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Extended animal cognitionSynthese 203 (5). 2024.According to the extended cognition thesis, an agent’s cognitive system can sometimes include extracerebral components amongst its physical constituents. Here, we show that such a view of cognition has an unjustifiably anthropocentric focus, for it tends to depict cognitive extensions as a human-only affair. In contrast, we will argue that if human cognition extends, then the cognition of many non-human animals extends too, for many non-human animals rely on the same cognition-extending strategi…Read more
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Almost Faces? ;-) Emoticons and Emojis as Cultural Artifacts for Social Cognition OnlineTopoi 1-12. forthcoming.Emoticons and facial emojis are ubiquitous in contemporary digital communication, where it has been proposed that they make up for the lack of social information from real faces. In this paper, I construe them as cultural artifacts that exploit the neurocognitive mechanisms for face perception. Building on a step-by-step comparison of psychological evidence on the perception of faces vis-à-vis the perception of emoticons/emojis, I assess to what extent they do effectively vicariate real faces wi…Read more
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The potential of plant action potentialsSynthese 202 (6): 1-30. 2023.The mechanism underlying action potentials is routinely used to explicate the mechanistic model of explanation in the philosophy of science. However, characterisations of action potentials often fixate on neurons, mentioning plant cells in passing or ignoring them entirely. The plant sciences are also prone to neglecting non-neuronal action potentials and their role in plant biology. This oversight is significant because plant action potentials bear instructive similarities to those generated by…Read more
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Predictive coding I: IntroductionPhilosophy Compass 19 (1). 2024.Predictive coding – sometimes also known as ‘predictive processing’, ‘free energy minimisation’, or ‘prediction error minimisation’ – claims to offer a complete, unified theory of cognition that stretches all the way from cellular biology to phenomenology. However, the exact content of the view, and how it might achieve its ambitions, is not clear. This series of articles examines predictive coding and attempts to identify its key commitments and justification. The present article begins by focu…Read more
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Structural Resemblance and the Causal Role of ContentErkenntnis 1-20. forthcoming.Some proponents of structural representations (henceforth, structuralists) claim that no other theory of representation can legitimatize the explanatory appeals that cognitive science makes to mental content. Because other naturalistic approaches to representation purportedly posit an arbitrary relation between representing vehicles and representational content, these approaches must appeal to the role played by a representation, i.e., how it is used by the system in which it is embedded, to gro…Read more
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The Structure of Analog RepresentationNoûs 57 (1): 209-237. 2023.This paper develops a theory of analog representation. We first argue that the mark of the analog is to be found in the nature of a representational system’s interpretation function, rather than in its vehicles or contents alone. We then develop the rulebound structure theory of analog representation, according to which analog systems are those that use interpretive rules to map syntactic structural features onto semantic structural features. The theory involves three degree-theoretic measures t…Read more
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Computational indeterminacy and explanations in cognitive scienceBiology and Philosophy 37 (6): 1-30. 2022.Computational physical systems may exhibit indeterminacy of computation (IC). Their identified physical dynamics may not suffice to select a unique computational profile. We consider this phenomenon from the point of view of cognitive science and examine how computational profiles of cognitive systems are identified and justified in practice, in the light of IC. To that end, we look at the literature on the underdetermination of theory by evidence and argue that the same devices that can be succ…Read more
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Transparency and the Phenomenology of Extended CognitionLímite: Revista de Filosofía y Psicología. forthcoming.Extended cognition brings with it a particular phenomenology. It has been argued that when an artifact is integrated into an agent’s cognitive system, it becomes transparent in use to the cognizing subject. In this paper, I challenge some of the assumptions underlying how the transparency of artifacts is described in extended cognition theory. To this end, I offer two arguments. First, I make room for some forms of conscious thought and attention within extended cognitive routines, and I questio…Read more
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The “cognitive neuroscience revolution” is not a (Kuhnian) revolution. Evidence from scientometricsRivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 13 (2): 142-156. 2022._Abstract_: Fueled by the rapid development of neuroscientific tools and techniques, some scholars consider the shift from traditional cognitive psychology toward cognitive neuroscience to be a _revolution_ (most notably Boone and Piccinini). However, the term “revolution” in philosophy of science can easily be construed as involving a paradigm shift in the sense of Kuhn’s _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_. Is a Kuhnian account sound in the case at hand? To answer this question, we consi…Read more
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The Personal/Subpersonal DistinctionPhilosophy Compass 9 (5): 338-346. 2014.Daniel Dennett's distinction between personal and subpersonal explanations was fundamental in establishing the philosophical foundations of cognitive science. Since it was first introduced in 1969, the personal/subpersonal distinction has been adapted to fit different approaches to the mind. In one example of this, the ‘Pittsburgh school’ of philosophers attempted to map Dennett's distinction onto their own distinction between the ‘space of reasons’ and the ‘space of causes’. A second example ca…Read more
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Secret charades: reply to HuttoPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (5): 1183-1187. 2022.
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From representations in predictive processing to degrees of representational featuresMinds and Machines 32 (3): 461-484. 2022.Whilst the topic of representations is one of the key topics in philosophy of mind, it has only occasionally been noted that representations and representational features may be gradual. Apart from vague allusions, little has been said on what representational gradation amounts to and why it could be explanatorily useful. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel take on gradation of representational features within the neuroscientific framework of predictive processing. More specifically, we …Read more
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A multidimensional phenomenal space for pain: structure, primitiveness, and utilityPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (1): 223-243. 2021.Pain is often used as the paradigmatic example of a phenomenal kind with a phenomenal quality common and unique to its instantiations. Philosophers have intensely discussed the relation between the subjective feeling, which unites pains and distinguishes them from other experiences, and the phenomenal properties of sensory, affective, and evaluative character along which pains typically vary. At the center of this discussion is the question whether the phenomenal properties prove necessary and/o…Read more
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Beyond the Platonic Brain: facing the challenge of individual differences in function-structure mappingSynthese 199 (1-2): 2129-2155. 2020.In their attempt to connect the workings of the human mind with their neural realizers, cognitive neuroscientists often bracket out individual differences to build a single, abstract model that purportedly represents (almost) every human being’s brain. In this paper I first examine the rationale behind this model, which I call ‘Platonic Brain Model’. Then I argue that it is to be surpassed in favor of multiple models allowing for patterned inter-individual differences. I introduce the debate on …Read more
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University of AntwerpPost-doctoral Fellow
IUSS Pavia
Alumnus
Antwerp, Antwerp Province, Belgium
Areas of Interest
5 more