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494Systematicity and the Cognition of Structured DomainsJournal of Philosophy 98 (4). 2001.The current debate over systematicity concerns the formal conditions a scheme of mental representation must satisfy in order to explain the systematicity of thought.1 The systematicity of thought is assumed to be a pervasive property of minds, and can be characterized (roughly) as follows: anyone who can think T can think systematic variants of T, where the systematic variants of T are found by permuting T’s constituents. So, for example, it is an alleged fact that anyone who can think the thoug…Read more
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62From filters to fillers: an active inference approach to body image distortion in the selfie eraAI and Society (1): 33-48. 2021.Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by a…Read more
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26Enacting Gender: An Enactive-Ecological Account of Gender and Its FluidityFrontiers in Psychology 13. 2022.This paper aims to show that genders are enacted, by providing an account of how an individual can be said to enact a gender and explaining how, consequently, genders can be fluid. On the enactive-ecological view we defend, individuals first and foremost perceive the world as fields of affordances, that is, structured sets of action possibilities. Fields of natural affordances offer action possibilities because of the natural properties of organisms and environments. Handles offer graspability t…Read more
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133Active Inference and Cooperative Communication: An Ecological Alternative to the Alignment ViewFrontiers in Psychology 12. 2021.We present and contrast two accounts of cooperative communication, both based on Active Inference, a framework that unifies biological and cognitive processes. The mental alignment account, defended in Vasil et al., takes the function of cooperative communication to be the alignment of the interlocutor's mental states, and cooperative communicative behavior to be driven by an evolutionarily selected adaptive prior belief favoring the selection of action policies that promote such an alignment. W…Read more
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61Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative BehaviorEcological Psychology 34. 2021.In this paper, we introduce an ecological account of communication according to which acts of communication are active inferences achieved by affecting the behavior of a target organism via the modification of its field of affordances. Constraining a target organism’s behavior constitutes a mechanism of socially extended active inference, allowing organisms to proactively regulate their inner states through the behavior of other organisms. In this general conception of communication, the type of…Read more
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150From neurodiversity to neurodivergence: the role of epistemic and cognitive marginalizationSynthese 199 (5-6): 12843-12868. 2021.Diversity is an undeniable fact of nature, and there is now evidence that nature did not stop generating diversity just before “designing” the human brain :15,468–15,473. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1509654112, 2015). If neurodiversity is a fact of nature, what about neurodivergence? Although the terms “neurodiversity” and “neurodivergence” are sometimes used interchangeably, this is, we believe, a mistake: “neurodiversity” is a term of inclusion whereas “neurodivergence” is a term of exclusion…Read more
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149The contrast between third- and first-personal accounts of the experiences of autistic persons has much to teach us about epistemic injustice and epistemic agency. This paper argues that bringing about greater epistemic justice for autistic people requires developing a relational account of epistemic agency. We begin by systematically identifying the many types of epistemic injustice autistic people face, specifically with regard to general assumptions regarding autistic people’s sociability or …Read more
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30From filters to fillers: an active inference approach to body image distortion in the selfie eraAI and Society (1): 1-16. 2020.Advances in artificial intelligence, as well as its increased presence in everyday life, have brought the emergence of many new phenomena, including an intriguing appearance of what seems to be a variant of body dysmorphic disorder, coined “Snapchat dysmorphia”. Body dysmorphic disorder is a DSM-5 psychiatric disorder defined as a preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others. Snapchat dysmorphia is fueled by a…Read more
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19A New Hope: A better ICM to understand human cognitive architectural variabilitySynthese 199 (1-2): 871-903. 2020.How can we best understand human cognitive architectural variability? We believe that the relationships between theories in neurobiology, cognitive science and evolutionary biology posited by evolutionary psychology’s Integrated Causal Model has unduly supported various essentialist conceptions of the human cognitive architecture, monomorphic minds, that mask HCA variability, and we propose a different set of relationships between theories in the same domains to support a different, non-essentia…Read more
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31Cultural Blankets: Epistemological Pluralism in the Evolutionary Epistemology of MechanismsJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2): 335-350. 2019.In a recently published paper, we argued that theories of cultural evolution can gain explanatory power by being more pluralistic. In his reply to it, Dennett agreed that more pluralism is needed. Our paper’s main point was to urge cultural evolutionists to get their hands dirty by describing the fine details of cultural products and by striving to offer detailed and, when explanatory, varied algorithms or mechanisms to account for them. While Dennett’s latest work on cultural evolution does mar…Read more
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10Convolution and modal representations in Thagard and Stewart’s neural theory of creativity: a critical analysisSynthese 193 (5): 1535-1560. 2016.According to Thagard and Stewart :1–33, 2011), creativity results from the combination of neural representations, and combination results from convolution, an operation on vectors defined in the holographic reduced representation framework. They use these ideas to understand creativity as it occurs in many domains, and in particular in science. We argue that, because of its algebraic properties, convolution alone is ill-suited to the role proposed by Thagard and Stewart. The semantic pointer con…Read more
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25Et pourquoi pas une explication non représentationnelle de l'action motrice? Considérations neurophénoménologiquesDialogue 46 (2): 353-360. 2007.
