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The Journal of Philosophy @jrnlofphil.bsky.social · 1d

"Wandering Inquiry" by Susanna Siegel #newarticle
#onlinefirst #philosophy #philsky

doi.org/10.5840/jphi...

Wandering Inquiry - published on October 9, 2025

Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an a...

www.pdcnet.org

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 2d

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.

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Julian Jara-Ettinger @julianje.bsky.social · 2d

Our paper in annual review of dev psych is out! It's a big-picture look at the development of social cognition from a computational perspective: compdevlab.yale.edu/docs/2025/an...

compdevlab.yale.edu

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 4d

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans?

New paper on this from my group:

arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125

🧵 1/10

Do AI Models Perform Human-like Abstract Reasoning Across Modalities?

OpenAI's o3-preview reasoning model exceeded human accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, but does that mean state-of-the-art models recognize and reason with the abstractions that the task creators inten...

arxiv.org

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Paolo Santorio @paolosantorio.bsky.social · 5d

FARM is happening next Friday and Saturday at UMD!

We have a great roster of speakers and commentators, and I'm beyond excited for it.

If you want to join us, the conference is open to all and free. Please just register following the link from the website:

sites.google.com/view/farm202...

FARM 2025

FARM is a new conference that aims at bringing together researchers working on meaning (including, but not limited to, semantics of natural language) and researchers working on reasoning and rational ...

sites.google.com

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Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social · 9d

🚨Recent work from Jane Acierno, Clare Kennedy, Fiery Cushman & Jonathan Phillips:

Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind

Inverse option generation: Inferences about others' values based on what comes to mind

Prior research shows that when people try to think of things, such as solutions to a problem, the options that come to mind most often are those that …

www.sciencedirect.com

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Carlos Muñoz Pérez @cmunozperez.bsky.social · 9d

SALT 36 will be held at my alma mater, the University of Buenos Aires, on July 29-31 2026. This will be the first time the conference takes place in South America.

Abstract deadline: Dec 15, 2025
Link: saltconf.github.io/salt36/

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Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social · 10d

📣Recent work by Emily G. Liquin, Marjorie Rhodes & Todd M. Gureckis:

Seeking new information with old questions: Children and adults reuse and recombine concepts from prior questions

Seeking New Information With Old Questions: Children and Adults Reuse and Recombine Concepts From Prior Questions

Abstract. Question asking is a key tool for learning about the world, especially in childhood. However, formulating good questions is challenging. In any given situation, many questions are possible b...

doi.org

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Roman Feiman @romanfeiman.bsky.social · 11d

When some kids say "any", they seem to mean no. Huh?

We show they really do, and why. The key idea: kids figure out what "any" means from the sentences it's in. But a concord negator in the same spots can look the same ("I don't want anything" vs. "I don't want nothing") doi.org/10.16995/glo...

When the syntactic bootstrap breaks: Some children think <em>any</em> means <em>no</em>

Children can use distributional information about where words occur to figure out their meanings. But what happens when two very different words not only have most of their distribution in common, but...

doi.org

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Juan Murillo Vargas @jimurillo98.bsky.social · 14d

Happy birthday Noam!

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 19d

New publication forthcoming in BBS, co-authored with John Krakauer: a commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's groundbreaking target article.

We critique widespread assumptions in cognitive neuroscience about the role of internal models in implicit cognition. (1/7)

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Judith Tonhauser @judithtonhauser.bsky.social · Sep 11

Hot off the presses! A new paper by @thegricean.bsky.social (Judith Degen) and me on "Projection inferences: On the relation between prior beliefs, at-issueness, and lexical meaning", in Glossa Psycholinguistics escholarship.org/uc/item/7hb2...

Projection inferences: On the relation between prior beliefs, at-issueness, and lexical meaning

Author(s): Degen, Judith; Tonhauser, Judith | Abstract: Interpreters frequently draw projection inferences, that is, inferences that the speaker believes utterance content contributed in the scope of ...

escholarship.org

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Juan Murillo Vargas @jimurillo98.bsky.social · Sep 11

As one of Peter's MA advisees I can confirm he thinks it's complimentary to Nagel on knowledge tracking! He actually just published a paper on it.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/....

