The more philosophers I have come to know, the more I realize how deeply personal philosophy is. Philosophical positions often emerge from personal experience and character – even the seemingly most technical, detached, and abstract ones. As Iris Murdoch wrote:…
The individuation of cognitive kinds is a fascinating subject at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and psychology. This topic delves into how we classify and distinguish between different types of cognitive processes and entities. Understanding this concept…
Externalism in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science offers a compelling framework for understanding the nature and individuation of cognitive kinds, challenging traditional internalist perspectives that locate cognitive processes solely within the confines of the individual brain. Externalism posits…
Episodic memory, a type of long-term memory, plays a critical role in our cognitive architecture by enabling individuals to recall specific events from their past, situated within particular contexts of time and place. This form of memory is distinct from…
Cognitive ontology, a domain concerned with the classification and organization of mental phenomena, plays a crucial role in understanding the structure and function of the mind. Within this framework, episodic memory is a fascinating subject due to its unique characteristics…
Concepts are the constituents of thoughts. As understood by cognitive scientists, they are items in semantic memory that are deployed in higher cognitive processes including inference, categorization, and judgment. In Chapter 2 of his excellent book Cognitive Ontology, Khalidi examines…
As I mentioned in the previous blogpost, the core of the book consists in a close look at a number of case studies of putative cognitive kinds, with a chapter devoted to each of seven theoretical constructs drawn from a…
Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s book Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences offers a compelling non-reductionist approach to understanding the furniture of the mind: the ‘real kinds’ of cognitive science. This book is a thoughtful and timely addition to current…
This week the Brains Blog is hosting a symposium on Muhammad Ali Khalidi’s new book Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences (Cambridge University Press). Over the next four days, we will have four posts from Khalidi summarizing central…
[embedded content] An interview with academic visitor Dr María de Jesús Medina Arellano, Professor and Researcher at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University (UNAM), on her research focusing on the ethics and regulation of biotechnologies in developing…
List of some of the papers and books discussed: [embedded content] Friston, K. (2014). Active inference and agency. Cognitive Neuroscience, 5(2), 119–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/17588928.2014.905517 Dr. Wanja Wiese https://homepage.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/wanja.wiese/ Dołęga, K., & Dewhurst, J. E. (2020). Fame in the predictive brain: a…
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[embedded content] “During the COVID 19 pandemic, politicians said, ‘We need to follow the science’. But science can’t tell us whether we should have a lockdown, or mandatory vaccination. For that we need thoughtful, careful ethical analysis,” says Wilkinson. But…
I think those chest-crossing Orthodox drivers are far more ontologically sophisticated than Socrates. Image: Easter on Santorini: Georgios Michos, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons: Link to image here. This isn’t an apologia for Orthodoxy in particular. Identical observations…
