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…
As I mentioned in the first blogpost, one aspect of some cognitive kinds that I try to emphasize throughout the book is their externalism, or as I have put it, their “etiological-environmental individuation.” This cumbersome expression is a more accurate…
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…
In this third of four blogposts, I’m going to introduce another theoretical construct from cognitive science, episodic memory, that I discuss in my book, and I will try to summarize my argument that it is a cognitive kind (and describe…
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. Dr. 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…