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.

Snowdon on Personal Identity By Charles Jansen Seminars with Paul Snowdon would typically begin with a single argument, written in the middle of a whiteboard. Snowdon would unpick the argument premise by premise, disambiguating, clarifying and outlining how it departed from (or, less frequently, aligned with) what we might ordinarily say – filling the board in the process with an array of claims, sub-arguments and diagrams (seemingly derived mid-discussion).

By Tony Cheng In Memorial of Paul F. Snowdon Paul Snowdon began his academic journey as an undergraduate at University College, Oxford, where he was mentored by Sir. Peter Strawson. He later served as a tutorial fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1971 to 2001. Following this, he held the Grote Professorship of Mind and Logic at University College London until his retirement in 2015.

Why are Visuo-spatial Representations Sometimes Weird? Rodrigo Garro Rivero, USC In cognitive science and philosophy, researchers hypothesize about the formats of mental representations via analogies to artifactual representations such as sentences, maps, pictures, etc. The guiding assumption is that if our mental representations were to be structured as artifactual representations, then they would exhibit characteristic patterns of performance that reflect the structural features of the artifactual representation .

Factive Mentalizing and the Attribution of Desire Akshan deAlwis, Washington University Research on the extent of mentalizing – attributing and tracking the mental states of other minds – is highly heterogeneous. Some research indicates that mentalizing is fast, easy, and early developing, while other research indicates that it is slow, hard, and late developing. The Factive Mentalizing View (Philips & Norby 2019; Philips et al.

Why is Cognition Question-Sensitive? Juan Murillo Vargas (MIT) Author’s note: I no longer believe most of the paper’s claims. But I find the question interesting and worth thinking about, even if I think the answer I gave for it is no longer workable. I’m curious to hear what readers think! It’s become trendy in certain corners to think the mind is question-sensitive: many of the ways we think and talk are sensitive to the…

Humans see faces as beautiful: The role of superadditive mechanisms in determining visual content. Selina Guter, MIT Our conscious visual experience presents us with various features of objects: among others, their shape, color, and size. But what about aesthetic properties, like beauty? My paper argues that at least one kind of beauty – facial beauty – is represented in conscious perception.

By Sarah Robins, Purdue University Thanks to the Brains Blog for featuring some of the great work from the latest SSPP meeting this week. There are several ‘phil & psych societies’, so it feels worth kicking off the week with a note about what distinguishes the SSPP. The SSPP is, so far as I know, the oldest/longest running of these organizations.

This week we are very happy to co-host a series of posts with the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, featuring work from this year's annual meeting! Today, Sarah Robins will outline the mission of SSPP, and what makes it such a great venue. Then, the rest of the week we will feature posts on the top graduate student submissions from this year's meeting. You can see all of the posts here:

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