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497Systematicity 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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480Atomistic learning in non-modular systemsPhilosophical Psychology 18 (3): 313-325. 2005.We argue that atomistic learning?learning that requires training only on a novel item to be learned?is problematic for networks in which every weight is available for change in every learning situation. This is potentially significant because atomistic learning appears to be commonplace in humans and most non-human animals. We briefly review various proposed fixes, concluding that the most promising strategy to date involves training on pseudo-patterns along with novel items, a form of learning …Read more
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244A framework for thinking about distributed cognitionPragmatics and Cognition 14 (2): 215-234. 2006.As is often the case when scientific or engineering fields emerge, new concepts are forged or old ones are adapted. When this happens, various arguments rage over what ultimately turns out to be conceptual misunderstandings. At that critical time, there is a need for an explicit reflection on the meaning of the concepts that define the field. In this position paper, we aim to provide a reasoned framework in which to think about various issues in the field of distributed cognition. We argue that …Read more
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230Epistemological strata and the rules of right reasonSynthese 141 (3). 2004.It has been commonplace in epistemology since its inception to idealize away from computational resource constraints, i.e., from the constraints of time and memory. One thought is that a kind of ideal rationality can be specified that ignores the constraints imposed by limited time and memory, and that actual cognitive performance can be seen as an interaction between the norms of ideal rationality and the practicalities of time and memory limitations. But a cornerstone of naturalistic epistemol…Read more
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180Embodied thoughts. Concepts and compositionality without languageTheoria Et Historia Scientarum 1 53-72. 2006.Is thinking necessarily linguistic? Do we _think with words_, to use Bermudez’s (2003) phrase? Or does thinking occur in some other, yet to be determined, representational format? Or again do we think in various formats, switching from one to the other as tasks demand? In virtue perhaps of the ambiguous nature of first-person introspective data on the matter, philosophers have traditionally disagreed on this question, some thinking that thought had to be pictorial, other insisting that it could …Read more
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154From 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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150The 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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141Structured Thoughts: The Spatial-Motor ViewIn Gerhard Schurz, Edouard Machery & Markus Werning (eds.), Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience, De Gruyter. pp. 229-250. 2005.Is thinking necessarily linguistic? Do we think with words, to use Bermudez’s (2003) phrase? Or does thinking occur in some other, yet to be determined, representational format? Or again do we think in various formats, switching from one to the other as tasks demand? In virtue perhaps of the ambiguous na- ture of first-person introspective data on the matter, philosophers have tradition- ally disagreed on this question, some thinking that thought had to be pictorial, other insisting that it could…Read more
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134Active 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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100Representation and indicationIn Hugh Clapin (ed.), Representation in Mind, Elsevier. pp. 21--40. 2004.This paper is about two kinds of mental content and how they are related. We are going to call them representation and indication. We will begin with a rough characterization of each. The differences, and why they matter, will, hopefully, become clearer as the paper proceeds
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87Va Savoir! De la connaissance en général -- Pascal Engel (review)Dialogue 48 (1): 217-221. 2009.
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77Cognitive 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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72Le 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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62Philosophie 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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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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62Communication 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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53Finding a place for elimination in inter-level reductionist activities: Reply to WimsattSynthese 151 (3). 2006.According to Wimsatt, a proper treatment of reduction must distinguish between two types of reductionist activities scientists engage in. One of the benefits of better understanding the nature of reduction, he believes, is that it shows that eliminativism, that is, the elimination of concepts and theories from science, is a rather circumscribed and limited affair, especially in the case of inter-level reductionist activities. While I agree with Wimsatt that it is important to distinguish the two…Read more
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48Psychologie évolutionniste et théories interdomainesDialogue 40 (3): 453-. 2001.Evolutionary psychology presupposes relations between theories of different domains that the two traditional models, reduction and autonomy, cannot properly account for. We aim to construct a model of relations between theories that succeeds where traditional models fail. We show that the multiple realizability argument, on which the autonomist model is thought to rest, is compatible with reductionism and, following Kim, that an autonomist reading of the argument deprives psychology of its scien…Read more
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47Convolution 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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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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39The 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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37Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, Neuroscience and Philosophy, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, 215p.Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, Neuroscience and Philosophy, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, 215p (review)Philosophiques 36 (1): 260-265. 2009.
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33La théorie des systèmes développementaux et la construction sociale des maladies mentalesPhilosophiques 33 (1): 147-182. 2006.Dans ce texte, nous proposons un cadre, qui vise à intégrer les contributions des approches constructionnistes et biologiques dans un domaine précis, celui des maladies mentales. Pour ce faire, nous utiliserons quelques propositions récentes faites par des philosophes de la biologie — plus spécifiquement les idées avancées par les tenants de la « théorie des systèmes développementaux » ainsi que la notion d’« enracinement génératif » .In this paper, we are proposing a framework to integrate the …Read more
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33L'empire contre-attaque : le retour de la réduction psychophysiquePhilosophiques 27 (1): 39-62. 2000.En refusant à la psychologie la latitude accordée aux autres sciences, l’argument concluant à l’irréductibilité des propriétés psychologiques à partir de leur réalisation multiple manifeste une attitude antinaturaliste à l’égard de cette science. En science, il est possible de relativiser les réductions à des domaines bien définis, c’est-à-dire des domaines qui découpent la nature d’une manière non ad hoc , et de corriger en conséquence l’appareil conceptuel des théories. Et en science, il est p…Read more
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32Cultural 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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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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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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28Jean-Frédéric de Pasquale ,Pierre Poirier
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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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