Mindcraft is a series of opinion posts on current issues in cognitive science by Brains Blog founder Gualtiero Piccinini. Do you agree? Disagree? Please contribute on the discussion board below! If you’d like to write a full-length response, please contact editor Dan Burnston. I have written an article proving that allocentric navigation of the sort enabled in vertebrates by the hippocampal-entorhinal complex under the conrol of the prefrontal cortex is in principle (under standard idealizations) computationally universal.

We are excited to announce that Wade Munroe will be joining us as one of our new associate editors! Wade is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His work focuses on the philosophy of language and thought. For the blog, Wade will host a series featuring work by early-career scholars. We’re thrilled to welcome Wade to the editorial team!

Signed Inner Speech Daniel Gregory ***What follows summarizes some ideas in my recent paper, ‘Inner speech and sign languages’ (Gregory 2026).*** When native speakers of voiced languages (such as English, Mandarin or Hindi) think about inner speech, they naturally tend to think of a mental state with an auditory phenomenology—something like an internal correlate of speech spoken aloud. But what about the inner speech of people whose native language is a sign language (such as American Sign Language, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language or Russian Sign Language)?

Do we know what we think before saying it to ourselves? Marta Jorba  Pompeu Fabra University LOGOS Research Group Self-talk, or talking to oneself, seems to present a puzzle. If, for instance, I tell myself, “I think I will read the Odyssey this summer”, it seems that, in order to have the intention to communicate this thought to myself, I must already know what I think.

Inner Speech, Speech Acts, and the Metaphysics of Language Wade Munroe There is scant mention of inner speech in the extensive literature on speech-act theory and recent work on the metaphysics of words and other linguistic entities. This is a substantial oversight. My post is a rallying cry: Inner speech shouldn’t be relegated to the periphery of our theorizing about language and its uses; it should be at the center.

Are there words in my head? Peter Langland-Hassan University of Cincinnati When we say something to ourselves in inner speech, do we produce words? We certainly talk as though we do. How can we say something in inner speech, if we produce no words? Where are the words we bring into being? Where else could they be than within the skull of the person doing the inner speaking?

Introduction to the Symposium Daniel Gregory Introduction Produce this sentence in inner speech (i.e., in your ‘inner voice’ or your ‘silent monologue’, as it is also sometimes known): ‘I think, therefore I am’. At the moment you produced that sentence in your mind, was it true? Setting aside the complications which philosophers have raised about every word in the sentence, the default answer is ‘yes’.

This week, we're excited to have a series of posts about inner speech, guest edited by Daniel Gregory! We have four great posters, Peter Langland-Hassan, Wade Munroe, Marta Jorba, and Daniel. We'll have an intro post from Daniel today, then one post each day the rest of the week. Join us, and feel free to chime in in the comments.

A guest post from Jack Copeland: If the ultra-secret logic machine they called Colossus shortened the Second World War by 6 months—and it was probably more—then 3 or 4 million lives were saved. Read about Colossus in “The Computer That Helped Win World War II”, an open access article in this month’s issue of Spectrum: Jack Copeland

Pain Intensities Kim Soland I’m honored to have my work selected for the Griffith award and grateful for the opportunity to share a summary of it here. Pains are standardly conceived as featuring a variety of phenomenal qualities and a singular magnitude: pain intensity. But there are circumstances in which pain’s sensory intensity may be phenomenally distinguished from its…

On Vehicle Indeterminacy in Memory Neuroscience Caitlin Mace University of Pittsburgh Neural representations are broadly understood to be individuable structures or processes in the brain that have a representational role in cognition or behavior. This representational role can be elucidated in a number of ways, such as by the causal role the structure or process plays (Egan 2020; Cao 2022), how the structure or process is used (Baker et al.

What does attention do to perception? Yoonhee Jung Ned Block (2010; 2015) challenges representationalism on the grounds that covert attention—the allocation of attention without eye movement—can alter the phenomenal character of perceptual experience without changing its representational content.[1] He considers an experiment developed by Carrasco and her colleagues in which subjects viewed two Gabor patches presented simultaneously in the periphery while maintaining fixation of their eyes on a central point (see Figure 1).

The Pluralistic Evolution of Factive Mindreading Gavin Robert FosterPurdue University The following is a significantly abridged version of a much-longer paper. As such, there are certain qualification and nuances that are lacking. For those interested in reading the current draft, please send me an email at foste362 at purdue dot edu. Feedback and questions are more than welcome! Most research on social cognition focuses on how we predict and explain the minds of others by attributing to them mental states such as beliefs or desires.

