Before joining this group as a postdoctoral researcher at the Collège de France, I was a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin (funded by the Irish Research Council), and before that I completed my PhD at the University of Toronto.

I specialize in the philosophy of mind and language. I explore two of the traditional answers as to what is distinctive about human nature—sociality and our use of language—constructively engaging with cutting-edge work in psychology and linguistics.

See my personal website www.roryharder.com for more information about my research and teaching.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Grenoble Alpes and recently completed my Ph.D. at UCLA.

I work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My primary research is in how the self is represented in cognition. I am particularly interested in non-conceptual representations that might mark the origins of the conceptual representation of self used in ‘I’-thoughts. At present, my work explores the contents, formats, and use of such representations in perception and bodily awareness.

More information about my research and teaching is available at my website: www.cphochman.com.

I am a Paris-based cognitive scientist, interested in symbols and the language of thought. My PhD work, supervised by Gergely Csibra and Dan Sperber at Central European University in Vienna, centered around the cognitive mechanism that allows us to interpret symbols in depictions. I developed a theoretical account of this human-specific capacity and provided empirical evidence that it is already present in human infants. After finishing my PhD, I obtained a Fyssen grant to pursue postdoctoral work with Stanislas Dehaene at NeuroSpin, with whom I investigated adults' language-of-thought representations in the domain of geometric shapes. As part of the Mental Files ERC project, I am currently developing a neuroimaging experimental paradigm to investigate how adults assign perceptual object files to discourse files in symbolic contexts in which objects are used as symbols of distal entities.

Stacie Friend is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she moved in 2023 after having taught in London for many years. She is an Editor of the journal Analysis and an organiser of the Scottish Aesthetics Forum, and until recently was the President of the British Society of Aesthetics (2018 to 2024). Her research focuses on issues at the intersection of aesthetics, language and mind, especially in relation to our engagement with fictional narratives. 

I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois-Chicago. I am interested in foundational questions about the nature of mental and linguistic representation, and the relation between them. Recently, I have focused on how best to understand the distinction between singular and descriptive thought, the relation between reference-determination and maintenance/‘update’ processes, and accounts of intra- and inter- personal semantic coordination. Following up on my suggestion in recent work that the notion of singular thought can be understood in terms of format, I am working on whether there is an unequivocal notion of singular form for conceptual thought. I am also working on the question of whether there is, or needs to be, semantic coordination between the thoughts of distinct agents.

My interest in mental files is motivated by the question of whether some version of the mental files picture, when applied to the attitudes, helps us with the above issues. I have co-edited an OUP Volume, Singular Thought and Mental Files, and written the Philosophy Compass piece, ‘Mental Files’, as well as several papers about mental files, their relation to singular thought and their role in thinking about update processes for thought. Aidan Gray and I have an ongoing project in which we argue that the explanatory aims of the file theory, as it is applied to the propositional attitudes to solve problems associate with Frege’s puzzle, are fulfilled by positing a process of mental filing, but remaining agnostic about the vehicular structure of object representations.

I am an Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Most of my research focuses on the semantics of proper names and issues surrounding Frege's Puzzle. Recently, I have been exploring 'Relationist' approaches to Frege's Puzzle. These are approaches that solve Frege's Puzzle by introducing semantic relations that are not grounded in non-relational semantic properties. I argue that a version of this approach is plausible and that taking it seriously affords us a clearer picture of the challenge posed by Frege's Puzzle.

