•  2
    The potential of plant action potentials
    with Jonny Lee
    Synthese 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
  •  61
    Philosophers and cognitive scientists reassess systematicity in the post-connectionist era, offering perspectives from ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, enactivism, and other methodologies.
  •  104
    The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (edited book)
    with Sarah Robins and John Francis Symons
    Routledge. 2009.
    _The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Second Edition_ is an invaluable guide and major reference source to the major topics, problems, concepts and debates in philosophy of psychology and is the first companion of its kind. A team of renowned international contributors provide forty-nine chapters organised into six clear parts: Historical background to Philosophy of Psychology Psychological Explanation Cognition and Representation The biological basis of psychology Perceptual Exp…Read more
  •  14
    Understanding brain circuits and their dynamics
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 274-275. 2010.
    We argue that Anderson's (MRH) needs further development in several directions. First, a thoroughgoing criticism of the several alternatives is required. Second, the course between the Scylla of full holism and the Charybdis of structural-functional modularism must be plotted more distinctly. Third, methodologies better suited to reveal brain circuits must be brought in. Finally, the constraints that naturalistic settings provide should be considered
  •  1377
    Are plants cognitive? A reply to Adams
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 73 64-71. 2019.
    According to F. Adams [this journal, vol. 68, 2018] cognition cannot be realized in plants or bacteria. In his view, plants and bacteria respond to the here-and-now in a hardwired, inflexible manner, and are therefore incapable of cognitive activity. This article takes issue with the pursuit of plant cognition from the perspective of an empirically informed philosophy of plant neurobiology. As we argue, empirical evidence shows, contra Adams, that plant behavior is in many ways analogous to anim…Read more
  •  25
    Zoocentrism in the weeds? Cultivating plant models for cognitive yield
    Biology and Philosophy 35 (5): 1-27. 2020.
    It remains at best controversial to claim, non-figuratively, that plants are cognitive agents. At the same time, it is taken as trivially true that many animals are cognitive agents, arguably through an implicit or explicit appeal to natural science. Yet, any given definition of cognition implicates at least some further processes, such as perception, action, memory, and learning, which must be observed either behaviorally, psychologically, neuronally, or otherwise physiologically. Crucially, ho…Read more
  •  72
    What Is It Like to Be a Plant?
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 24 (9-10): 205-227. 2017.
    In this article, I explore the possibility of plant subjective awareness within the conceptual framework of Plant Neurobiology -- an emerging discipline that aims to unearth the way plants perceive and act purposefully. I shall argue that plants lack none of the functional structures that are supposedly needed, and so we have no scientific reason to exclude the possibility that they have evolved different structures that underlie their own subjective experiences.
  •  127
    The philosophy of plant neurobiology: a manifesto
    Synthese 193 (5): 1323-1343. 2016.
    ‘Plant neurobiology’ has emerged in recent years as a multidisciplinary endeavor carried out mainly by steady collaboration within the plant sciences. The field proposes a particular approach to the study of plant intelligence by putting forward an integrated view of plant signaling and adaptive behavior. Its objective is to account for the way plants perceive and act in a purposeful manner. But it is not only the plant sciences that constitute plant neurobiology. Resources from philosophy and c…Read more
  •  65
    ‘Plant neurobiology’ has emerged in recent years as a multidisciplinary endeavor carried out mainly by steady collaboration within the plant sciences. The field proposes a particular approach to the study of plant intelligence by putting forward an integrated view of plant signaling and adaptive behavior. Its objective is to account for the way plants perceive and act in a purposeful manner. But it is not only the plant sciences that constitute plant neurobiology. Resources from philosophy and c…Read more
  •  136
    Some empirical evidence in the artificial language acquisition literature has been taken to suggest that statistical learning mechanisms are insufficient for extracting structural information from an artificial language. According to the more than one mechanism (MOM) hypothesis, at least two mechanisms are required in order to acquire language from speech: (a) a statistical mechanism for speech segmentation; and (b) an additional rule-following mechanism in order to induce grammatical regulariti…Read more