Jake Quilty-Dunn

I'm an associate 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.

I'm currently working on projects on the development of intelligence, the nature of conscious deliberation, the structure and development of concepts, and the relation between neural network architectures and the language of thought.

Some recent papers:

Unconscious rationalization, or: How (not) to think about awfulness and death. Unpublished.

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The nativist–empiricist debate is broken. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Forthcoming. (with Justin Wood)

Visual icons. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Forthcoming. [open access]

Remnants of perception: Comments on Block and the function of visual working memory. 2025. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110(1), 284–293. [open access]

Sensory binding without sensory individuals. 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. 2023. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, target article. (with Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum) [pdf]

Problems and mysteries of the many languages of thought. 2022. 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. 2023. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106(2), 273–298. (with E.J. Green) [pdf]

Polysemy and thought: Toward a generative theory of concepts. 2021. Mind & Language 36(1), 158–185. [open access]

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)