[SydPhil] Colin Klein: Prediction, explanation, and cognitive ontology Thursday @ 3

[Kristie Miller]

This coming Thursday’s current projects seminar will be Colin Klein presenting:

Title: Prediction, explanation, and cognitive ontology 

Abstract: 
  Yarkoni and Westfall have recently argued that cognitive neuroscience focuses too much on explanation at the expense of prediction. Advances in machine learning have made available powerful predictive tools, they claim, and we can use those tools to develop cognitive constructs that will be more useful for cognitive neuroscience. I disagree. Insofar as an ontological project is revisionary, it must focus on explanation (even at the expense of prediction). I show that this disagreement illuminates a heretofore implicit disconnect between how cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers think of the so-called problem of "cognitive ontology."
     I illustrate the point by discussing recent work on decoding words from whole-brain activation data. Time permitting, I will also have many things to say about the interpretations of double dissociations, and will continue a long-running streak of connecting neuroimaging to stuff that Paul Meehl said in the mid-1950s. 

As usual, papers are held in the Muniment Room at 3.00.




Associate Professor Kristie Miller
Senior ARC Research Fellow
Joint Director, the Centre for Time
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room 407, A 14

kmiller at usyd.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
http://www.kristiemiller.net/KristieMiller2/Home_Page.html















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