​​1 - Cognition and Social Minds: Biological, Semantic and Cultural Aspects

​     Description: Under the demands of a naturalistic philosophy, it is important to carry out research on human cognition in constant dialogue with the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience. As meaning and cognitive content depend on, and are parts of, intersubjective communication, the study of human knowledge should not just focus on the mental, despite what classical empiricism might say. Rather, it should also include research on biological and social behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. Despite knowledge having both an objective dimension (that depends on the nature of the reality under study), and a subjective one (that depends on embodied minds representing and organizing world perceptions), one must also recognize a third dimension that depends on the variable historical and cultural context. In researching cognition, we should not deny that the analysis of mental and neurological phenomena might contribute towards explaining the origin of human knowledge, as this involves perceiving and representing. However, we should also take into account the social dimension, that is, the effect of inter-subjective and social relations to our perceptual and conceptual contents. This makes it essential to maintain a pragmatic view of human language as conveying information, as well as a critical view of the possible metaphysical and scientific views that the semantic core of our language (meaning) commits us to - meaning is also an object of knowledge. What should not be done is accepting the philosophical critique against the possibility of explicating meaning, as meaning is constantly present in every social interaction. It is true that sentences only express meaning in contexts defined by social interaction. However, explaining social interaction in all its dimensions does not make meaning into an object - it just explains how meaning occurs.

 

2 - ​Social Minds: Action, Perception and Cognition from the Naturalist Perspective

​     Description: The problem of the mind-brain relationship has become a central philosophical issue in recent decades, related to broader questions about their make-up and interaction, as well as the possible dependence of moral actions on biological determinations. At the same time, the empirical sciences have come up with various rich and complex attempts to draw up maps of the brain, that give researchers a better understanding of human perception, cognition, emotions, the underling biological causes of action, as well as the very language of human beings. As these are questions that the philosophical tradition has always addressed, the role of philosophy in this context is a very important one: it should attempt to reconcile the advances of science with the traditional philosophical theories, so that the relationship between mind, brain and social human behavior is fully understood. Our project aims to investigate: (a) perception, cognition through perception, and language acquisition (including how this is related to perception); and (b) moral actions and judgments, in dialogue with the cognitive sciences. The project will be based on investigating current philosophical theories, and linking them to data obtained by the empirical sciences. Naturalized epistemology, an approach which has inspired recent research in theory of knowledge and philosophy of science, should assist in the investigation. It will not, however, substitute conceptual philosophical reflection, but be used to weave limits of what can or cannot be said about philosophical problems in theory of mind that are related to knowledge acquisition (propositional or not), and moral human behavior.

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3 - Naturalized Semantics and the Evolution of Scientific Concepts

     Description: Starting from classical contemporary works on the nature of science, as well as a naturalized philosophy of language, I seek to study the role of experience (here understood in a general sense, including social, cultural and historical aspects) in constituting the objects of the sciences. Recent scientific research has produced rich and varied illustrations that are particularly challenging for investigation. When we realize that the relationship between scientists and their objects not only involves perceiving the world, but also the limits imposed by these objects’ symbolic (and culturally dependent) representations, we could start investigating without assuming a direct relationship between the knowing subject and the world. On the one hand, language as mediation complicates the attempt to clarify how scientific objects appear. On the other hand, it has the ability to access these objects through what determines them as such, that which gives them form: contextually understood scientific discourse. Naturalized epistemology, an approach that has inspired recent research on the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science, should assist in the investigation. It will not, however, substitute conceptual philosophical reflection, but be used to weave limits of what can or cannot be said about the ontological commitments of the natural sciences. The following are the main lines of research: a) studying language from a naturalistic perspective; b) elucidating the complex interaction between scientific concepts and culturally determined human experience; and c) thinking about the difficulty in accurately defining the degree of realism implied by examples of empirical knowledge that we can accept. The main objective of this project is to investigate these three issues, referring to contemporary and classic philosophical texts and recent articles, and from a semantic point of view.