About to do the annual Applying for Philosophy PhD Programs session. If you have undergrads or MA students, now is a great time to start thinking about application prep. Guide here: www.hkandersen.com/applying-for... #philsky #philsci

Now out (for realz) in Cognition: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, & me) Free preprint: www.tomerullman.org/papers/grade... Journal link: bit.ly/gradedInconCog @jennhu.bsky.social @cognitionjournal.bsky.social

Your dominant hand isn't better because it's "born" that way. It's just had more practice, a new PNAS study finds. The skill gap appears only when you pick up a tool, suggesting handedness is, in part, a fingerprint of human tool-use culture.

There is a standard format for general philosophy of mind courses which goes: first there was dualism, then (300 years later) behaviourism (quickly refuted by Putnam) then identity theory (ditto) then functionalism then the problem of consciousness, and maybe intentionality. The end.

if the tournament stops now do we win

new paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: How Seriously Should We Take AI Welfare? Constraints from the Epistemology of Consciousness philpapers.org/rec/LENHSS

Had so much fun at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology last week! First talk of my life and it was an amazing experience! @socphilpsych.bsky.social #SPP2026

Philosophers of language start your engines

Ecstatic to announce, with @agholdier.bsky.social, that our paper "Emotional Outsourcing" has been accepted for publication in Philosophical Quarterly! Pre-print is up on PhilPapers now.⬇️ philpapers.org/rec/WEIEOP-2

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

The Minions speak the Language of Thought (LOT).

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Another installment in linguist @glasslelia.bsky.social’s beautiful series of papers on linguistic differences between good and bad This one’s about why “The dishes are clean” means that all the dishes are clean but “The dishes are dirty” doesn’t mean that all the dishes are dirty

It feels strange to share good news, but: I’m moving to UCSD in July!! 🥳 I'm very grateful for my time at Princeton and SO excited for what comes next. We're building multiplayer games to study how teams are shaped by the problems they solve. If that sounds fun to you, I'm accepting grad students!

Society for Philosophy and Psychology @socphilpsych.bsky.social at @jhu.edu this weekend. Stanton award winner @levelsof.bsky.social gave an extraordinary address on her work addressing the question: “when does thought begin?” Elegant experiments with deep implications about how the mind might work

birthday party at spp @oldjerryfodor.bsky.social

Second preprint, with Elizabeth Bonawitz, one of my favorite studies children search the hypothesis space more broadly and variably than adults. osf.io/preprints/ps...

New paper w/Alan Bale & @drbarner.bsky.social in Journal of Semantics!🎉 We show in 3 studies that conditionals get strengthened to "only if" depending on listeners' access to alternatives, constrained by QUD & speaker knowledge, paralleling other forms of pragmatic inference. doi.org/10.1093/jos/...

A new paper, forthcoming in PPR: Visual Icons This paper took me more than 5 years to write. It argues that the visual system constructs imagistic representations ("visual icons") and sketches a theory of how visual icons, and iconic representations generally, are compositionally structured.

New paper draft: On Cheap Artificial Consciousness. When investigating AI consciousness, it's natural to look at what theories of consciousness tell us. Problem: you can build simple systems that meet their conditions. So, what should we say? A thread. (Paper in the last post)

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another creative & impactful project from the rocket-fueled @talboger.bsky.social, applying the wickedly cool “visual anagrams” method to animacy! Read the paper in @elife.bsky.social today, then attend his presentation at @socphilpsych.bsky.social later this week. 🦆✈️

I’m joining linguistics at MIT this fall. Sad to leave UMass, but also excited about learning from people at MIT linguistics! 秋学期からマサチューセッツ工科大学の言語学科で働きます。UMassを去るのは寂しいですが、新しい環境が楽しみでもあります。 whamit.mit.edu/2026/05/11/

Separating Cognitive Development From Language Development in the Acquisition of Negation Using International Adoption 
📣From Annika McDermott-Hinman, Samuel Zimmerman, Jesse Snedeker & Roman Feiman

Representations of geometric shapes have syntactic structure w/ @maxencepajot.bsky.social and @standehaene.bsky.social is out & open-access in JEP:General doi.org/10.1037/xge0.... For an overview, see thread below!

