DANIEL A. WEISKOPF
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
Ph.D. in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, 2003
M.A. in Philosophy, Brown University, 1999
B.A. in Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley, 1996
Curriculum Vitae
Abstracts and downloadable papers
I work on the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and language. My work runs along two parallel tracks. I am interested in how empirical research in psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics can illuminate traditional philosophical questions about the mind, and I am also interested in the foundations of the cognitive sciences, including their methods, theories, and models.
Much of my research over the past several years has focused on concepts, understood as the basic mental representations that make up thoughts. My goal is to construct a theory of concepts that sheds light on traditional philosophical questions, such as what conceptual content is, how concepts are learned and develop, and how perception, language, and thought are related, while drawing on a broad range of empirical data. The view developed in this work, which I call ‘conceptual pluralism’, portrays concepts as cognitive tools: context-specific representations whose structure and function are shaped by properties of the domain, task, goal, and culture.
I've also written on a number of issues having to do with cognitive architecture, including dynamical systems theory and connectionism, massive modularity, the mindreading faculty, and embodied/extended cognition. I'm particularly interested in taxonomic questions about the right ways to draw boundaries around cognitive systems as a whole, as well as around the subsystems that make them up. The guiding concern here is: what evidence is relevant to deciding on one sort of principled decomposition of a complex system into parts rather than another?
Finally, I am concerned with questions about the metaphysics of science. These include the nature of kinds in psychology and neuroscience, the structure of mechanistic explanation, and the justification and interpretation of formal/mathematical models in cognitive science.