University of Missouri 2026 Virtual Summer School on the Foundations of the Mind Sciences We are pleased to announce the University of Missouri 2026 Virtual Summer School on the Foundations of the Mind Sciences, sponsored by the Florence G. Kline Chair in Philosophy and directed by Gualtiero Piccinini. This program brings together leading researchers to provide advanced training on the state of the art.

Please join us for the final installment of our interview series on AI and Agency, featuring Karl Friston in discussion with Brains editor Majid D. Beni!

Brains Blog Symposium on Concepts at the Interface Author’s Reply to Commentaries Nicholas SheaInstitute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of [email protected] Reply to Sarah Fisher Turning to Sarah Fisher’s helpful commentary, she raises a challenging question about concepts in LLMs. I was very pleased to have a chance to discuss this with her in the CLEA online symposium about the book a couple of months ago.

Brains Blog Symposium on Concepts at the Interface Author’s Reply to Commentaries Nicholas SheaInstitute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of [email protected] Many thanks to Eric, Johan and Gualtiero, and Sarah for their thoughtful commentaries. Their kind words about the book are also much appreciated. It’s great that they have selected different topics to focus on: language, predication and structural representation, and AI.

Distinctively HumanSarah Fisher In Concepts at the Interface, Shea offers us a compelling account of what concepts are and why they matter. His nuanced and careful treatment captures the function and feel of offline deliberation, ranging from abstract logical reasoning to building concrete suppositional scenarios. The puzzle motivating Shea’s analysis is how concepts can fulfil the distinct roles attributed to them.

Predication as Structural Representation; Concepts as Information Compression-Decompression HubsJohan Heemskerk and Gualtiero Piccinini Shea’s new book, Concepts at the Interface, is a trove of important ideas. To give just a few examples: Shea draws several important distinctions that criss-cross existing categories though arguably cutting deeper – such as the distinction between varieties of content-respecting transition; he suggests that cognizers use concepts to partly solve and partly circumvent the frame problem; he sketches a compelling answer to how agency relates to simulation; he collects a significant body of empirical literature and shows its relevance to an account of concepts.

Some Roles for Language in Concept-Driven Thinking: Comments on Nicholas Shea’s Concepts at the InterfaceEric MargolisUniversity of British Columbia There are many different questions that philosophers should be asking about concepts. One of the things that makes Concepts at the Interface such a valuable book is that it recognizes that much recent work on concepts has been too narrowly focused on questions about categorization—particularly how concepts are applied in perception—and that we need to think about concepts more broadly, including how they facilitate powerful forms of cognition by drawing upon and orchestrating a variety of specialized processes in different parts of the mind.

This week, we are featuring a symposium on Nick Shea's recent book, Concepts at the Interface.  We have three great commentaries from Eric Margolis, Johan Heemskerk and Gualtiero Piccinini, and Sarah Fisher, then responses from Nick on Thursday and Friday.  Please join us!

Mindcraft is a series of opinion posts on current issues in cognitive science by Brains Blog founder Gualtiero Piccinini. Do you agree? Disagree? Please contribute on the discussion board below! If you’d like to write a full-length response, please contact editor Dan Burnston. A lot of philosophers still use the term "cognitive science". For example, a few days ago Zoe Drayson gave a talk about what she takes explanation to be in "cognitive science".

Talking to Ourselves: Inner Speech and Natural Language as a Language of Thought By Wade Munroe We talk to ourselves. Sometimes we do so out loud. However, frequently, we do so without making a sound. We use inner speech. In my contribution to Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, I argue that inner speech modulates ongoing mnemonic, attentional, and sensorimotor processing, and, in certain cases, serves as the necessary vehicle for conceptual processing.

Inference in (neuro)cognitive systems By Urte Laukaityte and Matteo Colombo Psychologists speak of perceiving as inferring. Neuroscientists maintain that the brain solves inference problems. Biologists say that individual cells infer the structure of their environment. Computer scientists suggest artificial systems can at times draw better inferences than humans. For many philosophers, these ways of talking are nonsensical because only human reasoners can make inferences.

Frames of Discovery and the Format of Cognitive Representation By Dimitri Coelho Mollo & Alfredo Vernazzani A central assumption in contemporary cognitive science and AI is that cognition involves internal representations. Quite like public, external representations, such as texts, pictures and maps, internal representations carry contents (i.e. they are about something) and are implemented by vehicles (i.e., physical states that realize them).

