iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Charles C Roseman @evoroseman.bsky.social · 2h

If you are in the greater Washington DC area on Friday 6 November and have an afternoon to spare, I’m giving a talk at George Mason University. I’d love to see you there. (baboon skull diagram from Theibault et al. 2026) 1/7

Poster for a talk by Charles Roseman entitled "Spencer's Long Shadow: Why we should abandon the extended evolutionary synthesis" featuring a diagram of baboon skulls from Thiebault et al. 2026, some clipart mice, and a picture of the speaker whose father came in second in an uglyman contest.

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Johanna Winant @johannawinant.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

missing from this argument is the fact that Williams is an extraordinarily rich college with students who are overall very well-prepared for college—essentially none of this is generalizable even to a flagship university, much less any other higher education institution

nytimes.com

Opinion | I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think. (Gift Article)

If I do not treat writing as essential for achieving thought, it is not clear why I should force my students to.

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Jake Spinella @jakespinella.bsky.social · 3h

Delighted to say that my paper "E Pluribus Unum: Costly Inference and Fragmented Belief" has been accepted for publication in Mind! You can find the paper at this PhilPapers link. Abstract follows in a reply. philpapers.org/rec/SPIEPU

philpapers.org

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Mal Shah @compositiomality.bsky.social · 19h

Accepted to Linguistic Inquiry! I argue on syntactic grounds “some of the apples” is really “some apples of the apples” with NP-ellipsis. This explains which quantifiers and which modifiers (adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative clauses) can’t appear. Preprint: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009...

ling.auf.net

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Vincent Carchidi @vcarchidi.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A paper by @quiltydunn.bsky.social and Justin Wood arguing that the nativism-empiricism dispute in cognitive science is broken caught my attention. Rather than critique their paper (linked below), I take it as an opportunity to struggle with the ideas. vincentcarchidi.substack.com/p/is-the-nat...

vincentcarchidi.substack.com

Is the Nativism-Empiricism Debate Broken?

Upon surveying the literature on nativism and empiricism in cognitive science, a reasonable person might come to the conclusion that the entire thing is best avoided.

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

in academia if you wear a tie people react like you're wearing a tuxedo and holding a sign that says "I'm a fancy boy"

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

we've always had the secret hack of 'cheating'. You could, in principle, pay a qualified human to fully write your materials for you. If you see what's wrong with that, apply that reasoning to using genAI for this. If you see nothing wrong with that, I don't know what to tell you.

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victor @notnaughtknot.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

it’s 2026, high schoolers should have to read fodor

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Mike Feigin 🥯 @mikefeigin.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It’s crazy. I’m reading a Nature Communications paper. I can’t get through it. So much data. So little of it matters. So many conclusions drawn about nothing.

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Tomer Ullman @tomerullman.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

new preprint: "Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.23083 (by Qian , Li, Chen, Murthy @soniakmurthy.bsky.social , Belinkov, and me) this is particularly cool/important, and I'm allowed to say it because it was headed by @pqian.bsky.social

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I have a new preprint with Athulya Aravind. In it, we ask how can children learn the presuppositional meaning component of a word (e.g. "both" presupposing a |2| domain) Our claim... ...is that they can't. Presuppositional meanings are unlearnable. Preprint: lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/010...

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

everything I know about will stancil i learned against my will

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Kenneth Black @kennethblack.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

New paper! “Order of Explanation: Having it Both Ways” is now forthcoming in Noûs. It’s been a really fun paper to write and I’m stoked to share it.

philpapers.org

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Simon Schug @smonsays.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Human thought is thought to be systematic: Do reasoning models have systematicity of thought? With @brendenlake.bsky.social we study this question in our new preprint arxiv.org/abs/2609.13948 Thread 🧵

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Xinchi Yu @xinchiyu.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Excited to share our new paper in Cerebral Cortex (w/ Ellen Lau)! In this MEG study on visual working memory (VWM), we showed that uni- and multi-variate signals complementarily track different aspects of VWM representations across different regions. academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

academic.oup.com

Complementary univariate and multivariate signals in the parietal cortex for visual working memory pointers and features

Abstract. An emerging body of work in visual working memory (VWM) has embraced the theoretical construct of pointers: an object is mentally represented by

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

psychologists love to call one second '1000 ms'

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Gabor Brody @gaborbrody.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This is great! We should certainly make clear what we mean by "learning" we claim "X is (not) learned". But that is not about polysemy -- it is true of any scientific claim. If something is specific to this debate is the strategic non-acceptance for others' notion of learning as a valid.

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Fred Callaway @fredcallaway.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a paper as much as this one. Such clear thinking. Beyond the compelling nativism-empiricism argument, it's among the best illustrations/explanations of levels of analysis I've seen. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

cell.com

The nativist–empiricist debate is broken

The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural ...

