Lecture
LTP Colloquium "Cognitive ontology and the search for neural mechanisms: Three foundational problems"
- Date
- Thursday 4 December 2025
- Time
- Location
-
P.J. Veth
Nonnensteeg 1-3
2311 VJ Leiden - Room
- 0.06
The Leiden University Centre for Theoretical Philosophy is pleased to announce a lecture by Dr. Jolien Francken, Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Neuroscience at the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, University of Amsterdam.
Abstract
In this talk I question a central assumption in cognitive neuroscience: The idea that neuroscientific research, by elucidating neural mechanisms of cognitive capacities, will ultimately tell us how we should carve up our taxonomy of the mind (or 'cognitive ontology'). I will show that cognitive neuroscience faces three interlocking conceptual problems that together frame the problem of cognitive ontology. First, they must establish which tasks elicit which cognitive capacities, and specifically when different tasks elicit the same capacity. To address this operationalization problem, scientists often assess whether the tasks engage the same neural mechanisms. But to determine whether mechanisms are of the same or different kinds, we need to solve the abstraction problem by determining which mechanistic differences are and are not relevant, and also the boundary problem by distinguishing the mechanism from its background conditions. Solving these problems, in turn, requires understanding how cognitive capacities are elicited in tasks. These three problems together form a ‘cycle of kinds’ that frames the central problem-space of cognitive ontology. We describe this cycle to clarify the intellectual challenges facing the cognitive ontologist and to reveal the kind of iterative process by which ontological revision in cognitive neuroscience is likely to unfold.