In relation to mental files, I'm interested in understanding how the file approach offers a package of explanations at different 'levels': semantic, metasemantic, and psycho-functional. With Rachel Goodman, I have argued that, at least when it comes to theories of the attitudes, we can understand the file approach as agnostic about the structure of object representations.

associate researcher

Josef Perner received his PhD in Psychology from the University of Toronto. He was Professor in Experimental Psychology at the University of Sussex and is now Professor emeritus of Psychology and member of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Salzburg. He is author of "Understanding the Representational Mind" (MIT Press, 1991) and over 190 articles on cognitive development (theory of mind, executive control, episodic memory, logical reasoning), consciousness (perception versus action), simulation in decision making, and theoretical issues of mental representation and consciousness. He served as President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, the Leopoldina, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and the Association for Psychological Sciences. He holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, and was awarded the William Thierry Preyer Award for Excellence in Research on Human Development by the European Society of Developmental Psychology (ESDP) and the Bielefelder Wissenschaftspreis for the interdisciplinary nature of his research.

associate researcher

Isabelle Roy is a Professor of Linguistics at Nantes University and a member of the Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING-UMR6310). Her primary research interests lie at the interface between structure and interpretation, covering a range of topics including predication, copulas, copular sentences, adjectives and nouns, states, and grammatical ontology, across a variety of languages (Romance, Semitic, Niger-Congo, and Caucasian). She focuses on how the grammars of different natural languages grammaticalize similar (or potentially universal) distinctions.

She is the co-director of the International Research Network OASIS: Ontology as Structured by the Interfaces with Semantics (funded by CNRS, 2017-2021). She directed the MSH project IDENT: Identity in Language and Thought (2022-2023) and is a co-investigator on the DFG-AHRC-funded project SYNCOP: Syntax of Nominal Copular Sentences (Bielefeld/Edinburgh, 2024-2027).

Within the FILE ERC project, her contribution focuses on the interpretation of nominals, predication, copular sentences—particularly identity/equative sentences—and related ontological issues.

Marziye Lotfi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM). She completed her Ph.D. at IPM from 2016 to 2022, with a thesis titled "Metaontology and Metaphysical Realism." Her work critically engages with the Hirsch-Sider debate in metaontology, defending the position that ontological discussions regarding the existence of material objects are substantive rather than merely verbal.

Marziye's research interests involve metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Her current research focuses on the intricate intersections between ontology and semantics, particularly concerning fictional names..

I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Bergen in Norway, supervised by Lukas Skiba, Torfinn Huvenes, and Michael Murez. My research focuses on mental representation and reference, and lies mainly at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. 

In connection with François Recanati's ERC project, my work investigates whether file tokening—both in the case of short-lived object files in perception and long-standing mental files—might be governed by a single principle, namely an affordance-based constraint. Given that files are singular representational vehicles, I am particularly interested in exploring the implications of this framework for the nature and conditions of singular thought.

I am a PhD candidate and FPI fellow at the University of Valencia, under the supervision of Victor Verdejo. Before that, I obtained my BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Barcelona (UB-Logos). My research interests lie mainly in the philosophy of language, with an emphasis on the conditions for successful communication. Currently, I’m writing a paper on Loar’s puzzle for communication, which raises the question whether there is anything more to successful communication than referring to the same objects. In particular, I critically assess the view that speakers need not think in any relevantly similar way about said objects, as long as they know that they co-refer to them.

visiting reseacher

David Papineau has held a number of academic posts at the universities of Reading, Macquarie, Birkbeck London and Cambridge. Since 1990, he has pursued his career at King's College London and, from 2015 to 2020, he taught one semester of each academic year at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has served as President of the British Society for Philosophy of Science, the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society. His books include Theory and Meaning (1980), Philosophical Naturalism (1992), Thinking about Consciousness (2002), Philosophical Devices (2012), Knowing the Score (2017) and The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience (2021). He is currently interested in the concept of causality.

I am a PhD candidate in the NYU Department of Philosophy, under the supervision of Michael Strevens, Ned Block, and Kit Fine. I work on questions about mental representation and computation from an empirical, interdisciplinary perspective. At the moment I’m focusing on object representation in vision and artificial intelligence. The question is: what is it to represent objects, as opposed to some other category of entity? I’m also interested in format, in frameworks for neural computation, and in perceptual organization.