Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science
Faculty:
"I came to philosophy through psychology, and my research has always focused on scientific theories of the mind, with a focus on the role of evolutionary history. My current focus is on the evolution of norms, or cultural values, and on the theoretical problems raised by the many conflicting ways norms are represented across the social sciences. This includes concerns about the nature of norms in general, but also certain specific types of norms, such as moral norms, norms of sustainability and environmentalism, and norms of democracy. This focus on norms is a natural extension of earlier work on the evolution of religion, morality, and culture in general, some of which focuses on purely theoretical issues, and has been published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Journal of Cognition and Culture, while other work, published in Philosophical Psychology and Social Cognition, is empirical, using methods from experimental philosophy to measure folk intuitions about metaethics and the concept of morality. Finally, one strand of my research focuses on applying scientific theory, rather than developing it: I argue for climate solutions that focus on internalizing norms of sustainability and environmentalism, rather than merely complying with them as a means of avoiding punishment and gaining approval. Work on this topic has been published in Nature Sustainability, Sustainability, Sustainability Science, and Ecology and Society."
"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, the continuation of which lies at the heart of the Purdue Normativity and Cognitions (PuNCs) lab.
This lab continues a strain of work that I've developed in experimental philosophy (which many practitioners affectionately shorten to "x-phi"), that uses the tools of empirical social psychology to test philosophically rich theories about the role that moral values play in personal identity (Gomez-Lavin & Prinz 2019), our experiences of art and its role in informing identity (Fingerhut, Gomez-Lavin, Winklemayer & Prinz 2021), our perceptions of togetherness (Gomez-Lavin & Rachar 2019, 2022, 2023), and our judgements about the role of social norms—like those tied to gender—in developing future AI systems (Read, Gomez-Lavin, Beltrama & Miracchi 2022). Presently in the PuNCs Lab 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 a specific focus on the norms that inform relationships of Solidarity. 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."
Brett is an assistant professor of philosophy working on the philosophy of science (especially cognitive science and artificial intelligence) and normative philosophy (especially epistemology and ethics). His work has appeared in a number of interdisciplinary venues, including Neuropsychology, Psychomusicology, Memory, Ethics & Information Technology, and the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, among others. He has worked in collaboration with psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, and engineers on a number of projects, including two supported by grants from the Templeton World Charity Foundation. In his current TWCF grant project, he and his co-PI Colin Allen (UCSB) collaborate with animal cognition researchers Dora Biro (Rochester) and Chris Krupenye (Johns Hopkins) to develop a transdisciplinary framework for understanding rationality in systems as different as chimpanzee social groups and artificial agents. Other relevant collaborations include work on the ethics of the Internet of Things with Noah Apthorpe (computer science, Colgate) and on the political and moral justifications for a right to an explanation for algorithmic decisions with Henrik Kugelberg (political theory, LSE). In his spare time, he does more philosophy.
Daniel Kelly’s research focuses on issues at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, moral theory, and evolution. He turned his dissertation into a book on the psychology, as well as the genetic and cultural evolution, of disgust called Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust. He has published on a range of topics that include moral judgment, moral progress, climate change, social norms and norm-guided activity, the psychology of group membership, racial cognition, implicit bias and responsibility, and cross-cultural moral and psychological diversity. In the early 00’s while getting his PhD at Rutgers University—then and still one of the top places in the world to study cognitive science—he also became a founding member of the Moral Psychology Research Group, which includes like-minded philosophers and psychologists investigating morality from both conceptual and empirical perspectives. Kelly’s research interests are stridently interdisciplinary. He was recently a visiting scholar in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University, and has been a fellow at Holland College at KU Leuven and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Much of Kelly's recent work has been exploring ways to apply the insights of the cognitive, behavioral, and evolutionary sciences to social issues like climate change, misinformation and polarization, and systemic injustice. He is currently co-authoring a public-facing book that explores how those insights can be used to integrate individual and structural approaches to social change.
Corey received his Ph.D. in Logic and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University. Before that, he earned a B.S. in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Psychology, as well as a B.A. in Philosophy, from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He worked in a computational neuroscience lab at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, doing computational modeling of neural ion channels, and later at a cognitive neuroscience lab at Washington University in St. Louis, managing lab operations and assisting with fMRI brain scans. Corey’s research focuses on the role of computation as an explanatory framework in cognitive science and neuroscience, foundational issues in artificial and natural computation, and the role that forgotten technologies and paradigms, such as analog computation and cybernetics, can help address current ways of understanding computational cognitive science. His teaching has included courses in the philosophy of A.I., the philosophy of computation, and the philosophy of science, an interdisciplinary (i.e., linguistics, philosophy, and psychology) course on cognitive science, and an interdisciplinary course in non-digital computation, which he developed alongside a computer scientist.
