Philosophy and the Mind Sciences

Interoception has received growing attention in the past few decades. Yet, its conceptual foundations remain underexplored. This paper aims to expose conceptual limitations in dominant accounts of interoception, which are typically either viscerocentric or internalist. I argue that current philosophical definitions of interoception fail to accommodate the bidirectional feedback loop between olfac…

Explanations of cognitive behavior often appeal to computations over representations. What does it take for a system to implement a given computation over suitable representational vehicles within that system? We argue that the language of causality---and specifically the theory of causal abstraction---provides a fruitful lens on this topic. Drawing on current discussions in deep learning with ar…

What do we lose in our social lives when we lose olfaction? Many theories would agree that we lose access to certain sensory information and, with it, the possibility of perceiving others, the environment, and even ourselves as we once did. This paper argues that losing olfaction also entails a more fundamental loss: a prereflective, unconscious layer of affective and behavioral attunement that c…

Within theories of concepts and categorization, a concept is considered coherent to the extent that it is perceived as a structured whole. Although this notion plays an important role in the study of conceptual processes such as categorization and reasoning, it has proven difficult to define and operationalize. In this paper, we propose a formal framework in which the coherence of a concept depen…

Are emotions natural kinds? The debate is often framed as a choice between biologically fixed kinds with invariant essences and culturally constructed categories lacking natural reality. I argue that this framing is too restrictive because it conflates two independent questions: what fixes the content of emotion concepts, and what unifies natural kinds. Cross-classifying externalist and internali…

This paper addresses the intention-motor interface challenge, that is, the problem of how propositional intentions and non-propositional motor representations coordinate in guiding purposive action (cf. Butterfill and Sinigaglia 2014; Mylopoulos and Pacherie 2017). While several solutions have been proposed, they often leave aspects of the challenge unexplained or generate new interlock points. I…

Analogical abduction is a form of reasoning that combines analogical analysis with inference to the best explanation to address the epistemological problem of other consciousnesses—that is, what justifies our ascriptions of consciousness to other entities? In this paper, I apply analogical abduction to the case of fetal consciousness, focusing on fetuses at the end of the second trimester. I pres…

A new method for determining whether nonverbal organisms such as human infants have consciousness has recently emerged. According to this so-called marker methodology, we do not use theories of consciousness to assess whether creatures are conscious by meeting the conditions set out by those theories. Rather, we identify a range of markers that putatively correlate with consciousness to make educ…

Iconicity denotes an informative relation between the form of an utterance and the meaning of that utterance. With good design, an utterance directly invites a suitable perceiver with a certain initiation to grasp a meaning in the right direction. Despite the touted importance of iconicity in languaging, it proves difficult to define more formally. When the term is defined, researchers often base…

Vision has a dual life or possibly more. On the one hand, vision describes the environment as being a certain way. On the other hand, vision guides the execution of actions. Vision is, thus, Janus-faced : it is tied to both describing properties, this description being related also to spatial properties relevant for action, as well as to guiding the motor execution of that action. Philosophers an…

This paper defends a stuff theory of the chemical senses: smell and taste, unlike vision, touch, and hearing, are directly oriented toward stuffs rather than individual objects. I first argue that stuff constitutes an irreducible ontological category — distinct from both individuals and universals. I then contend, drawing on recent anti-reductionist work in the philosophy of chemistry, that chemi…

Vehicles, the carriers of representational content, are an important, if somewhat undertheorized, posit in cognitive science. In this paper we argue that generating and maintaining representational vehicles is not a trivial problem, even more clearly so when we are dealing with cognition in complex systems such as brains, or brain-body-environment aggregates. We discuss various vehicle-building o…

Are there ‘basic’ tastes and, if so, how many are there? While, to date, this question has mostly been addressed by sensory scientists, it would seem ripe for contemporary philosophical consideration (i.e., after Plato and Aristotle’s early discussion of the matter). Consider only the fact that the majority of those scientists who have written on the subject appear unable to make up their minds a…

Availability of the notion that the brain or mind represents the world by instantiating structures similar to relations amongst external items is crucial to the idea than an AI could represent the world in the same way that a human being does. This paper looks at the historical emergence of this notion within the structuralist movement in science, mathematics and philosophy seen in the late ninet…

The standard way of construing representation in neuroscience thinks of neural activities as encoding information. The activity then contributes to the function of the system by communicating that information to its outputs. We argue that this way of thinking is in tension with a number of well-established facts about neural activities. In general, neural activities do not correspond to one parti…