Hi Everyone, This week, we're excited to share a series of posts celebrating the 2026 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, which was held in Atlanta, Georgia this Spring. We'll first have a quick intro from this year's philosophy program coordinator, Josh Mugg. (Busy couple of weeks for Josh here on Brains! Check out the symposium on his book from a couple of weeks ago if you haven't yet.) Then we're excited to have posts from this year's graduate student travel award winners, as well as from Kim Soland, this year's winner of the Griffith award for best paper by an early-career scholar. Check out the posts all week!

Response to Commentators Joshua Mugg Response To Curry One goal of my project is to provide an empirically informed account of cognitive control that can be marshalled in defense of voluntarism of belief. Curry offers a dilemma for my account of control and voluntarism about belief. By his lights, I am engaged in a homuncular functionalist project of explaining human reasoning by positing smaller and dumber homunculi.

Comments on "From Human Reasoning to Belief" Aliya Rumana The holding power of dual-process theory in experimental process psychology is mysterious if we don’t consider the basic constraints on statistical testing. First, every study aims to reject the null hypothesis (H0) in favour of the alternative hypothesis (HA). Second, H0 claims that there is no difference in the cognitive process underlying observable behaviour—i.e., single-process theory (SPT)—whereas…

Commentary on "From Human Reasoning to Belief" Lesley Walker In Joshua Mugg's book, From Human Reasoning to Belief, he offers an empirically viable alternative to dual process theory and in doing so unifies three contentious cases of belief. The first are cases of wishful thinking, the second, cases of faith, and the third cases often labeled as the result of implicit attitudes.

DJ Homunculus Devin Sanchez Curry The first aim of Josh Mugg's From Human Reasoning to Belief is to propose a new, empirically viable theory of central cognition (and especially belief fixation and revision): the Soundboard Account of Human Reasoning. The book achieves this aim admirably, both detailing how extant evidence supports the Soundboard Account and laudably proposing specific ways to test the theory directly against its chief competitors (namely, dual process theories and Eric Mandelbaum's Spinozan theory).

Precis of "From Human Reasoning to Belief" Joshua Mugg Many thanks to the Brains Blog and Dan Burnston for the opportunity to discuss my book with Devin Curry, Aliya Rumana, and Lesley Walker. In this initial post, I will provide an overview of the book. Those interested in a longer overview can check out my contribution to The Nature of Belief, …

Hi All, This week, we're very happy to host a symposium on Josh Mugg's recent book, "From Human Reasoning to Belief"! Today, we'll have an intro post from Josh, followed by some really excellent comments from Devin Curry, Lesley Walker, and Aliya Rumana. On Friday, we'll have a response from Josh. Check it out, and feel free to join the discussion in the comments!

Hi Everyone, Be sure to check out the call for abstracts for a forthcoming conference on Biological Naturalism and Consciousness at UCLA! Details here: Call for Abstracts: Biological Naturalism about Consciousness November 5–6, 2026 · University of California, Los Angeles Can non-biological systems be conscious? If not, why not? These questions have taken on new weight as AI systems become increasingly sophisticated, not least because our answers bear on which entities might matter morally.

Post on “The Vector Grounding Problem” for the Brains Blog Dimitri Coelho Mollo & Raphaël Millière We first preprinted “The Vector Grounding Problem” in April 2023, about four months after the release of ChatGPT. By that point, large language models (LLMs) had started to capture the attention of philosophers, but there was still very little published work on the topic. The preprint languished on arXiv for longer than we initially planned, but it lived a life of its own and generated some interesting discussions.

Formats of representation in large language models Fintan Mallory Assuming that artificial neural networks (ANNs) can, through training, come to represent the data upon which they were trained, or more general features of that data, then two natural questions that arise are what are the vehicles of representation within the network and what is the format in which these vehicles are structured?

Realist Representational Explanations of Agency Should Require Some Unity of Purpose Nicholas Shea My paper is about what it takes for an AI system to be an agent. It is relevant to Sprevak and Fallon’s PhiMiSci Special Issue on Representation in the Neurosciences and AI because conditions on AI agency are often articulated in representational terms. Approaches to AI agency can be instrumentalist, for example when being an agent is understood in terms of representing goals and means to achieving goals, where representation is in turn understood to be a matter of displaying a certain pattern of behaviour.

‘Neuronal representation’ is not a defective concept: Ambiguity as a sign of science in progress Lotem Elber-Dorozko and Devin Gouvêa The term “neural representation” is extremely popular in cognitive neuroscience. Scientists often claim to have discovered neural properties that represent environmental features, such as specific visual objects or specific sounds. At the same time, both philosophers and scientists seem increasingly dissatisfied with this term.