"My Ph.D. is in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (not philosophy), involving extensive graduate coursework in all 3 disciplines. While in the PNP program at Wash U, I was a member of Rebecca Treiman’s Reading and Language Lab (Psychology) for 5 years. As a member of the lab, I lead my own research project and participated in all aspects of lab activity: experimental design, data collection and analysis, literature review and writing, mentoring/managing research assistants, conference presentations, journal submissions, etc.
As a faculty member, I have held affiliations with psychology and/or neuroscience at each of the 3 institutions where I have worked. Since arriving at Purdue in August, I have established an affiliation with the Purdue Institute for Integrative Neuroscience, and I look forward to developing further affiliations as I interact with other departments. I have designed and taught several interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses in the philosophy of cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, and memory, and have served on dissertation committees for graduate students in psychology, cognitive science, and computer science.
I am the incoming philosophy editor for WIRES Cognitive Science, starting January 2024. In addition, I hold editorial board appointments at 3 top journals for interdisciplinary work in cognitive science: Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Psychology, and Memory Studies. Felipe de Brigard (Philosophy/Neuroscience, Duke University) and I just recently co-edited a special issue of Synthese on locating representations in the brain, featuring contributions from philosophers and neuroscientists.
I am first author on a series of papers in leading developmental and psycholinguistics journals, which resulted from my work in Treiman’s Reading and Language Laboratory during graduate school. I have since developed new interdisciplinary research projects exploring some key concepts relating to memory. These include a model of event memory for AI systems, where I am collaborating with computer scientists David Ménager (Parallax) and Dongkyu Choi (A*Star). I have also worked with Sara Aronowitz (Philosophy/Psychology, Toronto) and Arjen Stolk (Neuroscience, Dartmouth) on theories of cognitive maps and their role in our understanding of mnemonic structure. Both collaborations have resulted in publications in cognitive science venues and are on-going.
As a result of my participation in the Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy program at Duke University, I was a part of two interdisciplinary research teams that were awarded seed grants. Last spring I was a primary contributing member on an (unsuccessful) proposal for a neuroscience collaboration grant from the Simon’s Foundation (lead PIs: Sheena Josselyn, Neuroscience, Toronto and Liz Phelps, Psychology, Harvard). I am currently working with neuroscientists at Toronto and Western University on a proposal to the New Foundations in Research Fund in Canada, to be submitted in 2024.
I have been involved in numerous interdisciplinary workshops, conferences, and panels on memory. Since 2022 these include: MindCORE seminar series at Penn, ESI-Sync at the Ernst Strungman Institute (Frankfurt), Summer Seminar in Neuroscience and Philosophy at Duke, an optogenetics workshop at the IHPST (Paris), a workshop on Memory, Space, and Time at Arizona, and an interdisciplinary public debate hosted by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at NYU.
I have played an organizational role in the leading organizations for the philosophy of cognitive science. I served on the executive council for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology from 2018-2022 and am currently President of the organization. In 2019, I was an invited symposium organizer for the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology. In 2023, I co-organized the pre-workshop for the Society for Philosophy and Psychology with Felipe De Brigard, which featured talks from philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists of memory."
Westra’s research is focused on questions about basic mechanisms of social cognition and their role in communication, social coordination, moral judgment, and the evolution thereof. During his PhD at the University of Maryland (where he was supervised by the eminent philosophy of cognitive science Peter Carruthers), he took multiple graduate seminars in neuroscience, linguistics, and developmental psychology, and was a member of Jonathan Beier’s Social Kids Lab, where he led empirical projects on the development of theory of mind and adult perspective-taking. He has published in numerous cognitive science journals, including Cognition, Perspectives in Psychological Science, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, and Mind & Language; he has forthcoming papers in Biological Reviews and Transactions of the Royal Society: B. His work is regularly cited by psychologists, linguists, philosophers, primatologists, and computer scientists in venues like PNAS, Developmental Review, Cognition, Cognitive Development, Child Development, Theoretical Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and many others. In addition to being an active participant in interdisciplinary cognitive science organizations like the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (which he is currently chairing), he has been invited to speak to audiences of cognitive scientists at the University of Toronto, Boston College, Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the Central European University. At York University, he taught the capstone seminar for the honors cognitive science program and supervised multiple honors theses; he was also an external examiner for a dissertation in the Department of Cognitive Science at the Central European University.
Maria received her PhD in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology, where she was trained in both philosophy and psychological sciences. In addition to completing her graduate coursework requirements in these three areas, Maria also received a cross training fellowship grant to work under the supervision of social psychologist, Dr. Ethan Kross, at the University of Michigan in his Emotions & Self-Control Lab. Maria continued to stay on as a lab member there after her fellowship ended, where she conducted research on the relationship between emotional empathy, desensitization to pain, and the impacts on well-being and moral judgment making. Despite now being at Purdue, Maria still has various connections to this lab, including Dr. Ethan Kross as well as other current and former graduate students whom she collaborated with. Maria’s current research continues to draw on findings from cognitive science, especially that of multimodal and visual perception as well as emotions and affect, as she has developed a Bayesian account of moral perception and moral emotions.