We are excited to announce that Alison Springle will be joining us as one of our new associate editors! Alison is an Assistant Professor at University of Miami, and works on a wide range of topics in philosophy of mind and science. For the blog, Alison will be working on promoting new collaborations and content-types for the blog, as well as contributing to our book symposia series.

We are thrilled to announce that Jorge Ignacio Fuentes Muñoz will be joining us at Brains as an Associate Editor. Jorge is an assistant professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and will be overseeing content in philosophy of mind and neuroscience, as well as keeping us updated on philosophical happenings in South America. Please see below for a brief introduction from Jorge!

Hi All, In the next weeks and months, we'll be making some exciting new additions to the editorial team at Brains. Two new Associate Editors will be introduced this week! I want to take the chance to give a huge thanks to two of our recent Associate Editors who will be stepping down. Majid Beni and Trey Boone both did incredible work with Brains over the past couple of years.

Reply to Chirimuuta Mazviita Chirimuuta is sympathetic to my deflationary construal of scientists’ representational talk when they characterize their models, but she sees objectionable elements of eliminativism in my discussion of representation outside the domain of science. She says of me: “If she has to choose between the ontology of the manifest image, and that of the scientific image, it’s the manifest that will have to go.” But we don’t have to choose.

Comment on Deflating Mental Representation by Frances Egan A “Left Sellarsian” Response to a “Right Sellarsian” Proposal  “Now the idea that epistemic facts can be analysed without remainder—even ‘in principle’—into non-epistemic facts, whether phenomenal or behavioural, public or private, with no matter how lavish a sprinkling of subjunctives and hypotheticals is, I believe, a radical mistake—a mistake of a piece with the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in ethics” …

Reply to Mace and Roskies Caitlin Mace and Adina Roskies (hereafter, M&R) argue that the identification of vehicles in neuroscience depends intimately on the prior assignment of content, and so content cannot be relegated to an extra-theoretical gloss. Identifying neural vehicles is notoriously difficult and, they claim, subject to indeterminacy. To identify computational vehicles, experimenters look for neural signals whose activity appears to be correlated with some experimental variable taken to be the representational content, such as the onset of a cue, a stimulus feature, or some aspect of behavior.

Title: Vehicle realism, content pragmatism: Uneasy bedfellows Caitlin Mace and Adina L. Roskies  Frances Egan’s (2025) “Deflating Mental Representation” poses an interesting challenge to both realists and fictionalists about mental representation. In the book she argues for a pragmatic view of representational content and realism about representational vehicles.  The book as a whole is a deflationary take on the primary ways in which the concept of representation enters into cognitive science: in scientific theorizing about the brain, in folk psychological discourse, and in perception.

Reply to Oron Shagrir  Oron Shagrir argues that computation and content are more interconnected than my account allows. Computational individuation, he claims, is subject to indeterminacy, and at least in some cases the indeterminacy is resolved by appeal to content. If content is a gloss, as I argue, then according to Shagrir computational characterization is partly a gloss too.   Shagrir deploys an example to make the case for computational indeterminacy.

On Egan's Conception of Computation Oron Shagrir  In Deflating Mental Representation, Frances Egan advances an exemplary account that combines realism about the computational vehicles of mental representations with anti-realism regarding their content. While the more contentious thesis concerns content, my focus is on Egan's conception of computation, which has shaped much of the ongoing debate on physical computation in recent decades.

Brains Blog precis of Deflating Mental Representation  In the book I propose what I call a deflationary account of mental representation, characterized by three claims: (1) Construing a mental (or neural) state as a representation does not presuppose a special, substantive relation (or relations) – what we can call a representation relation – holding between the state and what the representation is about,

Join us this week for our first event of the year, another fantastic book symposium!  This time, we have Frankie Egan discussing her new book, Deflating Mental Representation.  We have three great commentaries from Oron Shagrir, Caitlin Mace and Adina Roskies, and Mazviita Chirimuuta, along with responses from Frankie.  Feel free to hop into the comments to discuss!

See below for upcoming events at Neural Mechanisms Online. You can join the events by joining the mailing list; to do so email [email protected]. Neural Mechanisms Online 2026 Monday 19 January 2026  (4.30-7PM  CET*) : Online book Symposium on Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind   (H 4-6PM CET*)Monday 16 February 2026 Denny Borsboom (University of Amsterdam)Monday 2 March 2026 Marcello Ienca (Technical University of Munich)

Please join us as we wrap up the year with a special roundtable.  The Brains Blog recently passed it's 20th anniversary!  The managing editors from all 20 years of the blog got together for a brief chat about the history of the blog and where it's going.

The Idealized Mind (2025) suggests that the free energy principle (FEP) in theoretical neuroscience unifies all the different arguments covered in the book. The FEP is a GUT in more than one way. Friston’s commentary opens with the physicists’ spherical cow. In The Idealized Mind, chapter 9 seeks to establish that the possibility of explaining the brain and cognition by appeal to generative models and probabilistic inference requires idealizing the mind and brain.

The Physics of ‘As If’  Karl Friston11 Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University of College London Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader.

The Idealized Mind (2025) distinguishes between computational modeling, where computational models are used to study target systems, and the additional practice of showing that neural systems literally perform computations. The former is a legitimate scientific practice. The latter is problematic.   Because computational neuroscientists take neural systems to be computational systems, Maley thinks that a core task for philosophers of neuroscience is to figure out what it might mean for a neural system to compute.

COMMENTS ON THE IDEALIZED MIND, BY MICHAEL D. KIRCHHOFFCorey J. Maley Purdue University [email protected] Michael Kirchhoff’s book The Idealized Mind has many original and thought-provoking ideas, touching on a number of subjects relevant to contemporary discussions in the theory and philosophy of cognitive science. Here, I will focus my comments on Chapters 6 and 7, where Kirchhoff critiques views that characterize neural systems as performing computations in some literal sense.

The Idealized Mind (2025) argues that discussion about neural representation and neural computation is based on idealized models. This has serious implications for defending realism about neural representation and neural computation.   Egan is right to think that my critique of computational models applies more widely than to her own account of computational models (2018, 2025). Indeed, chapter 7 is devoted to a critique of Piccinini’s (2020) mechanistic account of computation (see also my response to Maley’s commentary).

Some Physical Systems (Literally) ComputeFrances Egan Rutgers University In his ambitious new book, Michael Kirchhoff argues that computational models cannot be literally true of the real-world systems they purport to describe. In chapter 6 he aims his critique at my account of computational models (Egan 2018, 2020), but, as I understand it, the critique is intended to apply widely to any account of physical computation and has implications for scientific theorizing in general.

The Idealized Mind (2025) examines how idealized models are used to interpret the nature and function of the mind and brain, whilst defending a version of scientific realism. Drayson presents several challenges to this project. She says that The Idealized Mind claims that “some scientific theories are neither true nor false” and that this makes me “one of the very few philosophers since the logical empiricists to deny semantic realism.” That’s a misreading of the book’s position.

Challenging Kirchhoff on the Semantics of Models and TheoriesZoe DraysonThe bold claim at the heart of Kirchhoff’s (2025) The Idealized Mind is that some scientific theories are neither true nor false. This makes Kirchhoff one of the very few philosophers since the logical empiricists to deny semantic realism: the view that all scientific theories, including those which posit unobservables, have truth conditions.

“Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter, the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.” (

This week, we are featuring a symposium on Michael D. Kirchhoff's book, The Idealized Mind. There will be amazing commentaries from Zoe Drayson, Frances Egan, Corey Maley, and Karl Friston, and corresponding Kirchoff responses each day throughout the week, so make sure to check back frequently. Please join us!

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!