Marco Facchin

👇 have a look at the program of this year's ISPSM conference, it's online and free.

#philmind #philsci #consci

#PhiMiSci has recently launched a new special issue on "Structuralism and the Science of Consciousness". It opens with a new paper by David Rosenthal titled "Objective foundations for the study of mental qualities". Have a look!

Alfredo Vernazzani, Language comprehension and the rhythm of perception - PhilPapers It is widely agreed that language understanding has a distinctive phenomenology, as illustrated by phenomenal contrast cases. Yet it remains unclear how to account for the perceptual phenomenology of ...

Here's the preprint of my forth. paper on "Language comprehension and the rhythm of perception" on Mind&Language. My claim, inspired by Kantian schematism, is that perception unfolds with distinctive rhythms:

philpapers.org/rec/VERLCA-3...

But the scale at which it is being pushed out and appended to everything just far exceeds its actual utility, in a way I've gotta suppose that eventually the market will realise and there'll be some contraction here.

Apparently 36% of Japanese voters believe that "immigrants are taking our jobs" bro what immigrants does Japan even have?? ATP a solid like 40% of voters *in every country* are just driven by completely imaginary grievances

My entire life, I bored people, talking about shit they didn't care about (so lonely). Until Analytic Philosophy wrapped me in her sinewy embrace and said "Child, everyone here is just as boring as you. Probably even more boring, actually." And I Wept, for I was Home

The Philosophy of Adaptivity - Dialectical Systems At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical ...

I have written a blog post that motivates and sets the agenda of a new line of philosophical inquiry - the philosophy of adaptivity. You may have heard of adaptive AI or robots but what exactly makes them adaptive? And in what sense are we dynamically adaptive as biological systems?

For 20 years a soviet agronomist named Lysenko promoted pseudoscientific agricultural theories and punished those who understood genetics. It had devastating effects on Soviet agriculture—leading to frequent crop failures and famines.

The Trump admin is filled with Lysenkos.

Tomorrow, we will have a symposium on "The Cognitive
Importance of “Non-cognitive” Processes: Reconsidering the connection between metabolism and cognition" at the BSPS. Join us and talk about metabolism.

WeTransfer TOS says they can use all your uploaded content for genAI

Bye forever, WeTransfer.

Quality of scientific papers questioned as academics ‘overwhelmed’ by the millions published Widespread mockery of AI-generated rat with giant penis in one paper brings problem to public attention

Quality of scientific papers questioned as academics ‘overwhelmed’ by the millions published www.theguardian.com/science/2025... - odd that preprint servers don't get a mention here... (they don't solve the problem of volume but they do change the incentive landscape)

Think of this situation but for, say, medicine. People delaying the publishing of findings for academic prestige. Insane.

As @timcrane.bsky.social points out in a sibling thread, publications is how placements and promotions are decided, and moving to a better, saner set of criteria is a collective action problem.

@krysdolega.bsky.social

The Diamond OAJ ournal @phimisci.bsky.social received metrics for the first time. Sure metrics are not the whole story, but its amazing to see them directly behind Philosophy of Science, and ahead of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science SJR Value! Lets keep pushing OA Philosophy!
#philsky

ABSTRACT. Marr famously argued that computational theory (analysis at the computational level) was required to explain both ‘what the device does and why’. In a series of articles, Shagrir and Bechtel argue that computational theory explains how certain mechanisms are appropriate for certain tasks by showing that identity holds between the corresponding mechanisms and the tasks at an abstract, computational level of description. Call this the ‘computational identity account’ of ‘mechanism–task fit’. Inspired by their work, I propose an alternative account that grounds mechanism–task fit in constraint satisfaction, where the mechanism is appropriate to the task because the mechanism’s properties satisfy all the task-related constraints. I use retinal edge detection and sound localization as two cases to demonstrate that constraint satisfaction may be a better way to ground mechanism–task fit than identity. This account of mechanism–task fit isn’t confined to the computational level of description, so I describe it as ‘task-fitting explanation’ rather than computational theory. I argue that task-fitting explanation is a species of constraint-based explanation: it is interested in which features of a mechanism make possible above-chance correct task performance for the mechanism. As such, it is ‘modally complementary ’to mechanistic explanation, which, I argue, is interested in which activities done by a mechanism’s parts make actual competent task performance for the mechanism.

Just accepted:

'Explaining Mechanism–Task Fit in Neuroscience’
– Aliya Rumana

Abstract in alt text or read the full paper here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...

#philsci #philsky

The sycophantic tone of ChatGPT always sounded familiar, and then I recognized where I'd heard it before: author response letters to reviewer comments.

"You're exactly right, that's a great point!"

"Thank you so much for this insight!"

Also how it always agrees even when it contradicts itself.

20 things that women should stop wearing after the age of 30.

1-20: The weight of other people's expectations and judgments.

Chirimuuta Wins 2025 Lakatos Award - Daily Nous Mazviita Chirimuuta (Edinburgh) is the winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award. Chirimuuta received the award for her book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience ...

It's a good book. You should read it.

Breaking news! Two more articles for our special issue of Philosophical Psychology. First: Marco Facchin argues that my version of mental fictionalism entails the existence of extended mental states: doi.org/10.1080/0951... @journalphp.bsky.social @marcofacchin.bsky.social 1/2

Mazviita Chirimuuta wins the 2025 Lakatos Award! The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce the 2025 Lakatos Award winner Mazviita Chirimuuta, who receives the award for her book “The Brain Abstracted:…

🏆 We are pleased to announce the 2025 Lakatos Award winner Mazviita Chirimuuta, who receives the award for her book “The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience”

Congratulations! 👏

👉More about the award: www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/b...

Farewell to Dimensions of Radical Embodiment 3 at the University of Southern Denmark

Once again, this was a lot of fun!

Some photos here radicalembodiment3.github.io/gallery/

Any volunteers to host DRE4?

This is now published #openaccess here 👇 #philsky #cogsci philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.

From today, every paper submitted to Nature -if published - will be accompanied by peer reviewers comments & authors rebuttal.

We started the trial in 2020; we now want to open up the review process & showcase its role in shaping & improving papers
🧪 #AcademicSky

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Out now! Mind as Metaphor (OUP, 2023) t.co/eBlYtDd5lY

I would like to attend, but other things may take precedence

Fictional minds extend for real Toon’s (2023) Mind as Metaphor defends a fictionalist view of propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which propositional attitudes are metaphors projecting the use of certain representati...

#philsky #philmind
My paper "Fictional mind extend for real" is finally out in Philosophical Psychology
www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SYIXD...

A person watering plants in a brain

Latest papers: Joseph Gough offers a genealogy of the concept of mind and category mental, building on work by Rorty and Wilkes, buttressed by recent work in history and anthropology in this open access article doi.org/10.1080/0951...

3rd Online Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind ISPSM 2025   3rd Annual Online Conference   Call for AbstractsThe International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind(ISPSM) is happy to invite all philosophers working on a...

🗓️DEADLINE EXTENSION!

You have time until May 14th to submit an abstract to the @ispsm.bsky.social online conference: philevents.org/event/show/1...

#philsky #philsci #consci #philmind

#philsky and #philmind
Pleased to see my paper "Fictional minds extend for real" accepted in Philosophical Psychology. The paper argues that the truth of fictionalism entails the existence of some extended mental states.
Pre-print (pre-review) here marcofacchinmarcof.wixsite.com/site/articles