I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. From 2020 to 2023 I was an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis; before that I was a postdoc at Oxford for three years after getting my PhD at CUNY in 2017.
I work primarily in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but I have broad research interests including philosophy of language, aesthetics, and early modern philosophy.
Much of my research concerns distinctions between kinds of mental representations (such as iconic and discursive formats), mental processes (such as inference and association), and mental systems (such as perception and cognition).
I'm currently working on projects on the structure of concepts and lexical meaning, the function of rationalization, the compositional nature of icons, and the language of thought.
Some recent papers:
Unconscious rationalization, or: How (not) to think about awfulness and death. Unpublished.
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Remnants of perception: Comments on Block and the function of visual working memory. Forthcoming. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Sensory binding without sensory individuals. Forthcoming. In A. Mroczko-Wąsowicz & R. Grush (Eds.), Sensory Individuals, Properties, & Perceptual Objects: Unimodal and Multimodal Perspectives (OUP).
The best game in town: The re-emergence of the language of thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences. Forthcoming. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, target article. (with Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum) [pdf]
-The language of thought hypothesis as a working hypothesis in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, reply to commentators. (with Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum)
Problems and mysteries of the many languages of thought. Cognitive Science 46(12), e13225. (with Eric Mandelbaum, Yarrow Dunham, Roman Feiman, Chaz Firestone, E.J. Green, Daniel Harris, Melissa M. Kibbe, Benedek Kurdi, Myrto Mylopoulos, Joshua Shepherd, Alexis Wellwood, & Nicolas Porot) [pdf]
Perceptual attribution and perceptual reference. Forthcoming. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. (with E.J. Green) [pdf]
Polysemy and thought: Toward a generative theory of concepts. 2021. Mind & Language 36(1), 158–185. [open access]
Concept appraisal. 2021. Cognitive Science 45(5), e12978. (with Sapphira Thorne, Joulia Smortchkova, Nicholas Shea, and James Hampton) [open access]
Concepts and predication from perception to cognition. 2020. Philosophical Issues 30(1),273–292. [open access]
Perceptual pluralism. 2020. Noûs 54(4), 807–838.
Is iconic memory iconic? 2020. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101(3), 660–682. (Winner of 2020 William James Prize, ASSC.)
Attention and encapsulation. 2020. Mind & Language 35(3), 335–349.
The outlier paradox: The role of iterative ensemble coding in discounting outliers. 2020. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 46(11), 1267–1269. (with Michael Epstein, Eric Mandelbaum, & Tatiana Emmanouil)
For more papers, click here.
email: quiltydunn@gmail.com
An iconic representation of me standing next to an iconic representation of a forest, which is made up of a linguistic character meaning forest, which is made up of a linguistic character meaning tree, which is an iconic representation of a tree.
(Ryuichi Yamashiro, "Forest", 1954)