New preprint w @carenwalker.bsky.social & @drbarner.bsky.social! We test the "minimal representations" hypothesis that explains gaps in 3yos modal reasoning. Against it, we find that even 2½yos reason about mutually exclusive possibilities... when goals are clear to them. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/6

Tired: film adaptation of The Odyssey Wired: film adaptation of Theodicy

Never expected that hackers would prevent me from grading essays

Anyone going to SPP interested in going birding one of the mornings?

We’re growing a pot of grass for our dog (she likes salad?), so I think of ensemble perception every time I walk through the living room

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

You know you can catch your boy crying over concepts

I looked at the nearest possible world in which I reduced the sun to the size of a golf ball and placed it in NYC, and I'm dubious

It's sort of wild to me that Continental Philosophy has never produced anything as perspicuous as Bertrand Russell's famously clear Gray's Elegy argument in "On Denoting."

Good news guys! I’ve discerned whether it’s continental or analytic philosophy that is the good one

Hi Bluesky! Suppose I was feeling brave and wanted to learn about how we/kids develop event cognitive capacities. Where should I start?

Why do we think people get so excited about consciousness, but not representation? I know why some *philosophers* find the former more interesting. But there are endless podcasts, quirky op eds, etc, about consciousness, and laypeople eat it up. Not so much for representation. Why?

Nativists rejoice

Big dividing line among naturalistic theories of representational content is whether my watch’s 12 now means 11

Sleep talked about number perception last night. Wife wrote down that I said “You can represent that there are 17 objects without representing 17 objects. Existentially, without tracking anything.” She then asked (sleepy) me how; to which I, she reports, simply “nodded with steady determination”

Love: also systematic and productive

I’m all for the idea that our minds are really different from LLMs but sometimes I really do wake up to inner speech philosophyslop

Found it: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

Whenever a philosophy topic trends, I have two reactions. On the one hand, I'm super excited that people want to talk about anything philosophical. On the other hand, I'm annoyed how no one bothers to ask what philosophers have thought about this. They just spout off whatever occurs to them

Got sidetracked this morning trying to categorize philosophers based on whether they tend to use ‘furthermore’ or ‘moreover’ more often, love my job

Sometimes Bob Stalnaker says he doesn’t believe in possible worlds

Please make a terrible ruckus about this, if you live in Oregon

It would be fun if journal articles had YouTube-style thumbnails so you can have your silly/eye-catching thing as well as an informative title without doing the old 15-word title+subtitle thing

Tried to tell my sister that if something isn’t accurate, it can’t be knowledge. Knowing epistemology is a burden sometimes

A grad student put up a bunch of these MIT philosophy themed valentines. I thought this one was fantastic and told them so. Turns out I came up with it a couple years ago and they had just parroted me. Perry’ed again

If I had a nickel for every time a group of a cappella singers rickrolled my class, I’d have a nickel today.

Ordinary language philosopher doing philosophy of physics “Well they’re like regular mechanics, but really tiny”

Older philosophy papers without any signposting at the start are total roller coasters, you have no idea what what you’re in for

Reposting in honor of groundhog day

Philosophers who change their mind on something owe us a blurb on their website documenting the shift. It’s not enough to have a footnote “in previous work… but I’ve since changed my mind.” You had arguments for your previous view! Tell us what you think was wrong with them!!

I'm excited to share that my first paper "Guessing and its Limits" is forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research! Thread below. TLDR: I present a novel puzzle for a recent "question-sensitive" theory of guessing/belief in multi-question scenarios. philpapers.org/rec/FANGAI-2

New paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: "Consciousness doesn't do that". I explain why I believe that animal sentience research is in large part built on sand. In my opinion, we should be skeptical of many of the claims made in this field. philpapers.org/rec/MICCDD

When I was very young someone told me babies know every language before they’re born and then forget most of them, and I’m now wondering if that was an extremely corrupted version of Chomsky on UG

Got a haircut in advance of the APA, the things I sacrifice for this career

Maybe this year I’ll just shoot to believe things, it’s hard enough these days

the hardest part about studying how kids learn language is that they know but won’t tell us

*frowning at the philosophy shelf at the used book store* How are people supposed to find wisdom without analytic philosophy

Two bald eagles sharing a kill on the ice this morning. One of the coolest bird-related moments of my life (which is to say, one of the coolest moments of my life)

The word “Pickwickian” was apparently pretty popular in ~90s philosophy of mind and I would like to see a comeback

“You will be haunted by three spirits”

This holiday season, give your philosopher friends the gift of a devastating counterexample

Random thigh pain today but immediately knew what it wasn’t; reading analytic philosophy of mind really pays off sometimes

Protect your tables, metaphysicians

Two-boxers, you know what to do

“I asked ChatGPT” Oh yeah? Well I asked an analytic philosopher and they said

Who needs NDPR when we can have influencer reviews

Stephen Yablo is subscriber only content

Big day for semantic externalists, eBird have dropped their new taxonomy! That feeling in the back of your throat was the bird words you knew receiving new referents: ebird.org/news/2025-ta...