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7Et pourquoi pas une explication non représentationnelle de l’action motrice?: Considérations neurophénoménologiquesDialogue 46 (2): 353-360. 2007.
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15After phrenology : Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain de Michael L. AndersonPhilosophiques 43 (2): 533-537. 2016.Mélyssa Thibodeau-Doré,Pierre Poirier
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38The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think Robert Aunger New York: Free Press, 2002, 392 pp., $41.00 (review)Dialogue 44 (2): 410. 2005.
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46Convolution and modal representations in Thagard and Stewart’s neural theory of creativity: a critical analysisSynthese 193 (5): 1535-1560. 2016.According to Thagard and Stewart :1–33, 2011), creativity results from the combination of neural representations, and combination results from convolution, an operation on vectors defined in the holographic reduced representation framework. They use these ideas to understand creativity as it occurs in many domains, and in particular in science. We argue that, because of its algebraic properties, convolution alone is ill-suited to the role proposed by Thagard and Stewart. The semantic pointer con…Read more
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The concept of innateness and the destiny of evolutionary psychologyJournal of Mind and Behavior 29 (1-2): 17-47. 2008.According to a popular version of the current evolutionary attitude in cognitive science, the mind is a massive aggregate of autonomous innate computational devices, each addressing specific adaptive problems. Our aim in this paper is to show that although this version of the attitude, which we call GOFEP , does not suffer from fatal flaws that would make it incoherent or otherwise conceptually inadequate, it will nevertheless prove unacceptable to most cognitive scientists today. To show this, …Read more
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21Les gardiens du bon usage : Étude critique de « Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience », de P. M. R. Hacker et M. R. Bennett (review)Philosophiques 34 (1): 183-200. 2007.
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32À Harvard durant l’année académique 1940-41, les philosophes-mathématiciens Quine, Tarski et Carnap débattaient de la possibilité d’établir une distinction entre les énoncés analytiques et synthétiques qui soit suffisamment mordante pour dégager un statut spécial à l’épistémologie. Quine et Tarski s’objectaient à la distinction et l’objection de Quine verra notamment le jour sous le titre fameux « Les deux dogmes de l’empirisme ». Carnap, dans son autobiographie intellectuelle, se souvient avoir…Read more
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André De Tienne, L'analytique de La représentation chez Peirce (review)Philosophy in Review 16 251-253. 1996.
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61Philosophie de l'esprit: état des lieuxVrin. 2000.Cet ouvrage vise à délimiter le champ d'investigation de la philosophie de l'esprit. Il comprend huit chapitres. Le premier, le plus général, se veut une première délimitation du champ d'investigation de la philosophie de l'esprit à l'aide de ses trois concepts clés: l'intentionnalité, la rationalité et la conscience. Le chapitre suivant se veut une réflexion plus générale sur les motivations philosophiques qui commandent des jugements si opposés sur le statut ontologique et épistémologique de l…Read more
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76Cognitive evolutionary psychology without representational nativismJournal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 15 (2): 143-159. 2003.A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be (a) heritable and (b) ‘quasi-independent’ from other heritable traits. They must be heritable because there can be no selection for traits that are not. They must be quasi-independent from other heritable traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cognitive capacity could have no distinctive consequences for fitness if effecting those variations required widespread changes in other unrelated traits and cap…Read more
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2Pascal Engel, La dispute: une introduction à la philosophie analytique (review)Philosophy in Review 18 (5): 324-326. 1998.
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3Judith Genova, Wittgenstein: A way of seeing Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 16 (4): 257-259. 1996.
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44By using the name of one of his first papers (See Clark 1987) for his latest book, Andy Clark proves how consistent his view of the mind has been over his career. Indeed Being There becomes the latest in a ten year effort, laid out over a series of books, to flesh out one of the few comprehensive proposals in philosophy of mind since Fodor’s Representational Theory of Mind (RTM). Each book in the series accentuates one aspect of Clark’s view. The first, Microcognition (Clark 1989), explores the …Read more
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10The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We ThinkRobert Aunger New York: Free Press, 2002, 392 pp., $41.00 (review)Dialogue 44 (2): 410-412. 2005.
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27Jean-Frédéric de Pasquale ,Pierre Poirier
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71Le véritable retour des définitionsDialogue 50 (1): 153-164. 2011.In our critical review of Doing without Concepts, we argue that although the heterogeneity hypothesis (according to which exemplars, prototypes and theories are natural kinds that should replace ‘concept’) may end fruitless debates in the psychology of concepts, Edouard Machery did not anticipate one consequence of his suggestion: Definitions now acquire a new status as another one of the bodies of information replacing ‘concept’. In order to support our hypothesis, we invoke dual-process models…Read more
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