Publications

Decoding Cognitive Neuroscience: A Defence of the Explanatory Role of Content
2025. Philosophy of Science
https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2025.10157 

Cognitive neuroscientists typically posit representations that relate to various aspects of the world, which philosophers call representational content. Anti-realists about representational content argue that contents play no role in neuroscientific explanations of cognitive capacities. In this paper, I defend realism against an anti-realist argument due to Frances Egan, who argues that for content to be explanatory it must be both essential and naturalistic. I introduce a case study from cognitive neuroscience in which content is both essential and naturalistic, meeting Egan’s challenge. I then spell out some general principles for identifying studies in which content plays an explanatory role. 

Aesthetic Alchemy: Feature Construction and Conceptual Enrichment through Literature

2021. Pli

Aesthetic experiences play a vital role in shaping our lives. In this essay, I consider how certain aesthetic experiences specifically impact conceptual cognition. In particular, I set out how literature elicits the construction of feature representations. These are mental representations of features of objects – real or imagined – which facilitate categorization, and combine to form full-blown conceptual representations. To explain how this is achieved, I introduce the mechanisms of information reduction and combination through a close reading of several literary texts. I suggest that these mechanisms force the reader to create and store feature representations. In this way, literature provides us with a rich representational vocabulary which can be deployed in myriad conceptual tasks. 

In preparation

Mechanistic informational teleosemantics

Please email for manuscript

Informational teleosemantics promises to provide a naturalistic account of representational content. It is the view that the content of a representation is given by (i) an informational link between the representation and an item in the environment, and (ii) the function of the representation. Most contemporary philosophers in the field aim to provide theories that capture scientific practice. That is, informational teleosemantic views that are consistent with the use of representation in scientific explanation. Existing views struggle with mechanistic explanations, i.e. those which address how a system performs a particular cognitive capacity. Most theories use etiological functions when spelling out (ii), but such views are known to have difficulty with mechanistic explanation due to Swampman-like cases. I argue that existing non-etiological views also struggle because they fail to adequately restrict the informational link in (i). In this paper, I set out a novel informational teleosemantic view consistent with mechanistic explanation by invoking non-etiological functions and by rigorously applying Shannon's information theory. I argue that this view is largely implicitly presupposed in much of cognitive neuroscience in which representational content features in mechanistic explanation. The theory, maxMI, provides a measure of the information available to the system itself, enabling precise specification of the values of the external item processed when enacting cognitive capacities.

Ultimate/proximate explanations and teleosemantic pluralism

(with Ross Pain)

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We argue that etiological teleosemantic theories are aimed at providing content attributions consistent with ultimate explanations. Non-etiological teleosemantic theories are aimed at providing content attributions consistent with proximate explanations. Each of the two types of theory should be judged independently, relative to the adequacy conditions associated with consistency with their respective type of explanation. Both types of explanation can exist side-by-side, and, provided each type of teleosemantic theory meets the adequacy conditions on consistency with such explanations, the two types of teleosemantics can also exist side-by-side. So, we should be pluralists. While many philosophers view the two types of teleosemantics as being at odds, we argue that they are two different projects aimed at two different types of explanation and can comfortably co-exist. We address the question of content pluralism, and argue that while this paper does not entail it, it does provide some motivation for thinking that a representation can have at least two types of content.

Swampman's last stand

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In this paper, I attempt to settle some meta-theoretical questions concerning Swampman, hopefully clarifying the narrow conditions in which Swampman is a concern, while providing a simple suggestion to avoid Swampman in such conditions. In short, I conclude that Swampman is only a threat to those who can avoid it. I begin by outlining the classic Swampman thought experiment, in which an atom-for-atom copy of an existing individual is created miraculously by a bolt of lightning hitting a swamp. The classic question is whether Swampman has mental states, which is intended to bring out intuitions regarding physicalism. Swampman has since been deployed as a problem for teleosemantic accounts of intentionality. According to such accounts, the representational content of mental states is given by the function of the target representation. However, if that function is determined by selection history, as many teleosemanticists claim, Swampmen have no representational content since they have no selection history.