Paweł Gładziejewski

Polish Academy of Sciences | PAN · Institute of Philosophy and Sociology

Psychedelic substances elicit powerful, uncanny conscious experiences that are thought to possess therapeutic value. In those who undergo them, these altered states of consciousness often induce shifts in metaphysical beliefs about the fundamental structure of reality. The contents of those beliefs range from contentious to bizarre, especially when...

Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non‐inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic...

It has recently been argued that cognitive scientists should embrace explanatory pluralism rather than pursue the search for a unificatory framework or theory. This stance dovetails with the mechanistic view of cognitive-scientific explanation. However, one recently proposed theory—based on an idea that the brain is a predictive engine—opposes plur...

This paper centers around the notion that internal, mental representations are grounded in structural similarity, i.e., that they are so-called S-representations. We show how S-representations may be causally relevant and argue that they are distinct from mere detectors. First, using the neomechanist theory of explanation and the interventionist ac...

According to the predictive coding theory of cognition (PCT), brains are predictive machines that use perception and action to minimize prediction error, i.e. the discrepancy between bottom-up, externally-generated sensory signals and top-down, internally-generated sensory predictions. Many consider PCT to have an explanatory scope that is unparall...

Despite the fact that the notion of internal representation has - at least according to some - a fundamental role to play in the sciences of the mind, not only has its explanatory utility been under attack for a while now, but it also remains unclear what criteria should an explanation of a given cognitive phenomenon meet to count as a (truly, genu...