Research team
Expertise
Literature reviews in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of science and in cognitive science Writing of articles in international journals Deliverance of talks in appropriate venues Organizing conferences (on line and in person) Organizing and attending reading groups Organizing and attending "Work in progress" meetings
Towards a globally non-representational theory of the mind.
Abstract
Predictive Processing (PP) is an increasingly popular neurocomputational framework which is seemingly able to explain every facet of the mind. Importantly, PP is closely aligned to, and in fact vindicates, key insights coming from non-representational, ecological and enactive, approaches to cognition. Yet non-representational approaches are commonly thought of as structurally incapable of accounting for many aspects of mentality. So, how can PP account for every fact of the mind while being closely aligned to such approaches? My project elaborates a two-pronged strategy to answer this question. On the one hand, I will supplement the PP framework with conceptual and empirical resources coming from extended and distributed approaches to cognition. In this way, I will show how the cognitive engines described by PP can account for the rich panoply of our mental lives while remaining non-representational in the relevant way. On the other hand, I will argue that any explanatory need for inner representations is due to a cognitive illusion. This illusion, I will show, is the fruit of the unwarranted application to psychology and neuroscience of the (non-scientific) interpretative strategies we use to understand and interact with other human agents.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Myin Erik
- Fellow: Facchin Marco
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project