Available #OpenAccess, Michael Kirchhoff's "The Idealized Mind" brings together ideas from the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of science to reconcile scientific realism with model-based science: mitpress.mit.edu/978026255293...

Data only shows associations. Turning those into claims about mechanism or causation? That requires a Rosetta Stone of prior knowledge + theory. Resting-state fMRI is purely observational; correlation is its currency. From this, plenty of "theoretical toys" about brain function can be built...

Second: Michael D. Kirchhoff @kirchhoffmd.bsky.social explores the relationship between mental fictionalism and successful idealizations in the sciences: doi.org/10.1080/0951...

Not that it comes as much of a surprise to many of us, but it's worth emphasizing once again - the 👏 brain 👏 uses 👏 distributed 👏 coding 👏. 😁 Two new papers from the #IBL looking at brain-wide activity: www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience 🧪

🏆 Best Paper — Predictive Coding or Just Feature Discovery? An Alternative Account of Why Language Models Fit Brain Data: doi.org/10.1162/nol_... Richard Antonello and @alexanderhuth.bsky.social

Come to Melbourne for the 2025 Conference of the Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology Check out the great keynotes - submit your abstract Come join this exciting community of researchers Nov 24-25 - Register now! #philosophy #neuroskyence #philsky sites.google.com/monash.edu/a...

Looking forward to this podcast interview

I am advertising two PhD positions in philosophy -- one for a domestic student, one for an international student. Both positions are 1 + 3 years, meaning that the first year is an MRes and the next three years are for the PhD. www.mq.edu.au/research/phd...

Exciting news. Following the publication of 'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' (2025, MIT Press), I have signed a new contract for a completed and forthcoming book with MIT entitled 'The Idealized Brain: Uniting Philosophy of Science and Computational Neuroscience'.

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

'The Idealized Mind: From Model-based Science to Cognitive Science' published by MIT Press. Claims: models of the mind are idealized models; this is consistent with scientific realism; yet, it blocks realism about neural representation and neural computation based on evidence from neuroscience.

"Beyond the Extended Mind: New arguments for extensive enactivism". Published earlier this year in Synthese (Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel D. Hutto and Michael D. Kirchhoff) link.springer.com/article/10.1... Lot's of major implications for theorizing about the mind, brain and the nature of cognition

'The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-building, Scientific Realism, and Instrumentalism' (Kirchhoff, Kiverstein & Robertson) has finally made its way into the ahead of print stage with The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/bjps/0/0

Pre-print of my new paper "Idealization and Mental Fictionalism" accepted for publication in Philosophical Psychology. Thesis: fictionalism about mental representation is not explanatorily useful. Reason: fails the benchmark test of a useful idealization. www.academia.edu/127076112/Id...