My work combines philosophical arguments and empirical evidence from the mind sciences and AI to address how psychological capacities should be distinguished and compared across different biological and artificial systems.
Published work:
Schwartz, A., & Boyle, A. (forthcoming) How Do We Know if Animals Remember? Proximal Functions and the Distribution of Episodic Memory. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
Schwartz, A. (2026) Are episodic memory and episodic simulation different in kind? Philosophical Psychology, 39(5), 2208–2231.
Schwartz, A., & Fresco, N. (2025) Mapping content: why cognitive maps are non-conceptual mental states. Synthese, 205, Article 95.
Schwartz, A. (2022) Simple Remembering. Synthese, 200, Article 190.
Schwartz, A. (2020). Simulationism and the Function(s) of Episodic Memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 487–505.
Schwartz, A., & Drayson, Z. (2019). Intellectualism and the argument from cognitive science. Philosophical Psychology, 32(5), 661-691.
Schwartz, A. (2018). Memory and Disjunctivism. Essays in Philosophy, 19(2): 213-230. (Special Issue: The Philosophy of Memory. Eds. I. O’Loughlin and S.K. Robins).
Work in preparation:
In 'Do DNNs Explain Visual Object Recognition', I argue that conflicting measures of similarity between AI models and brains limit our evidence for fine-grained mechanistic explanations of visual object recognition, while allowing that such models may capture its more abstract mechanistic features.
In 'Episodic Memory: Preserving to Learn', I draw on computational models to argue that episodic memory may have a proximal proper function to support offline learning by selectively preserving and replaying records of experience to train other cognitive systems.
Please get in touch with me if you have any trouble accessing my work.