MAY 8
Aula 205
10:30–11:40 – Marc Artiga, University of Valencia – Deception, computation, and mental content.
11:40–11:50 – Pause
11:50–13:00 – Antonella Tramacere, Università degli Studi Roma Tre – Does embodied cognition change our understanding of the evolution of the mind?
13:00–15:00 – Lunch
15:00–16:10 – Krystyna Bielecka, University of Warsaw – From Korsakoff confabulation to psychodynamic psychotherapy: An error-based teleosemantic account of memory and affect.
16:10–16:20 – Pause
16:20–17:30 – Lucía González Arias, University of Barcelona – Gluing the past back together: Episodic memory, implicit attitudes, and the accuracy framing problem.
MAY 9
Seminari de filosofia
10:30–11:40 – Karl Bergman, Uppsala University/University of Barcelona – Do proper functions constitute norms?
11:40–11:50 – Pause
11:50–13:00 – Stephen Mann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig – The benefits of structure.
13:00–15:00 – Lunch
The workshop was made possible thanks to the funding of the Faculty and Department of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona.
ABSTRACTS
Marc Artiga – Deception, computation, and mental content
N/A
Antonella Tramacere – Does embodied cognition change our understanding of the evolution of the mind?
This talk explores how different theoretical frameworks—classical modular, cultural, and embodied—account for the evolution of content-oriented cognition, using mindreading as a case study. While classical views explain mental content through internal representations shaped by natural selection or cultural scaffolding, embodied approaches challenge this assumption by emphasizing sensorimotor interaction and participatory engagement. I examine both the promises and limitations of these embodied views in accounting for the phylogenetic and developmental gradients of mindreading. The central argument is that if embodied cognition is to serve as a genuine alternative, it must show how changes in bodily features give rise to flexible cognitive capacities—without reverting to modular assumptions.
Krystyna Bielecka – From Korsakoff confabulation to psychodynamic psychotherapy: An error-based teleosemantic account of memory and affect
This talk develops a single explanatory spine that runs from severe episodic-memory pathology to everyday psychotherapeutic change. The spine is an error-based teleosemantic model in which representations are produced, stored and consumed only within systems that possess a live capacity for error detection. I begin with Korsakoff’s syndrome. In these patients the internal “evaluation consumer” that normally cross-checks retrieved memories against other cues is physiologically damaged. Because the comparator is missing, mnemonic outputs cannot be flagged as inaccurate; the result is the familiar mixture of provoked and spontaneous confabulations. Although caregivers often supply corrective information, their feedback rarely takes root—there is no functional place inside the patient where the correction can be evaluated and learned.
The second half of the talk exports the very same producer / channel / consumer architecture to psychotherapy and augments it with an affective track. Drawing on container–contained theory, I show that the therapist temporarily assumes the role of an external Evaluation-plus-Regulation Consumer for both channels. Cycles of projective identification, interpretation and return create a distributed feedback loop: raw affect and distorted memories are “metabolised” by the therapist and re-presented in forms the patient can gradually internalise. Over the course of treatment, the patient rebuilds their own comparators, restoring triangulation among multiple information sources and re-coupling truth-tracking with affect regulation.
Lucía González Arias – Gluing the past back together: Episodic memory, implicit attitudes, and the accuracy framing problem
Errors in episodic memory—errors in remembering past events—are more the norm than the exception. Some are trivial (e.g., remembering one’s first day of school as sunnier than it was), but others can be serious (e.g., falsely remembering having turned off a gas valve). Among the serious cases are misrememberings influenced by implicit attitude (IA), such as racially biased distortions of legally relevant facts, even when these biases conflict with an agent’s explicit, egalitarian attitudes. Accommodating these memory errors—especially those implicating IAs—challenges the two leading theories of remembering: Reliabilism (in particular its simulationist variants) and Causalism.
A factive view of successful remembering treats any discrepancy between the memory and the original event as inaccuracy. In contrast, constructivist theories acknowledge that some distortions —such as the aforementioned ‘relatively insignificant’ ones— do not compromise memory’s epistemic status. However, current constructivist theories, either causalist or reliabilist, fail to offer a principled criterion for distinguishing tolerable from problematic distortions, such as those arising from IAs. I call this theoretical impasse the Accuracy Framing Problem (AFP).
In this paper, I argue that this challenge arises from a deep tension between endorsing constructivism and maintaining a factive criterion of successful remembering—one that naturally aligns with content preservationism. This tension underwrites the AFP.
To resolve the AFP, I propose a revised causal theory of episodic memory—the 3C model—which supplements the standard Causal condition with two additional requirements: Correspondence and Coherence. According to the Correspondence condition, the core elements of a memory must match those of the original experience. The Coherence condition requires that the non-core elements are reconstructed in a way that maximises the probability of matching the original event by drawing on statistically grounded cognitive heuristics. ‘Core’ elements are identified not only through empirical investigation but also via pragmatic relevance: different contexts may impose distinct task-sensitive criteria for what counts as core.
This framework preserves the virtues of causalism while refining the notion of accuracy in episodic memory. It also offers a novel defence of memory traces as necessary bearers of core content (content preservers), anchoring reconstruction and guiding successful remembering. By articulating a principled way to distinguish acceptable from distorting memory errors, the 3C model advances our understanding of memory’s epistemic function and its vulnerability to IAs.
Karl Bergman – Do proper functions constitute norms?
Proper functions seem to constitute norms, of a kind. To say of the heart that it has the function to pump blood is, it seems, ipso facto to say that it is supposed to pump blood, or that it ought to pump blood, or that a heart that fails to pump blood is a bad heart. Within teleosemantics, this putative normativity of proper functions has been considered key to understanding the would-be normativity of mental content. However, not everyone is willing to grant that these putative norms are norms in anything but a deflationary, insubstantial, or metaphorical sense. This situation motivates a thorough, systematic effort to address the titular question, which is what I attempt in this paper. I construct a conceptual framework within which the question can be fruitfully addressed and the various possible ways of making it precise duly distinguished; all with an aim to single out those interpretations of the question, if any, that render an affirmative answer both defensible and interesting.
Stephen Mann – The benefits of structure
Several authors have noted that structural isomorphism seems to provide benefits in terms of the efficiency of storing, processing, learning or updating representations. Here I canvas several routes to formally capturing these intuitive benefits. I suggest ways in which computational complexity and algorithmic complexity can and cannot be used to demonstrate the benefits of structure, and I argue that the relationship between structural representation and analog computation is less direct than has been supposed.
