Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science
Faculty:
"My work in philosophy of mind is largely empirically informed, and seeks to understand the structure and functioning of our moral minds. Much of my recent work has been focused on social norms and norm psychology, and on how culture influences minds and behaviors."
"My work tackles the (in)adequacy of concepts in cognitive science, with an emphasis on those at the core of “central” cognition: reasoning, reflection, and imagination. I’ve argued that the psychological realizers of these processes—with an emphasis on working memory—can’t explain many of their desired features, and that less individualistically-oriented concepts will be required to make progress in cognitive science. Namely, new concepts rooted in our social, moral, and aesthetic worlds. This, in turn, requires that we better understand how we perceive and make sense of the social and normative bonds that innervate our lives. It’s that problem that motivates my longstanding collaborative and interdisciplinary research in experimental philosophy and aesthetics, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab. Presently, we’re empirically cataloguing the norms that arise from different cases of working together with others and how this “normative fingerprint” might help us map various social relationships. With the with the Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (VRAI) lab, we are beginning work to uncover how these bonds might deform or extend as we enter into unprecedented collaborative and competitive relationships with artificial intelligence in both augmented and virtual reality. All in all, to make progress in cognitive science my bet is that we’ll need to move beyond our inherited cache of individualistically oriented concepts and make room for those that privilege our nature as socially embedded creatures."
Corey’s research is focused on foundational questions regarding the nature of computation, particularly how to incorporate analog and other forms of non-digital computation into a coherent conceptual framework alongside digital computation. Part of the aim of this research is to understand how to unify the cognitive and neural computations posited by scientists to explain the nature of mentality with computation as it is understood in computer science. For example, neuroscientists routinely claim that certain parts of the brain literally perform computations, while researchers in artificial intelligence and machine learning deploy computational systems to perform increasingly sophisticated cognitive tasks. However, it is unclear what unifies—and justifies—the idea that all of these are literal (and not just metaphorical) computations. This is where his research aims to shed some light.
Sarah Robins’ research focuses on memory, a topic through which she explores a range of issues in philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. She is particularly interested in the concept of the memory trace, or engram, and the role it plays in both everyday and scientific thinking about remembering. Through wok on the memory trace, she is also exploring questions about mental content, cognitive ontology and cognitive architecture, and the role of conceptual engineering in scientific inquiry.
Evan Westra works on a number of topics in the philosophy of cognitive science, with a special focus on social cognition. He is particularly interested how we use concepts like knowledge and belief, the cognitive science and epistemology of character judgment, and the cognitive science of norms. He also has interests in the philosophy of animal minds and in debates about mental representation.