When something doesn't work properly, can your dog tell if the object is broken or if you just don't know how to use it? I'm pleased to share my group @jhu.edu's first study with pet dogs (!!), now out in @plosone.org Led by Amalia Bastos: Do dog rationally infer the causes of failed actions? 1/4

“We’ve had semantics, yes. What about metasemantics?”

🚨Recent work from Brian Leahy, Michael Huemer, Katie Holmes & Susan Carey: Do older 2-year-olds deploy explicit possibility concepts in action planning?

We are hiring next year in semantics- one year positions of course less exciting and good for the field than straight up tenure track postings, but on the other hand hiring in something that isn’t computational feels like a win anymore in linguistics. Come bring some innovative takes on meaning!

Syllabus (draft) on modal thought: flaxen-store-af3.notion.site/PHIL555-Moda... Comments welcome!

when the issue on the table is demonic

It's that time of the year again.

Aaaand we're back!! Two Postdocs in Philosophy of Mind (one ot two years), Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp - to work with me! Deadline: March 20, 2026 More info on PhilJobs

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

MIT News article about our new paper providing a roadmap for using transcranial focused ultrasound for consciousness research: news.mit.edu/2026/new-too... (Original article here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41270981/)

The 52nd annual meeting of the SPP will be at JHU, June 17-20 📣 Submit your work by January 16! 📣

Elmar Unnsteinsson (@eunnsteins.bsky.social) and I have a new paper forthcoming in Noûs. "Genre and Conversation" We show how to generalize the classic pragmatic theories to conversational genres that aren't factual, cooperative, committal information exchanges. philpapers.org/rec/ELMGAC-2

I am thrilled to announce that this framework is out! Who is responsible for inequality? @tanialombrozo.bsky.social and I show that answers depend on whether people are judging causes or obligations, and the past vs the future. doi.org/10.1177/1745...

🧵New preprint: Adults often agree with their ingroup even when evidence says otherwise. Why? To find out, we studied kids, who show the same tendency but *before* political identities take hold. With developmental data, we can see the basic psychological ingredients. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 1/11

a project I really like, now officially out! "Shape Guides Visual Pretense" by Qian and me paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article... I'll walk through a quick version here To get a sense of it, first consider: Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

Announcing the first Workshop on Formal Languages and Neural Networks (FLaNN)! We invite the submission of abstracts for posters that discuss the formal expressivity, computational properties, and learning behavior of neural network models, including large language models (LLMs).

A fascinating new paper by Amanda Royka and colleagues explores why monkeys fail false belief tasks. A natural explanation would be that monkeys wrongly assume that other agents share their own knowledge. Royka et al. find that this is NOT the case... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Beautiful experimental philosophy paper on what people ordinarily mean when they say that a statement is “true” Turns out it’s not always about corresponding correctly to the facts. Sometimes it’s more closely related to a moral ideal of “truthfulness” philarchive.org/archive/ZYGTJN

We wrote a thing -- showing you don't need LLMs to model language production dynamics like the tendency for speakers to reduce predictable words. All you have to do is better model how speech rate varies depending on where a word is and how long the utterance is. arxiv.org/abs/2512.23659

A while ago, I posted a set of notes about the Bayesian approach to inquiry and how it can help us think about questions raised in the recent literature on zetetic epistemology. I’ve now corralled that material into something like a first draft of a book. I hope it might be of interest to others.

Invited speaker lineup is out for SPP 2026! More information on the meeting here: www.socphilpsych.org/meetings.html Submissions accepted until Jan 16! Come hang in Baltimore; conference is at Johns Hopkins from June 17-20, 2026! @socphilpsych.bsky.social @joshrottman.bsky.social #SPP2026

Large language models are not about natural language arxiv.org/abs/2512.13441

Merry Christmas to you all, from birds of Costa Rica!

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.

