Perry and Recanati have argued that thought and speech can concern entities that they do not represent. This is possible because speakers and thinkers are pragmatically situated within their environs. I argue that thought and speech can go much farther than that. Consider a semi-nomadic tribe who tell the time only by sundials, and who say such things as, “Everywhere we go, we dine at 7”. Their speech and cognition can thus transcend the local environment, and concern remote entities without (...) the aid of either representation, or the context of utterance, or that of assessment. (shrink)

Traditionally, philosophy of psychology has individuated mental states functionally or semantically. These approaches have shaped many of the debates surrounding cognitive architecture and perceptual experience. We argue that understanding perceptual learning requires a mechanistic approach, which focuses on the structure of the mental representations underlying learned perceptual abilities. We articulate the mechanistic approach, then show how it differs from functional and semantic approaches with regards to important debates about high‐level contents, cognitive permeation, and non‐conceptual content. Finally, we argue that our (...) approach opens new avenues for explaining how perception contributes to important phenomena such as perceptual expertise and decision‐making. (shrink)

On the basis of a series of surveys targeting neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, Favela and Machery raise concerns about the conceptual messiness around what counts as a representation. I propose some alternative explanations for the pattern of responses elicited by the surveys, arguing that the way “representation” is used in the wild may turn out to be more disciplined than it initially appears—and then offer a brief catalog of these uses, as a step towards a fuller picture of what work (...) (if any) the concept of representation is doing in different contexts. (shrink)

It is well‐established within linguistics that slang serves a group‐identifying function. In this paper, a new understanding of the notion of lexical metadata is developed to provide a philosophical treatment of said function. The proposed account explains the group‐identifying function of slang in terms of certain inferences about a speaker's group affiliations that people competent with a slang word will be disposed to make given the lexical metadata related to the word in question. The resulting view is theoretically simple and (...) may extend to a whole range of linguistic phenomena that speakers utilize to position themselves in social space. (shrink)

In this article, we respond to Rosa Cao's, Frances Egan's, and John Krakauer's comments, defending our interpretation of our experimental results and the significance of an epistemology of the imprecise.

This article outlines the motivations and main findings of Favela and Machery's “Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences”, and discusses what to do with the concept of representation in the brain sciences moving forward.

Luis Favela and Edouard Machery provide a summary of a survey they previously performed on how the term representation is used in the brain sciences by neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers. They then propose, based on the results, that as the term representation is likely not referring to any ontologically real thing then imprecision in its usage should not only be tolerated but in fact encouraged as it serves to promote fruitful comparative work between areas of research that all use the (...) term. I argue that this is a sad fate for a concept as deep and important as representation. (shrink)

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of experience. But why does the mind wriggle about rather than stay focused? The answer depends on understanding mind wandering as task‐unrelated thought. Despite being the standard view of mind wandering in cognitive psychology, there has been no systematic elaboration of the task‐unrelated thought view of mind wandering. I argue for the task‐unrelated thought view by showing how mind wandering reflects a distinctive form of non‐vigilant thinking. This argument defuses several objections to the task‐unrelated (...) thought view. The account of mind wandering defended here is also compatible with a naturalistic account of subjectivity. (shrink)

Perceptual experience is self‐locating. This claim aligns with our intuitions and is the dominant view in philosophy. To defend the claim, some philosophers have advanced perspectival accounts and others have advanced agentive accounts. Here, I explore tensions between the two accounts and propose a novel, integrative account: the top‐down view, which defends that visual experience is self‐locating in virtue of cognitive maps that modulate visual processing in a top‐down fashion. I assess recent neuroscientific evidence of spatial modulation in the visual (...) cortex and show how it turns existing notions of self‐location upside‐down, shifting the focus from bottom‐up to top‐down processes. (shrink)

Teleosemantics has an indeterminacy problem. In an earlier publication, I argued that teleosemanticists may afford to be realists about indeterminacy, pointing to the phenomenon of vagueness as a case of really‐existing semantic indeterminacy. Here, I continue that project by proposing two criteria of adequacy that a semantically indeterminate theory should meet: a criterion of theoretical adequacy and a criterion of extensional adequacy. I present reasons to think that indeterminate versions of teleosemantics can meet these criteria. I end by discussing vagueness, (...) concluding that it most likely is not the same kind of phenomenon as the semantic indeterminacy afflicting teleosemantics. (shrink)

Perception not only registers property instances, but also connects with and attributes properties to individual entities—so‐called sensory individuals, or SIs. But what are SIs? The most‐discussed answers are: (i) SIs are ordinary material objects—cohesive, temporally persistent objects extended and bounded in space, and (ii) SIs are locations or regions in spacetime. I will argue for the object view of SIs on the grounds that its rival, the locational view, faces obstacles concerning the relationship between SIs and spacetime: it makes a (...) mystery of perception's representation of SIs as occupying locations in and moving in ordinary spacetime. (shrink)

According to a recent proposal, natural concepts are represented in an optimally designed similarity space, adhering to principles a skilled engineer would use for creatures with our perceptual and cognitive capacities. One key principle is that natural concepts should be easily learnable. While evidence exists for parts of this optimal design proposal, there has been no direct evidence linking naturalness to learning until now. This article presents results from a computational study on perceptual color space, demonstrating that naturalness indeed facilitates (...) learning. (shrink)

There are two main approaches within classical cognitive science to explaining how humans can entertain mental states that integrate contents across domains. The language-based framework states that this ability arises from higher cognitive domain-specific systems that combine their outputs through the language faculty, whereas the language-independent framework holds that it comes from non-language-involving connections between such systems. This article turns on its head the most influential empirical argument for the language-based framework, an argument that originates from research on spatial reorientation. (...) I make the case that neuroscientific findings about spatial reorientation in rodents and humans bolster the language-independent framework instead. (shrink)

Emotion terms such as “sad”, “happy”, and “joyful” apply to a wide range of entities. We use them to refer to mental states of sentient beings, and also to describe features of non‐mental things such as comportment, nature, events, artworks and so on. Drawing on the literature on polysemy, this article provides an in‐depth analysis of emotion descriptions. It argues that emotion terms are polysemous and distinguishes seven related senses. In addition, the article applies the analysis to shed light on (...) a long‐standing debate in philosophy of music concerning emotion descriptions of music. (shrink)

This article aims to connect issues in the epistemology of modality with issues in the philosophy of music, exploring how modalizing takes place in the context of musical performance. On the basis of studies of jazz improvisation and of classical music, it is shown that considerations about what is sonically, musically, and agentively possible play an important role for performers in the Western tonal tradition. We give a more systematic sketch of how a modal epistemology for musical performance could be (...) constructed. We argue that it is necessary to adopt a pluralist approach toward the modal epistemology of music. (shrink)

Cognitive science gives computational explanations of the brain. Philosophers have treated these explanations as if they simply claim that the brain computes. We have therefore assumed that to understand how and why computational explanation works, we must understand what it is to compute. In contrast, I argue that we can understand computational explanation by describing the resources it brings to bear on the study of the brain. Specifically, I argue that it introduces concepts and formalisms that complement cognitive science's modeling (...) goals. This allows us to understand computational explanation without having to debate what it is to compute. (shrink)

Favela and Machery conclude from their studies that neuroscientists' and psychologists' concept of representation is both unclear and confused. Rather than advocating reform or elimination of the concept, they suggest that it can serve various theoretical purposes precisely because it is unclear and confused. I challenge their claim that the concept of representation, as used by neuroscientists and psychologists, is unclear and confused, and I propose an alternative explanation of why it might appear to be so.