Juan Murillo Vargas
@jimurillo98.bsky.social
140 followers 180 following 40 posts
PhD student at MIT. Philosophy of language, philosophy of cog sci, philosophy of mind. Lower-case chomskyan, upper-case Nerd.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
chazfirestone.bsky.social
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.
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
julianje.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
paolosantorio.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
cmunozperez.bsky.social
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/
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
romanfeiman.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
quiltydunn.bsky.social
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)
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
gibbonitathought.bsky.social
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....
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
ianbphillips.bsky.social
€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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
ruizhegoh.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
journalphp.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas
talboger.bsky.social
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
Reposted by Juan Murillo Vargas