between sender and receiver, or are causally involved in triggering a representation) and properly represe…Read more
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1002Real patterns and indispensabilitySynthese 198 (5): 4315-4330. 2021.While scientific inquiry crucially relies on the extraction of patterns from data, we still have a far from perfect understanding of the metaphysics of patterns—and, in particular, of what makes a pattern real. In this paper we derive a criterion of real-patternhood from the notion of conditional Kolmogorov complexity. The resulting account belongs to the philosophical tradition, initiated by Dennett :27–51, 1991), that links real-patternhood to data compressibility, but is simpler and formally …Read more
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753The Meaning of Biological SignalsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84 101348. 2020.We introduce the virtual special issue on content in signalling systems. The issue explores the uses and limits of ideas from evolutionary game theory and information theory for explaining the content of biological signals. We explain the basic idea of the Lewis-Skyrms sender-receiver framework, and we highlight three key themes of the issue: (i) the challenge of accounting for deception, misinformation and false content, (ii) the relevance of partial or total common interest to the evolution of…Read more
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636Usefulness Drives Representations to Truth: A Family of Counterexamples to Hoffman's Interface Theory of PerceptionGrazer Philosophische Studien 96 (3): 319-341. 2019.An important objection to signaling approaches to representation is that, if signaling behavior is driven by the maximization of usefulness, then signals will typically carry much more information about agent-dependent usefulness than about objective features of the world. This sort of considerations are sometimes taken to provide support for an anti-realist stance on representation itself. The author examines the game-theoretic version of this skeptical line of argument developed by Donald Hoff…Read more
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83Deception as cooperationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 77 101184. 2019.I develop a rate-distortion analysis of signaling games with imperfect common interest. Sender and receiver should be seen as jointly managing a communication channel with the objective of minimizing two independent distortion measures. I use this analysis to identify a problem with 'functional' theories of deception, and in particular Brian Skyrms's: there are perfectly cooperative, non-exploitative instances of channel management that come out as manipulative and deceptive according to those t…Read more
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182Representations are Rate-Distortion Sweet SpotsPhilosophy of Science 86 (5): 1214-1226. 2019.Information is widely perceived as essential to the study of communication and representation; still, theorists working on these topics often take themselves not to be centrally concerned with "Shannon information", as it is often put, but with some other, sometimes called "semantic" or "nonnatural",kind of information. This perception is wrong. Shannon's theory of information is the only one we need. I intend to make good on this last assertion by canvassing a fully (Shannon) informational answ…Read more
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129Synergic kindsSynthese 197 (5): 1931-1946. 2020.According to the homeostatic property cluster family of accounts, one of the main conditions for groups of properties to count as natural is that these properties be frequently co-instantiated. I argue that this condition is, in fact, not necessary for natural-kindness. Furthermore, even when it is present, the focus on co-occurrence distorts the role natural kinds play in science. Co-occurrence corresponds to what information theorists call redundancy: observing the presence of some of the prop…Read more
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546A Naturalistic Account of Content and an Application to Modal EpistemologyDissertation, Universitat de Barcelona. 2010.
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63Response to LeahyPhilosophical Psychology 29 (4): 517-519. 2016.Brian Leahy and I agree that Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics, or something very much like it, is the correct approach to the naturalization of intentionality. On the other hand, Leahy’s interesting...
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910Deception in Sender–Receiver GamesErkenntnis 80 (1): 215-227. 2015.Godfrey-Smith advocates for linking deception in sender-receiver games to the existence of undermining signals. I present games in which deceptive signals can be arbitrarily frequent, without this undermining information transfer between sender and receiver
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1389Common Interest and Signaling Games: A Dynamic AnalysisPhilosophy of Science 83 (3): 371-392. 2016.We present a dynamic model of the evolution of communication in a Lewis signaling game while systematically varying the degree of common interest between sender and receiver. We show that the level of common interest between sender and receiver is strongly predictive of the amount of information transferred between them. We also discuss a set of rare but interesting cases in which common interest is almost entirely absent, yet substantial information transfer persists in a *cheap talk* regime, a…Read more
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15La" P" de PANIC: representacionalismo y fenomenología del dolorTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 181-195. 2008.
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1337Teleosemantics and IndeterminacyDialectica 67 (4): 427-453. 2013.In the first part of the paper, I present a framework for the description and evaluation of teleosemantic theories of intentionality, and use it to argue that several different objections to these theories (the various indeterminacy and adequacy problems) are, in a certain precise sense, manifestations of the same underlying issue. I then use the framework to show that Millikan's biosemantics, her own recent declarations to the contrary notwithtanding, presents indeterminacy. In the second part,…Read more
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903Teleosemantics and productivityPhilosophical Psychology 26 (1): 47-68. 2013.There has been much discussion of so-called teleosemantic approaches to the naturalization of content. Such discussion, though, has been largely confined to simple, innate mental states with contents such as ?There is a fly here.? Even assuming we can solve the issues that crop up at this stage, an account of the content of human mental states will not get too far without an account of productivity: the ability to entertain indefinitely many thoughts. The best-known teleosemantic theory, Millika…Read more
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324Imperative content and the painfulness of painPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (1): 67-90. 2011.Representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness have problems in accounting for pain, for at least two reasons. First of all, the negative affective phenomenology of pain (its painfulness) does not seem to be representational at all. Secondly, pain experiences are not transparent to introspection in the way perceptions are. This is reflected, e.g. in the fact that we do not acknowledge pain hallucinations. In this paper, I defend that representationalism has the potential to overcome th…Read more
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