⭐️From Elizabeth Lapidow, Amberley Stein, Giovanni Thomas & Caren Walker: Young Children Use Causal Knowledge to Guide Question Asking

Can infants or other animals represent "mutually exclusive possibilities"? In a new paper in JEP:G, we argue for specifying: in thinking or seeing? We show that in object perception (shared with infants and many animals), the answer is yes. (w Peter Mazalik & Roman Feiman) osf.io/preprints/ps... /1

Philosophy is easy, all you have to do is tell people about episodes of Seinfeld

I wrote a piece for the Yale Review on AI and "jagged intelligence". (Note: headline was not written by me.) yalereview.org/article/mela...

If you work in phil science and never sent your paper to a generalist journal (because worry your readership isn’t there), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research intends to bring more Phil science to its pages, and I have just joined as one of the editors. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal...

⭐️From Emily Liquin: More Time and Effort, Same Curiosity: Expected Effort Does Not Impact Curiosity

We should make talking about free energy in cognition (especially if you're a physicist just saying some shit without the most basic grounding in any field that studies the mind) punishable by 30 years hard labor

This is a great piece. One of the best things on the topic. That’s both a testament to Chiang and the result of how bad work on the topic of LLM consciousness and welfare has been recently.

We're thrilled to announce the launch of Semantics of Natural Languages, a new diamond open access journal - the scholar-owned and -led successor to Natural Language Semantics, published with OLH under the auspices of LingOA. snl-journal.org The Editors Amy Rose Deal, Clemens Mayr, Florian Schwarz

In defense of pluralist metaethical constitutivism: “How to Be a Constitutivist” by Bennett Eckert-Kuang at: doi.org/10.1086/739644 #philsky #PolTheory #legalphil #moralphil #moralphilosophy #legalphilosophy

I’m really pleased this paper is now coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Consent and the formation of preferences philarchive.org/rec/PETEOA-7 (Pictured with a cat I met just before hearing the paper has been accepted.)

my review of Nich Shea's new concepts book

New paper: "Introspection and Scientific Data" for the Handbook of Introspection, about the role of introspection in the production of scientific data. My view: introspection doesn't deliver a special 'subjective' kind of data and there's nothing special about studying consciousness.

Bayesians are like listen up FUCKERS, we SOLVED epistemology. And it turns out you can believe WHATEVER YOU WANT provided it’s not LITERALLY INCONSISTENT and you CHOSE THE RIGHT OPINIONS before LOOKING AT THE EVIDENCE AT ALL

Do LLMs *understand* language? Do educational AI agents *understand* the material they teach (or their students)? Claims about what AI systems do or don't understand are pervasive, but assessing them requires an account of MACHINE UNDERSTANDING

Aside from testing the MR view, we offer a new theoretical take on why kids fail. Kids conceptualize the goal of object retrieval tasks exactly as adults do betting. When we bet on horses, we don't spread bets across all options, but try to pick a winner. When FORCED to spread bets, kids succeed.

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

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Quantifying Epistemic Relevance

🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning.. We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance. And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use! 1/

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*

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (w/ @matthiasmichel.bsky.social) Join us to talk about moonwalkers and robot overlords and star children! Listen here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1...

Bristol has been the most wonderful dept to belong to for the past 23 years, first as masters student, then PhD, postdoc, faculty. My colleagues & students have been the best I could hope for. And now I’m looking forward to working with everyone at Oxford (and meeting a whole new community of cats).

This is a super interesting short paper! Not for the formal results, which I confess I don't really understand. But for the meta-science. It discusses how the same model can be implemented differently in code. So there's a need for independent coding, even when the researchers agree on the model.