Concepts at the Interface has just been published by OUP. This book has come out of my ERC Consolidator Grant project. Thanks to the ERC, an open access pdf is available to download for free. I am grateful to the many colleagues who offered references, criticism, discussion and generous advice…
Deep neural networks – how do they think?
Deep neural networks perform astoundingly well on a whole range of difficult tasks. But what is going on inside? Are their computations anything like human reasoning? This paper shows that there are in fact two quite different ways that their internal processing works. This new distinction at the level of…
New paper: Concept Appraisal
I’m very pleased to report that the Project’s interdisciplinary experimental work has now been published in Cognitive Science: Sapphira R. Thorne, Jake Quilty-Dunn, Joulia Smortchkova, Nicholas Shea*, & James A. Hampton (2021), ‘Concept Appraisal’, Cognitive Science, 45, e12978. [open access pdf] [link] In short, we find that people do reflect on or appraise…
Most accessed articles
I was delighted to see that Jake Quilty-Dunn‘s excellent article on concepts is currently the most accessed article at Mind & Language, the leading journal in philosophy of cognitive science. In fact, two of the current top three papers have come out of the ERC Metacognition of Concepts project. Thanks…
OUP Blog Post …
… about Representation in Cognitive Science is here.
New TICS paper: metacognitive tools of cultural origin
Psychologists are making great strides forward in uncovering the mechanisms that support human metacognition. Especially when we also find out how those mechanisms work in the brain, we tend to assume that they are hard wired, a fixed part of our distinctively human endowment. However, capacities that we learn from…
New paper: can metacognitive development explain stages of conceptual development?
One rich source of evidence for philosophers interested in concepts is the developmental literature. Indeed, some of the most theoretically sophisticated theorists of concepts are developmental psychologists. A natural extension of asking about the way adults turn their metacognitive capacities onto their own concepts is to ask how children’s metacognition…
TICS paper: Consciousness and Metacognition
One leading way to study consciousness empirically is through its links with metacognition. Indeed, some theories of consciousness equate them: conscious states just are metacognitively monitored states. The other leading scientific theory of consciousness is the global workspace theory. These two approaches are usually taken to be rivals. That is…
New book
Representation in Cognitive Science (2018, OUP) What is a representation? Where does meaning come from? How can the brain represent objects and events in the outside world? That is one of the deepest questions in cognitive science (AHRC project). To answer it, my book turns to cutting edge research coming…
New Paper: abstract concepts and metacognition
It is common to distinguish ‘abstract’ concepts like BEAUTY and ELECTRON from more concrete concepts like RED and CAT. A concrete concept like CAT might be grounded, in some sense, in the sight, sound and feel of cats; perhaps also in what you feel like doing when you see one…
