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MeReX kick-off workshop

We will kick-off our research project with a small, discussion-intensive workshop.

 

Confirmed attendees (on site or online):

Galia Avidan (cognitive neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Dimitri Coelho Mollo (philosophy, Umea)

Bryce Counts (philosophy, Arkansas)

Ruben Ellinghaus (cognitive psychology, Hagen)

Marco Facchin (philosophy, Antwerp)

Kayson Fakhar (computational neuroscience, Hamburg)

Nir Fresco (philosophy, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Mariel Goddu (philosophy/developmental psychology, FU Berlin/Stanford)

Bojana Grujicic (philosophy, HU Berlin)

Ori Hacohen (philosophy, Jerusalem)

Phillip Kieval (philosophy, Cambridge)

Matej Kohar (philosophy, TU Berlin)

Beate Krickel (philosophy, TU Berlin)

Marcin Milkowski (philosophy, Warsaw)

Gualtiero Piccinini (philosophy, Missouri)

Peter Schulte (philosophy, Zürich)

Irene Senatore (philosophy, HU Berlin)

Antonella Tramacere (philosophy, Rome)

Carlos Zednik (philosophy, Eindhoven)

Exemplary questions we want to discuss

Compatibility challenge

  1. Is there a conflict between the norms of mechanistic and representational explanation?

  2. Is neuroscientific explanation mechanistic? In what sense?

  3. Is there a principled difference between causal and constitutive explanation?

  4. How are explananda individuated in neuroscience?

Representational Explanation in Neuroscience

  1. How does the term "representation" get used in neuroscience?

  2. What explanatory role do representational contents play in cognitive neuroscience?

  3. Does neuroscientific practice favour any particular theory of content?

  4. Is deflationism/pragmatism about content consistent with the explanatory goals of neuroscience?

Empirical case studies in philosophy

  1. Can you recommend any case studies especially suitable for examining the role of representation and computation in cognitive neuroscience?

  2. To what extent can inferences about explanatory practices drawn from case studies be generalised?

  3. What pitfalls should philosophers avoid when analysing neuroscientific case studies?

  4. How can one minimise biases when selecting case studies to be analysed?

Neural computation

  1. What recent developments in computational/mathematical techniques do philosophers need to understand?

  2. What explanatory aims are served by imputing computations to the brain?

  3. Do neural computations have to operate on representations?

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