Gavin Foster🦧

Screenshot of a journal article titled "Two ontogenetic challenges to trait individuation" by Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, published in Synthese (2025) 205:219. The abstract reads: "Trait individuation is an epistemically indispensable and heuristically fruitful practice in biological science. However, important ontological issues transcend an epistemology-only reading of what trait individuation entails (e.g., adaptation and homology), prompting scholars to advance models and frameworks to grapple with this problem. Here, I articulate two challenges that arise when advancing theories and frameworks to tackle trait individuation: the synchronicity and the diachronicity challenges. The synchronicity challenge involves specifying the traits an organism has at a given moment in ontogeny, whereas the diachronicity challenge involves understanding the causal processes that drive trait individuation in development and tracing these units across time. To delve deeper, I introduce extant functionalist and structuralist perspectives on trait individuation and evaluate how they address both challenges. Overcoming these challenges is necessary for such accounts to fulfill their theoretical promise of individuating the traits that organisms have in an ontologically sound way."

“Traits” are central units of biological analysis—but how should they be individuated, and relative to which ontogenetic frame of reference? In my new paper, I argue that answering this isn’t easy—and matters more than it seems. 📃👇 link.springer.com/article/10.1... #philsci #HPBio #evosky #evodevo

i mean, at the very bottom we have physical laws, not mechanisms relevant for bio explanations anymore. & Ned's example of gravity not being fundamentally computational is exactly there

& bio isn't just macro-physics. evo history matters, & it needs its own vocab

www.jstor.org/stable/30378...

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Our conference on Dialectical Biology, the Marxist tradition represented by the work of Richard Lewontin, is this weekend! Join us Friday to Sunday, online or in Toronto, register here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Help spread the word if you can!

Brett Karlan, Practical capacities, empathy, and human-centered artificial intelligence - PhilPapers This chapter explores some conceptual connections between human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) research and empathic AI. First, I argue that HCAI is best understood as a framework that center...

Reactivating my account for the worst reason (to publicize a new paper of mine)

On what human-centered AI might be and how it might help/hinder the development of our practical capacities, using empathy as a case study. You probs won't like it, but hey at least it's short

philpapers.org/rec/KARPCE

October 10th, philosophy grad student Eric Servatius will be presenting a paper titled 'Signaling contempt: Immigration, social identity, and public contempt expressions' at The Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum conference.

Eric's paper was also chosen as the best graduate paper for 2025! 🥳

Individual Intentions in Shared Intention* Abstract. There is disagreement among philosophers about the following claim: when we share an intention to perform some action, we each have an intention

New Xphi Study with Matt Rachar just dropped:

academic.oup.com/analysis/adv...

Philosophy grad student, @gibbonitathought.bsky.social has a new publication out now in Philosophical Psychology! 🦍 👶Check out the abstract and then read the whole paper here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Food causes 22-34% of climate change.
But it only gets 4% of the media coverage.

Why? Neglect. Misunderstanding. And a hell of a lot of greenwashing.

Rest in peace to Jane Goodall, without whom the field I have fallen in love with would not exist.

A giant who will be remembered for centuries to come.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

It better be better than On What Matters Vol 3

Ok fine I'll read Reasons and Persons

We’re living though the Misanthropocene

Grid of promotional tiles for Future Knowledge podcast episodes one through nine.

🎙️ Have you listened to the Future Knowledge #podcast from #InternetArchive + @AuthorsAlliance.bsky.social ?

Catch up on past episodes & get ready for a new one this week!

🎧 Listen & subscribe wherever you get your podcasts ⤵️
futureknowledge.transistor.fm

@Archive.org

Hi Internet! I'm Drew and THIS IS MY FACE.

If this GIF has ever brought you joy in the past, I humbly ask you to consider making a donation to the National MS Society. It would mean a lot to me and to those I know affected by the disease!

Donate at blinkingguy.com

Why is this horrible for Universities?

Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card.

This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

When I correct someone and they say “I bet you’re fun at parties,” I explain what a terrible bet that would be.

Monte Dolack, Home on the Reef, 1994

Monte Dolack, Home on the Reef, 1994

From monkeys to infants: the empirical challenges facing mental fictionalism In recent decades, a novel theoretical account of folk psychology has emerged that challenges traditional assumptions: mental fictionalism. Rather than treating mental states as things in creatures...

Third: Gavin Robert Foster @gibbonitathought.bsky.social offers a critique of mental fictionalism based on evidence concerning mindreading in infants and non-human primates: doi.org/10.1080/0951...

Photo of square orange tiles, set into the ground, across one of which several cats footprints are clearly visible.

One day, nearly 2000 years ago, a cat dashed across some drying tiles, somewhere near Hadrian's Wall.

It's immortality of a kind, isn't it?

New Publication! @evanwestra.bsky.social's paper
'Belief in Social Cognition' is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of the Cognitive Science of Belief 🥳 Evan argues that belief plays a modest role, rather than a central role, in everyday social cognition. Abstract here: philpapers.org/rec/WESBIS

From monkeys to infants: the empirical challenges facing mental fictionalism In recent decades, a novel theoretical account of folk psychology has emerged that challenges traditional assumptions: mental fictionalism. Rather than treating mental states as things in creatures...

"Mental fictionalism, in starting from the fully developed adult practice, appears to overlook the developmental trajectory that any adequate theory of folk psychology must capture."

Thank you!!!

out here fighting against the overwhelming fictionalist orthodoxy that has captured cog sci 😓✊

of collective game of pretense or collective narratives.

I conclude by arguing some strategies that fictionalists could adopt to help fill in this important gap.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

facing all versions is that, as of now, they have no story to tell about how the ability to engage in folk psychological practice emerges.

I show this by considering the strong evidence of infant and non-human primate mindreading. The problem: they appear to mindread without partaking in any kind

desires to others, that we are actually capturing real things in others' minds. Instead, they argue that we are engaging in a kind of collective fiction.

Mental fictionalists differ on the details about how this fiction is realized, as well as to its purpose. However, I argue that a common problem

In the last decade, a new interpretation of folk psychology has emerged, primarily due to the work of Meg Wallace, @adamtoonphilos.bsky.social, Tamás Demeter, as well as other great philosophers.

They argue that realists are wrong to think that when we attribute mental states such as beliefs or

Really excited to share my first ever published paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology: "From Monkeys to Infants: The Empirical Challenges Facing Mental Fictionalism"

It's open-access, which I'm really happy about.

Brief 🧵 on what it's all about!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....