Delighted to say that my paper "E Pluribus Unum: Costly Inference and Fragmented Belief" has been accepted for publication in Mind! You can find the paper at this PhilPapers link. Abstract follows in a reply. philpapers.org/rec/SPIEPU

Accepted to Linguistic Inquiry! I argue on syntactic grounds “some of the apples” is really “some apples of the apples” with NP-ellipsis. This explains which quantifiers and which modifiers (adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative clauses) can’t appear. Preprint: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009...

👧🔍🧠 🔓 Andreuccioli, L., Mazor, S., Begus, K., Bonawitz, E., Denison, S., & Walker, C. M. (2026). Children’s exploration distinguishes necessary and merely possible outcomes. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

📣 New paper in Open Mind! How do our concepts of others’ minds connect to language and to where we expect others to look? 🤔 We link phenomenal vs. intentional mental states to gaze, one of our earliest social cues from infancy. Led by Mohit Mukherji! 🎉 direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Descriptions of Phenomenal Versus Intentional Mental States Are Differentially Associated With Gaze Direction

Abstract. Across cultures, humans reason about others’ mental states as being either phenomenal, reflecting shareable experiences, or intentional, reflecting agentive goals. Might our dissociated judg...

direct.mit.edu

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper forthcoming in Philstudies: There Can Be No Dispute Quick Pitch: You can make arguments from disagreement without disagreement. Contextualists defenses, including appeal to metalinguistic negotiation, are neutralized. Thread: philpapers.org/rec/SKETCB-2

Four days ago, a scientist was surprised by the news that Anthropic discovered new virus genes for making DNA. He says he’s been studying them for years—and feeding his data to Anthropic’s AI as part of his own research. Coincidence? Here’s my story. nyti.ms/3VSWayc

Did Anthropic’s A.I. Really Make a Scientific Discovery on Its Own? (Gift Article)

An expert at the University of Copenhagen said his team had been sharing its research with the company’s A.I. model, Claude, and that its new finding matched their work.

nyti.ms

New: Stephen Laurence and I have written a free Reader's Guide to our book The Building Blocks of Thought (OUP 2024, open access)—with suggested paths through the book, reading schedules for courses, a glossary, and chapter abstracts. On PhilPapers: philpapers.org/rec/LAUARG

🚨 Preprint alert! 👶🧠🌊 "The Emergence of a Distinction between Things and Stuff" osf.io/preprints/ps... So excited to share my first infant study, with the wonderful Sanghee Song and Liz Spelke.🎉 Do babies expect sand to behave differently from solid objects? 🧵1/5

🚨New paper alert! 🚨 The visual system tunes itself to the statistics of its input. How do individual experiences differently tune vision? In this work, @bjbalas.bsky.social and I examined how one individual difference—height—changes the visual diet and how this affects perception. 1/

My latest column www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

We all know a lack of exercise is bad for our bodies. So what is relying on AI doing to our brains? | Devi Sridhar

Most of my students use AI, and I worry about its corrosive effects. We must not entrust tech companies with our long-term health, says Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the Universi...

theguardian.com

we've always had the secret hack of 'cheating'. You could, in principle, pay a qualified human to fully write your materials for you. If you see what's wrong with that, apply that reasoning to using genAI for this. If you see nothing wrong with that, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm so grateful for the continued support from my lab, and for everyone who helped along the way, now as an associate professor with tenure at Stanford 🧑‍🏫🥂🌲

I feel like this has the potential to make all the anti-AI and all the anti-Wittgenstein crowd happy, and this is basically 100% of the philosophy population.

I have a new preprint with Athulya Aravind. In it, we ask how can children learn the presuppositional meaning component of a word (e.g. "both" presupposing a |2| domain) Our claim... ...is that they can't. Presuppositional meanings are unlearnable. Preprint: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/010...

New collaborative work with Matt Husband and Runyi Yao featuring an incremental QUD approach to causal discourse expectations doi.org/10.1016/j.ac...

👶🧠 Pequay, E., & Dautriche, I. (2026). The development of compositionality in language and thought. Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, 8. Advance online publication. doi.org/10.1146/annu...

The Development of Compositionality in Language and Thought

Compositionality is the property of a representational system whereby complex meanings arise from the combination of simpler meaningful elements. Here we take a developmental perspective to…

doi.org

sometimes i give people feedback on job market materials, and thought it might be useful to do a thread of some common feedback i find myself giving. just one guy's opinion (and one thing that can be frustrating about producing and getting feedback on these documents is that informed people *will*

My one genuine thought about the Veit piece is that I'm inclined to think almost all kinds of inquiry can have good and bad instances, so I find the idea that an entire field of inquiry can be completely pointless to be pretty alien and weird

This is such a cool paper on why and how a broken fork is "1 fork" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Children and adults’ treatment of partial objects in bounded quantificational contexts

When asked to count under specific instructions, for example, to count “the forks,” or to identify the referent of “a fork,” children have been shown to treat whole forks and detached parts of fork...

tandfonline.com

New paper! “Order of Explanation: Having it Both Ways” is now forthcoming in Noûs. It’s been a really fun paper to write and I’m stoked to share it.

Human thought is thought to be systematic: Do reasoning models have systematicity of thought? With @brendenlake.bsky.social we study this question in our new preprint arxiv.org/abs/2609.13948 Thread 🧵

Attention philosophers of language who also work in theoretical linguistics: the Philosophy department and the Linguistics department at UC Davis are jointly hiring a TT Assistant Professor. Apply! recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07874

Department of Philosophy/Linguistics - Philosophy of Language/Computational Linguistics

University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

recruit.ucdavis.edu

New work out today! The result of a 15 year project to offer genuine linking hypotheses between linguistics and neuroscience: a revised research program, and its first result - a novel neural binding operation ('Meld') capturing core properties of natural language syntax 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2609.14384

Formal Properties of Language as Constraints on Neural Dynamics

What must a neural system be capable of to implement language? Current research annotates stimuli with linguistic variables and tests which electrodes, voxels, or language-model layers predict neural ...

arxiv.org

#AmistadesALFAn

Children Expect Prior Belief Strength to Constrain Belief Revision 🚨From Pearl Han Li, Laura Soter & Tamar Kushnir

Tres plazas abiertas a concurso en el Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas UNAM. Acá la convocatoria: www.filosoficas.unam.mx/docs/2103/fi...

Paper's now out (open access!). Shoutout to the lovely copyediting and proofs team at Ergo. If you're LoT curious feel free to check it out! journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...

Juan Murillo Vargas@jimurillo98.bsky.social · last yr.

Happy to announce that my paper "How Language-Like is the Language of Thought?" is forthcoming at Ergo! Thread with a TL;DR below! philpapers.org/rec/MURHLI-3

Online Now: The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

dlvr.it