The Individuation of Cognitive Kinds

A central thesis of Cognitive Ontology is that cognitive kinds are unlikely to reduce to neural kinds. I found one of the most exciting threads in the book to be an argument supporting this anti-reductionistic thesis, which Khalidi summarizes in…

What’s (episodic) memory good for anyway?

What makes episodic memory stand out from the motley array of memory types, running the gamut from working memory through to procedural memory (with many more waiting in the wings!)? Following Muhammad Ali Khalidi, we can cleave episodic memory from…

Marr’s Levels and Ontology

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…

Cognitive Ontology – Part 1

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…