Unconscious size representation involved in summary statistics judgments of average size: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

Maybe there are two distinct kinds of belief: they either represent facts (It's rainy) or express identity (My son is the best). We find instead that many beliefs simultaneously represent facts and express identity (but few beliefs do neither).

Does anyone know of recent literature on the use of "else" between conditionals, as in sentences like "The package will arrive on Friday if you order it today, or else on Saturday if you order it tomorrow."?

I know of some work vaguely in this direction (e.g., studies on how non-human primates don't learn language) but wanted to ask: does anyone know studies/literature on whether non-human animals ask questions? (My understanding is they don't but want to read the lit before I form a strong view.)

🚨 @gibbonitathought.bsky.social have a new review of Emma Borg's Acting for Reasons: In Defence of Common-sense Psychology. TLDR we're big fans. We also use the review as a chance to riff on the relation between reasoning and mindreading. Check it out!

Delighted to share (with @evanwestra.bsky.social) a preprint of our review of Emma Borg’s Acting for Reasons, forthcoming in Mind. It was a pleasure to read and engage with. We suggest the thesis of the book could be supplemented by considering regulative accounts of FP. philarchive.org/rec/FOSROA

Random Q: has anyone tested whether 3 - 5 year-olds understand that epistemic modals but not other flavours of modality give rise to epistemic contradictions? E.g., do 3 - 5 year-olds think "it might be raining but it's not" and "it could be raining but it's not" are equally fine? (1/2)

(some of the ideas build on the a suggestion that can be summarized as "the language of thought is typed", see more here: arxiv.org/abs/2210.01634)

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946

The call for commentaries on our "Core Perception" paper is now live! We would love to know what you think about this new perspective on the nature of early emerging knowledge. Details here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Proposals due Dec 29!

This paper with @aaronstevenwhite.io is finally published! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1007/s110... (Or, if you don't have institutional access, you can download it from lingbuzz: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007...)

New pre-print with @drbarner.bsky.social! We ask how children come to understand age. We find that young children use numerical age and facial morphology to identify who’s older, not just size, and point to acquiring a number system as key to developing an understanding of age. osf.io/gvb46

I have news. Wonderful news. New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief. philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF

“Murder is wrong, but I don’t disapprove of it” Expressivist theories of moral language seem to suggest that this sentence should make no sense — but a new paper in Cognition finds that people actually *do* find this sentence largely acceptable www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Check out commentary on the @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social BBS Target Article where Jeff Mitchell and myself review the evidence on LLMs learning impossible languages: arxiv.org/abs/2511.11389

New paper from @tashaunalb.bsky.social, Roger Strong, and me! We find that the ability to split attention between non-contiguous locations develops quite late - between 6 and 8 years of age! Now out in APP. #visionscience #psychscisky #devpsych link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

My Visual Attention in Crisis paper has finally appeared, along with 30 commentaries and response. I argue that it’s time to rethink attention from the ground up, and suggest key phenomena and possible directions. Requires access, alas. doi.org/10.1017/S014...

In my professional opinion, ChatGPT is not conscious and does not have psychological states like beliefs and desires (yes I’m aware of the arguments to the contrary)

Looking for a funded Ph.D. in #CogSci in an interdisciplinary, research-first program? Apply to CEU! cognitivescience.ceu.edu/admission Deadline February 4, 2026. Please share with any interested students! #PsychSciSky #DevPsych #CogPsych

New mentorship program for interdisciplinary crossover philosophy-neuroscience work, from #SPAN. Check it out and apply!

At last! Open Access version of the book on MIT's site. One for the syntax nerds. I argue we need to replace Merge, that there are no Phases, and that we need to rethink the basic theoretical typology of Islands. Feel free to download with abandon! 🐦🐦 #syntax direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

🚨🚨🚨 Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17 🚨🚨🚨 We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

There’s more. She reviews “Steffan Yabble” here.

If it does, it won't bother me, Brett Karlan, an epistemologist who has never published anything on (or even talked about) AI! #brettkarlanisanepistemologist