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  1. Cognitive Penetration and Cognitive Realism.Majid D. Beni - 2024 - Episteme 21 (1):270-285.
    The paper addresses the issue of theory-ladenness of observation/experimentation. Motivated by a naturalistic reading of Thomas Kuhn's insights into the same topic, I draw on cognitive neuroscience (predictive coding under Free Energy Principle) to scrutinise theory-ladenness. I equate theory-ladenness with the cognitive penetrability of perceptual inferences and argue that strong theory-ladenness prevails only under uncertain circumstances. This understanding of theory-ladenness is in line with Thomas Kuhn's view on the same subject as well as a cognitive version of modest realism rather (...)
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  • Goals shape means: a pluralist response to the problem of formal representation in ontic structural realism.Agnieszka M. Proszewska - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-21.
    The aim of the paper is to assess the relative merits of two formal representations of structure, namely, set theory and category theory. The purpose is to articulate ontic structural realism. In turn, this will facilitate a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of both concepts and will lead to a proposal for a pragmatics-based approach to the question of the choice of an appropriate framework. First, we present a case study from contemporary science—a comparison of the formulation of quantum (...)
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  • Aligning the free-energy principle with Peirce’s logic of science and economy of research.Majid D. Beni & Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-21.
    The paper proposes a way to naturalise Charles S. Peirce’s conception of the scientific method, which he specified in terms of abduction, deduction and induction. The focus is on the central issue of the economy of research in abduction and self-correction by error reduction in induction. We show how Peirce’s logic of science receives support from modern breakthroughs in computational neuroscience, and more specifically from Karl Friston’s statements of active inference and the Free Energy Principle, namely the account of how (...)
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  • Inflating the social aspects of cognitive structural realism.Majid D. Beni - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-18.
    Inspired by Ronald Giere’s cognitive approach to scientific models, Cognitive Structural Realism has presented a naturalist account of scientific representation. CSR characterises the structure of theories in terms of cognitive structures. These are informational structures embodied in the brains of scientists. CSR accounts for scientific representation in terms of the dynamical relationship between the organism and its environment. The proposal has been criticised on account of its negligence of social aspects of scientific practice. The present paper aims to chart out (...)
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  • A free energy reconstruction of arguments for panpsychism.Majid D. Beni - 2021 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22 (2):399-416.
    The paper draws on scientific resources formed around the notion of Free Energy Principle to reconstruct two well-known defences of panpsychism. I reconstruct the argument from continuity by expanding the mind-life continuity thesis under the rubric of the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by showing that FEP does not provide an objective criterion for demarcating the living from the inanimate. Then I will reconstruct the argument from intrinsic nature. The FEP-based account of consciousness is centred on the notion of ‘temporal depth’ (...)
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  • Reinvigorating the Nineteenth Century Scientific Method: A Peirce-pective on Science.Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen & Majid D. Beni - 2023 - Perspectives on Science 31 (5):684-715.
    This paper proposes to recover the topic of the philosophy of scientific method from its late nineteenth-century roots. The subject matter of scientific method sprouted from key inferential ingredients identified by Charles Peirce. In this paper, the historical path is traversed from the viewpoint of contemporary Cognitive Structural Realism (CSR). Peirce’s semiotic theory of methods and practices of scientific inquiry prefigured CSR’s reliance on embodied informational structures and experimentation upon forms of relations that model generic scientific domains. Three results are (...)
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  • Agency, Causation, and Empiricism.Majid D. Beni - 2021 - Theoria 87 (3):729-751.
    Price claims that the agency theory of causation could be understood as a sophisticated form of either realism or empiricism (but not a simple‐minded form of any of them). In this paper, I argue that the agency theory could find a more congenial ally in constructive empiricism (rather than realism) and show that this new alliance would be profitable to both constructive empiricism and the agency theory of causation.
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  • A critical analysis of Markovian monism.Majid D. Beni - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):6407-6427.
    Free Energy Principle underlies a unifying framework that integrates theories of origins of life, cognition, and action. Recently, FEP has been developed into a Markovian monist perspective. The paper expresses scepticism about the validity of arguments for Markovian monism. The critique is based on the assumption that Markovian models are scientific models, and while we may defend ontological theories about the nature of scientific models, we could not read off metaphysical theses about the nature of target systems from our theories (...)
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  • Active Inference and Abduction.Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen & Majid D. Beni - 2021 - Biosemiotics 14 (2):499-517.
    The background target of the research going into the present article is to forge an intellectual alliance between, on the one hand, active inference and the free-energy principle (FEP), and on the other, Charles S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics and pragmatism. In the present paper, the focus is on the allegiance between the nomenclatures of active and abductive inferences as the proper place to begin reaching at that wider target. The paper outlines the key conceptual elements involved in a naturalistic (...)
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  • Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System.Inês Hipólito - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.
    This paper proposes an account of neurocognitive activity without leveraging the notion of neural representation. Neural representation is a concept that results from assuming that the properties of the models used in computational cognitive neuroscience must literally exist the system being modelled. Computational models are important tools to test a theory about how the collected data has been generated. While the usefulness of computational models is unquestionable, it does not follow that neurocognitive activity should literally entail the properties construed in (...)
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  • Structures in Physics and Neuroscience.Majid Davoody Beni & Georg Northoff - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (4):479-495.
    We offer to extend structural realism into the field of mind and brain studies. The naturalised metaphysics of structural realism has been defined in terms of unification of sciences. The unification program has been carried out nicely in fields of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. But for the structural realist metaphysics to receive a recommendation, the unification program needs to be extended to the fields of especial sciences. Our aim in the paper is twofold. On the one hand, we present (...)
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  • Measure for Measure: Operationalising Cognitive Realism.Majid D. Beni - 2024 - Minds and Machines 34 (3):1-16.
    This paper develops a measure of realism from within the framework of cognitive structural realism (CSR). It argues that in the context of CSR, realism can be operationalised in terms of balance between accuracy and generality. More specifically, the paper draws on the free energy principle to characterise the measure of realism in terms of the balance between accuracy and generality.
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