Carrie Figdor

Neuroscience and the Multiple Realization of Cognitive Functions

Many empirically minded philosophers have used neuroscientific data to argue against the multiple realization of cognitive functions in existing biological organisms. I argue that neuroscientists themselves have proposed a biologically based concept of multiple realization as an alternative to interpreting empirical findings in terms of one‐to‐one structure‐function mappings. I introduce this concept and its associated research framework and also how some of the main neuroscience‐based arguments against multiple realization go wrong.

Objectivity in the News: Finding a Way Forward

Many media critics believe news reports are inevitably biased and have urged journalists to abandon the objectivity norm. I show that the main arguments for inevitable bias fail but identify factors that make producing objective news difficult. I indicate what the next steps should be to understand bias in the news and to combat it.

Semantics and Metaphysics in Informatics: Toward an Ontology of Tasks

This article clarifies three principles that should guide the development of any cognitive ontology. First, that an adequate cognitive ontology depends essentially on an adequate task ontology; second, that the goal of developing a cognitive ontology is independent of the goal of finding neural implementations of the processes referred to in the ontology; and third, that cognitive ontologies are neutral regarding the metaphysical relationship between cognitive and neural processes.

On the Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates

One question of the bounds of cognition is that of which things have it. A scientifically relevant debate on this question must explain the persistent and selective use of psychological predicates to report findings throughout biology: for example, that neurons prefer, plants and fruit flies decide, and bacteria communicate linguistically. This paper argues that these claims should enjoy default literal interpretation, and that these reports of psychological properties in non-humans are as straightforward as they seem. An epistemic consequence is that these findings can contribute directly to understanding the nature of psychological capacities.

Semantic Externalism and the Mechanics of Thought

I review a widely accepted argument to the conclusion that the contents of our beliefs, desires and other mental states cannot be causally efficacious in a classical computational model of the mind. I reply that this argument rests essentially on an assumption about the nature of neural structure that we have no good scientific reason to accept. I conclude that computationalism is compatible with wide semantic causal efficacy, and suggest how the computational model might be modified to accommodate this possibility.

(When) Is Science Reporting Ethical? The Case for Recognizing Shared Epistemic Responsibility in Science Journalism

Internal mechanisms that uphold the reliability of published scientific results have failed across many sciences, including some that are major sources of science news. Traditional methods for reporting science in the mass media do not effectively compensate for this unreliability. I argue for a new conceptual framework in which science journalists and scientists form a complex knowledge community, with science news as the interdisciplinary product. This approach motivates forms of collaboration and training that can improve the epistemic reliability of science news.

Verbs and Minds

In this chapter I introduce and defend verbialism, a metaphysical framework appropriate for accommodating the mind within the natural sciences and the mechanistic model of explanation that ties the natural sciences together. In a mechanistic explanation, the behaviour and features of a whole are explained in terms of their organized parts and the organized activities they engage in, and explaining the mind is explaining how it is composed out of brain parts and their activities (Bechtel 2005, 2008). Verbialism is the view that mental phenomena belong in the basic ontological category of activities (a term I use to refer to any type of occurrent).1 The name verbialism derives from the fact that activities are the referents of verbs and their linguistic forms or relatives (e.g., gerunds, nominals, and verbed nouns, such as to google or to hood). By intention it also brings to mind adverbialism, a theory of perceptual content that originally aimed to explain illusory perception. But verbialism is not a theory of perceptual content; it is not a theory of content at all. It is a metaphysics that prescribes that our theories of perceptual and cognitive content alike be consistent with the fact that mental phenomena are activities.2 If minds are what brains do, explaining the mind is explaining how it occurs (Anderson 2007), and the ontology of mind is verbialist.