I'm very pleased to announce the CfA for the PLM Workshop on philosophy (and neuroscience) of memory, which is organised by my friend, bsky.app/profile/jona...: www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/phil-lang/tr... Deadline for submissions: 30-11-25. It will be hosted by Ruhr University Bochum in mid Feb.

When a typo in your Google search leads to new and exciting philosophical positions

J.J. Gibson with some truth bombs in Ch. 3 of The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: "A special case of the ground is a floor." "A stick is an elongated object." More seriously, this attempt at constructing in effect a phenomenological taxonomy of the lived world is fascinating. #philsky

New paper alert! My take on solving the scaling-up problem (representation-hunger) using mechanistic compositionality is now out with JGPS! #philsci #philsky doi.org/10.1007/s108...

The Scaling-Up Problem from a Mechanistic Point of View - Journal for General Philosophy of Science

This paper argues that the so-called scaling-up problem (representation-hunger problem) can be resolved within the mechanistic framework of explanation. Emphasising the problem’s character as an empir...

doi.org

"The situation in France isn't as bad as people think it is. It's just that the French are stubbornly opposed to paying taxes, and so their governments keep on failing." "Cogwheels" by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (orig. publ. 1927) Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

The Economist’s Off The Charts newsletter sometimes shares the more fun sides of data. It’s not all a socio-economic snooze fest. This colour “Rorschach test” is an example, created by an AI and neuroscience researcher: ismy.blue Here’s @alexselbyb.bsky.social results, what’s up with his brain?!

We --the MeReX-project-- are organizing a conference on mechanistic, computational, and representational explanation in cognitive neuroscience at TU Berlin in February 2025! 🧠 Come and join us all! Registration opens in about a week. further info: www.merex-project.org #philsci #neuroscience

Read China Mieville's Embassytown recently. Highly recommended to anyone looking for linguistics inspired SF where the premise is not just "What if Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, amirite?".

Academic pet-peeve: Writing "pace", when you mean "contra".

And today marks another day in my professional life that I wish I had taken a stats class in my BA instead of Latin. Though I did enjoy watching the suffering of my Psychology studying friends with smug superiority at the time, they do get the last laugh after all...

Just a few days left to submit an abstract for our February workshop on neuroscientific explanation in Berlin. The deadline is this Sunday (29th September). For more info, visit: neuroexp2025.sciencesconf.org #PhilosophyOfScience #neuroscience

I'm attending the #DKPhil (German Congress of Philosophy) in Münster this week and giving a talk on my recently published paper on virtual causation tomorrow afternoon. If you are around, come have a look!

My new paper on "Illusionism about virtual causation" is out now at Inquiry with Open Access. Check it out at: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #philosophy #VR

Illusionism about virtual causation

The question whether there are virtual objects grows more salient, as virtual reality (VR) technology becomes commercially viable. Arguments for realism about virtual objects rely on virtual causat...

tandfonline.com