Cognitive ontology in terms of cognitive homology - The role of brain, behavior, and environment for individuating cognitive categories By Beate Krickel and Mariel Goddu How should we categorize the mind’s capacities? This is the cognitive ontology question: how to carve up cognition in a way that supports scientific prediction, explanation, and generalization. The answer matters: If we classify cognitive processes poorly, our theories and models of cognition risk confusion, redundancy, and missed connections.

Rethinking the Mind with Neuroscience: Introducing Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind By Gualtiero Piccinini Many thanks to Dan Burnston for this opportunity to introduce the new edited volume, Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind. For decades, many philosophers of mind wrestled with the question of what the mind is and how it works as though it could be answered in isolation—through introspection, conceptual analysis, or cognitive modeling—while leaving neuroscience largely on the sidelines.

Join us this week for a symposium on the new book, Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, edited by Brains Blog founder Gualtiero Piccinini!

        Styles of Rationality was written 20 years ago, well prior to any thoughts of   (unicepts of) unicepts.  The question of Hurley and Nudds’ book Rational Animals? was whether non-human animals were rational in any sense.  I would have to think through that again now. It would be important not to allow it to become a verbal issue.I am not sure now of any argument requiring language to be either prior to or coincident  with declarative thought. 

Alison Springle, University of Miami Ruth’s second post echoes the key themes of one of my favorite essays: Ruth’s “Styles of Rationality” (Ch. 4 of Hurley & Nudds 2006 Rational Animals?). A key move Ruth makes in that essay is to shift our conception of practical reasoning from the Aristotelian practical syllogism-- a kind of proof-- to “the core of actual practical reasoning processes” which she claims “is not like a proof but like a search for a proof…you begin with something you would like to do or to have done and then attempt to construct something like a proof” where the relevant construction is “largely a matter of trial and error.” Accordingly, Ruth approaches rationality as “an ability to make trials and errors in one’s head rather than in overt behaviour” and distinguishes two different kinds of practical reasoning (trial-and-error learning) capacities in terms of the kinds of abilities or skills they involve.

Ruth Millikan, University of ConnecticutKarl Popper spoke truly of the unique and transformative human capacity to “let our hypotheses die in our stead.” Though not his intention, Herbert Terrace has recently presented us with evidence suggesting that a more basic capacity on which this capacity rests is also unique to man.  Humans may have initiated “declarative” (“indicative”) thought.

If offered ten more years to think about these matters with someone, give me Nick Shea.  (And let me very strongly urge Nick’s recent book Concepts at the Interface!! (Oxford University Press. Open Access 2024) [“Unicepts at the interface’??] I am ashamed how little I now know of contemporary developments in the cognitive sciences. But outside of cog-sci, in general philosophy we did at least have, for example, “the concept dog,” “our concept of a university” “the concept of division” and so forth.

Nick Shea, Oxford University I was delighted to be asked to write a commentary on the first of Ruth Millikan’s Brains Blog posts on her oeuvre. Having made important and influential contributions to many areas of philosophy of mind and language, I am especially pleased that she decided to start her series of posts with her work relating to concepts.

This week on Brains, please join us for a discussion with Ruth Millikan.  Millikan's wide-ranging work has been deeply influential in Philosophy of Mind in the 20th and 21st centuries, and we are thrilled to feature some of her current work this week.  We will have two posts from Millikan (Monday and Wednesday).  On Tuesday and Thursday we will have excellent commentaries from Nick Shea and Alison Springle, and responses from Ruth.  

Hi All, Brains relies on contributions from scholars working in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. It is a volunteer-run organization, but also one of the major public venues for work in the field. If you would like to contribute to this project, please consider self-nominating for one of our Associate Editor positions! Associate Editors generally oversee content contributions on the blog, and are expected to undertake 1-2 initiatives per year for new types of content.

Snowdon on Knowing One’s Own Experience By Tony Cheng Paul F. Snowdon passed away unexpectedly in summer 2022. The posts dedicating to our memories of him were written a while ago, and we are pleased that these pieces can finally appear after some delays. Personally, I first met Paul back in 2006 at the conference in London on Sellars’s EPM. I joined UCL in 2012 as a MPhil.

Paul Snowdon on Animalism By Helen Steward I first came across Paul Snowdon’s thinking on animalism as a result of attending his lectures on the subject in Oxford in what I believe was probably the 1990s, though I have no reliable way of checking that date. Though Paul had been my doctoral supervisor some years previously, I had gleaned rather little from our supervisions concerning what his views on any substantive philosophical matters actually were.