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Sam Gershman @gershbrain.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This is interesting, but I'm having trouble with parts of the argument. It says that the same phenomena support both radical positions, but it doesn't seem to be the same phenomena. The data from newborn chicks supports nativism, but the "data" from ML support empiricism. These are different.

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Taylor Webb @taylorwwebb.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

This is a very interesting paper that makes some useful clarifications between different senses of learning, however I think it overstates the extent to which the nativism vs. empiricism debate stems purely from terminological confusion. (1/x)

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Jenny Wang 👶 🧮 @jinjingjenny1.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

A thought-provoking piece by my esteemed colleague Jake! Although I disagree that the framework dissolves the nativist-empiricist debate, at least not for folk psychologists (and developmentalists like myself). More in our recent Psych Sci paper bsky.app/profile/jinj...

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Devin Curry @devinsanchezcurry.com · 11/09/2026

when we met at a conference as grad students, jake asked a great question about my anti-fodor talk, listened to my reply, and then declared "you're, like, my arch-nemesis" afraid the common ground we've since achieved can only mean we've gotten old

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Elizabeth Wrigley-Field @wrigleyfield.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is totally fascinating

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Really important and interesting paper

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:

authors.elsevier.com

Please wait whilst we redirect you

All content on this site: Copyright © 2026 Elsevier B.V., its licensors, and contributors. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies. For all open access content, the relevant licensing terms apply.

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okie (they/them) @okie.gay · 25/08/2026

Texas’s drag ban was found to be unconstitutional this morning and one of the plaintiffs who brought the suit was an Austin-based drag queen who often impersonates Dolly Dolly was named in the final judgement itself and after hearing about the lawsuit, she sent that drag queen a signed guitar

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Chris Person @papapishu.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Sorry chatbot lovers but the waning of Boolean operators in most search functions on websites has made my life actively worse. You can't find anything, you can only have things suggested to you.

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

New from me and Jessica Applin! We find that infants' behavior in a cracker choice task is impacted by an agent’s partial knowledge of object quantity: infants choose based on the agent's (inaccurate) representation rather than their own 🤯 Now in press at JECP, preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

the APA is organizing these too far in advance imho

An email about the APA central meeting in the year 2207

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

nice case study in how apparently robust "failures" in animal cognition research can be due to simple, boring performance errors rather than reflecting fundamental differences in cognition (ditto for children)

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Me reading Fodor

meme of Homer Simpson walking and saying "everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974" with the word rock overwritten by the word philosophy

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Henry Mance @henrymance.ft.com · 19/08/2026

Woah.

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Jake Quilty-Dunn @quiltydunn.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

mine is that thoughts depend entirely on things inside your mind, and not causal-historical relations to things in the world or (god forbid) set-theoretic objects

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noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

alex guerrero, noted member of the not fucking around crew

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tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

BBS recently published a great piece by @mdubova.bsky.social & @sabinasloman.bsky.social on “Excess capacity learning”. I argue D&S’s framework overlooks a special kind of representation that encodes information both minimally and perfectly: lossless compression. philpapers.org/archive/BOGC...

Figure for my BBS commentary ("Compression without compromise") on Dubova & Sloman's target article ("Excess capacity learning")

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Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

What a joy to visit today with the wonderful Molly Potter, to whom I owe my career. Molly's ideas still motivate much of my research and her example of what it means to be a mentor, scientist, and activist continue to inspire. Yay Molly!

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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

AOC: Millennials are not punk kids anymore. We're grown adults with mortgages and kids, and that generation is starting to be decisive at the polls. And there is anger at being ignored, having our economic futures mortgaged by the generations that came before us and we're taking the reins

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Elliot Murphy @elliot-murphy.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Thank you to the SFN organizers for this thoughtful planning 🙏🏼

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Akshan deAlwis @adealwis.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

My paper 'Desire, decoupling, and factive mentalizing' is forthcoming at Mind and Language! Attributing desire requires the complicated stuff for attributing belief, but empirical work suggests it's easier to do. What gives? Check out more here: philpapers.org/rec/DEADDA-5

philpapers.org

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Mike Caulfield @mikecaulfield.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

There's an inside baseball misinformation studies point I want to make here about enduring five years of the political science and sociology folks saying: "people online don't really believe this stuff, this is all just downstream expression" and what an obvious crock that was.

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Melissa Kibbe @levelsof.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

New from me and Alan Leslie! We got the band back together to lay out our view on object representations in the infant mind: non-discursive indexes that operate within a language of thought, & which get development of a more complex object concept off the ground www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

sciencedirect.com

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