Assertoric mindreading

This essay offers an explanation of how assertions express that the speaker has a propositional attitude toward what's asserted. The explanation is that this feature of assertion is owed to a hearer'...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Juan Murillo Vargas @jimurillo98.bsky.social · Sep 10

Congrats Gavin!!

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Jeffrey Bowers @jeffreybowers.bsky.social · Sep 10

The following article is now in press at Psychological Review. Interested to hear what people think! "The successes and failures of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) highlight the importance of innate linguistic priors for human language acquisition".

osf.io/preprints/ps... via

OSF

osf.io

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Gavin Foster🦧 @gibbonitathought.bsky.social · Sep 10

Really excited to share my first ever published paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology: "From Monkeys to Infants: The Empirical Challenges Facing Mental Fictionalism"

It's open-access, which I'm really happy about.

Brief 🧵 on what it's all about!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Josh Habgood-Coote @impractknow.bsky.social · Sep 8

New paper on what it is to ask a question.

TLDR: teachers' asking, self-directed asking, and shared agenda-setting asking require us to rethink what it is to ask a question.

philpapers.org/rec/HABAAQ

Joshua Habgood-Coote, Asking a Question is a Proposal in Shared Inquiry - PhilPapers

What is it to ask a question? We might think about asking a question as the expression of an interrogative attitude towards a question that articulates the speaker’s aim of resolving ...

philpapers.org

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Ian Phillips @ianbphillips.bsky.social · Sep 4

€3,000 essay prize on 'The philosophical implications of aphantasia/hyperphantasia', just announced by @bencenanay.bsky.social. Open to anyone who got their PhD after May 2018 and current PhD students. Deadline: Dec 1, 2025. Announcement and details: listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A....

LISTSERV 16.5 - PHILOS-L Archives

listserv.liv.ac.uk

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Rui Zhe Goh @ruizhegoh.bsky.social · Sep 2

Really happy to have a new paper forthcoming at PPR!

Ever wondered if there’s any point in feeling regret? In this paper, I argue that regret is valuable because it helps us overcome temptation. Check it out: philpapers.org/rec/GOHRLA

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The Onion @theonion.com · Aug 25

Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up https://theonion.com/guy-in-philosophy-class-needs-to-shut-the-fuck-up-1819568055/

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Aug 24

the first includes ideas proposed by Paul Grice: we assume others are saying things that are not just true, but also relevant and informative. there's some psychological evidence that this happens early on in language development, here

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Preschoolers can recognize violations of the Gricean maxims

Grice (Syntax and semantics: Speech acts, 1975, pp. 41–58, Vol. 3) proposed that conversation is guided by a spirit of cooperation that involves adherence to several conversational maxims. Three types...

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Philosophical Psychology @journalphp.bsky.social · Aug 18

In our #vol38issue6 lots of exciting new articles! Follow this thread to discover them. First on, Nathaniel Greely on metacognition and reality testing, arguing that metacognition is prior to cognition both phylogenetically and logically doi.org/10.1080/0951... #philsky #philpsy

Reality testing and metacognition

Reality testing is the process by which we distinguish our own perceptual states from imagination or episodic memory. I argue that reality testing is a metacognitive process. Since reality testing ...

doi.org

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steven t. piantadosi @spiantado.bsky.social · Aug 20

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by ‪@ruthefoushee.bsky.social‬ and colleagues
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From

We introduce a novel method to test a classic idea in developmental science that children's attention to a stimulus is driven by how much they can learn from it. Preschoolers (4–6 years, M=4.6${\it M...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · Aug 19

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°!

In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

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Matthias Michel @matthiasmichel.bsky.social · Aug 19

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)

MIT Consciousness Club

The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

sites.google.com

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