My name is David Colaço.  

My last name also appears as Colaco (without the cedilla).

I am a historian and philosopher of science as well as a philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience. Much of my research focuses on memory and its scientific study. Some examples can be found here, here, and here. 

I am a member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich. I am working on a DFG "Eigene Stelle" on Three Methodological Problems in Memory Science. I also recently completed an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral research fellow at the MCMP.

In my current research, I investigate philosophy of science that is in flux, or scientific situations where there is a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty.  One area that is very much in flux is memory science, due in part to new, provocative reports of memory in “unconventional systems,” including in non-neuronal biological systems like single cells and plants, extended systems, AI, and collectives. While some of the debate over these reports is motivated by methodological concerns, addressing what researchers can show and the quality of the studies they deploy to show it, much of the debate is conceptual in nature: it is over what memory is.

My AvH project addressed failures of scientific reasoning, or cases in which scientists (and philosophers who investigate science) incorrectly reason about the status of the phenomena they seek to investigate. I integrate psychological and formal accounts of reasoning with the analysis of cases from the history of science. By integrating these areas of research, I analyze these failures and their implications for scientific reasoning. For each failure of reasoning, I address what makes it a failure, its consequences, and how it can be resolved.

I completed my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in the department of History and Philosophy of Science. I also completed the Graduate Training Program offered by the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition. My dissertation addresses how researchers discover, characterize, and conceptualize the targets of their scientific investigations: so-called scientific phenomena. 

I run the International Memory Reading Group with Jonathan Najenson. 

I was interviewed by the APA in 2021. You can find the interview here.

I am the co-creator and former host of Let's go the Archives, a series on pieces in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at Pitt's Hillman Library. The series can be found here on the Center for Philosophy of Science YouTube Page.