•  274
    Not Every Thing Must Go
    with Nina Van Rooy and Felipe De Brigard
    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. forthcoming.
    In The Entangled Brain, Pessoa criticizes standard approaches in cognitive neuroscience in which the brain is seen as a functionally decomposable, modular system with causal operations built up hierarchically. Instead, he advocates for an emergentist perspective whereby dynamic brain networks are associated, not with traditional psychological categories, but with behavioral functions characterized in evolutionary terms. Here, we raise a number of concerns with such a radical approach. We ultimat…Read more
  •  378
    Robustness and Modularity
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    Functional robustness refers to a system’s ability to maintain a function in the face of perturbations to the causal structures that support performance of that function. Modularity, a crucial element of standard methods of causal inference and difference-making accounts of causation, refers to the independent manipulability of causal relationships within a system. Functional robustness appears to be at odds with modularity. If a function is maintained despite manipulation of some causal structu…Read more
  •  76
    Mechanistic Abstraction
    Philosophy of Science 83 (5): 686-697. 2016.
    We provide an explicit taxonomy of legitimate kinds of abstraction within constitutive explanation. We argue that abstraction is an inherent aspect of adequate mechanistic explanation. Mechanistic explanations—even ideally complete ones—typically involve many kinds of abstraction and therefore do not require maximal detail. Some kinds of abstraction play the ontic role of identifying the specific complex components, subsets of causal powers, and organizational relations that produce a suitably g…Read more
  •  3026
    The cognitive neuroscience revolution
    Synthese 193 (5): 1509-1534. 2016.
    We outline a framework of multilevel neurocognitive mechanisms that incorporates representation and computation. We argue that paradigmatic explanations in cognitive neuroscience fit this framework and thus that cognitive neuroscience constitutes a revolutionary break from traditional cognitive science. Whereas traditional cognitive scientific explanations were supposed to be distinct and autonomous from mechanistic explanations, neurocognitive explanations aim to be mechanistic through and thro…Read more
  •  15
    Range content, attention, and the precision of representation
    Philosophical Psychology 33 (8): 1141-1161. 2020.
    A number of authors have recently cited phenomenal effects of covert attention as a source of objection to representationalism. These authors maintain that covert attention brings about changes to phenomenology that cannot be explained by changes in representational content. This paper deals with two related issues that are central to this debate: (1) how attention interacts with representational content, and (2) how variations in the precision or determinacy of representational content should b…Read more
  •  15
    Multiple Realization and Robustness
    In Marta Bertolaso, Silvia Caianiello & Emanuele Serrelli (eds.), Biological Robustness. Emerging Perspectives from within the Life Sciences, Springer. pp. 75-94. 2018.
    Multiple realization has traditionally been characterized as a thesis about the relation between kinds posited by the taxonomic systems of different sciences. In this paper, I argue that there are good reasons to move beyond this framing. I begin by showing how the traditional framing is tied to positivist models of explanation and reduction and proceed to develop an alternate framing that operates instead within causal explanatory frameworks. I draw connections between this account and the noti…Read more
  •  477
    Operationalizing Consciousness: Subjective Report and Task Performance
    Philosophy of Science 80 (5): 1031-1041. 2013.
    There are two distinct but related threads in this article. The first is methodological and is aimed at exploring the relative merits and faults of different operational definitions of consciousness. The second is conceptual and is aimed at understanding the prior commitments regarding the nature of conscious content that motivate these positions. I consider two distinct operationalizations: one defines consciousness in terms of dichotomous subjective reports, the other in terms of graded subjec…Read more