All the philosophy students who pursued their passion made a wise decision. Learning how to think is a always a good investment. Psychology grads are not doing too badly on the job market either.

more of this!

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Thrilled this is out! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🧵 Do we have 2 kinds of beliefs? Some beliefs seem insensitive to evidence and rarely guide behavior, etc. To explain this, several theories divide belief into 2 types. I argue the explanation isn't in the *mind* but in the *world*

wrote a thing—it's fun you should read it

I think it's important for neuroscientists to reinforce this too. It's the first thing I teach in my cog neuro class. A thing isn't more real just because it's found in the brain. Every psychological thing must be in the brain at some level

Hey psychologists, when you're explaining some psychological phenomenon that's perfectly well captured in psychological terms, maybe you don't need to refer to some shitty neuroimaging study with ten people to make it seem more "sciencey"...

philosophy: i'm going to use this word. others use that word. these words are different but also similar. i use this one because i want to talk about this thing. other people interested in that thing use the other word. however, what i say will also matter for that word even though i use this word.

In totally unsurprising news, Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis. Paywall bypass: archive.is/6RdK9

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

interesting paper on what makes a psychological event count as learning by henry schiller, who is not on bluesky. highly recommend it philpapers.org/rec/SCHRLP-4

If AI was basically popular and useful but we couldn't monetize it, that'd be one thing. If we all loved the games and community and connections, great. That's not really the issue. It's not broadly useful, it's costly and environmentally damaging, and it destroys jobs without replacing them.

the sinking feeling when you see someone has cited your worst paper

New paper out in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: we apply linguistic tools to sperm whale vowels. The result: sperm whale vowels do not just look like human vowels. They also behave like them. We found several parallels. Like in Latin, whales have short and long vowels.

We'd love to involve the broader VSS community in this event, starting now. We genuinely want to know where you stand on this topic, so please feel free to give us your open-ended hot takes here (the spiciest takes may be featured in the intro): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

🧵Excited to announce— "Reimagining the binding problem(s) for the 21st century": A VSS Symposium St. Pete Beach @vssmtg.bsky.social May 15th, 10:30am Presenters: Peter Tse, JohnMark Taylor, Seda Karakose-Akbiyik, Ana Chica, Anne Sereno, & Jake Quilty-Dunn visionsciences.org/symposia/?sy...

happy #CDS2026 to those who celebrate!

i mean if i don't repost this asinine thing i made now, when will i

this fall i'm teaching intro to philosophy for the first time in over ten years. please, i am begging: share your syllabi! the weirder the better!

The next round of Zed and my work on aesthetic judgment and conversation: inspired by Susan Sontag we make the case for "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment and against vibing, communitarianism and the "omnivore monoculture". onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

New article! Many folks love their AI companions, and some philosophers argue current systems should count as "friends" functionally: they reciprocate "care" through positive intentions and rewarding experiences. 1/ philpapers.org/rec/BROAAT-37

it's bullshit when connections has ad-hoc barsalou-ass categories

We need to bring back the ideal of masculinity focused on quiet self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Alpha shit is for losers. Be a man and humbly forgo the shit you want for years so you can provide for your family, you indulgent little wuss

New commentary on Bai et al.'s BBS target article, co-authored with E. J. Green. Bai et al. argue that core cognition should be reconceptualized as perceptual. We argue that principles of object continuity in visual perception do not match traditional principles of core object cognition.

Perfect

glib, evidence-avoidant critiques of dissonance theory exemplify the central claims of the theory

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

scenes from the MIT philosophy department

I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...

Object category warps the topography of object space for behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.11.711098v1

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition? In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🥁Now announcing the winner of the 2026 Stanton Prize: Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ This honor will be celebrated at the upcoming meeting of the SPP

Claude is short for Jean Claude Van Damme. Are you saying Jean Claude Van Damme does not have consciousness? Because I agree with you.

Philosophers have never successfully defined wetness. How do you know a climate model isn’t wet?

very compelling argument for representationalism about psychology and antirepresentationalism about neuroscience

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... Enjoyed writing this with the wonderful philosopher Bill Ramsey

She's like an old samurai whose great battles are behind her but every once in a while she kills a man with piece of paper just to prove a point

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

really cool to see two of my favorite philosophers of perception collab, and the paper is a very convincing critique of the idea that mental imagery plays a widespread role in ordinary stimulus-driven perception

lots of good points have already been made on using AI Agents for cheating (e.g. the latest Canvas-bot), it degrades learning, etc. One additional thing I'd like to point out: if you use this stuff, you're not being clever, you're just an asshole. to explain:

Was an intellectual pleasure working on this with @quiltydunn.bsky.social Someone who also feels that there is a glaring gap in current cognitive science/neuroscience/AI

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

it snowed

my paper has been rejected for not discussing quilty-dunn's work enough

I'm SO tired of people looking for "the neuroscience of X" (meaning uninformative neuroimaging pictures) when *the psychology of X* is right there, doing a perfectly good job...