Thomas van Es

Thomas van Es
  • Doctor of Philosophy
  • Researcher at University of Antwerp

About

13
Publications
2,632
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156
Citations
Current institution
University of Antwerp
Current position
  • Researcher

Publications

Publications (13)
Article
Full-text available
Where does enactivism fit on the question of realism or idealism for perception? In recent years all general positions have been argued to be adequate. I will argue that enactivism is neither realist nor idealist, and requires a completely different game altogether. In short: it is not idealist because it sees cognition as inherently world-involvin...
Article
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Philosophy of science has undergone a naturalistic turn, moving away from traditional idealized concerns with the logical structure of scientific theories and toward focusing on real-world scientific practice, especially in domains such as modeling and experimentation. As part of this shift, recent work has explored how the project of philosophical...
Article
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In their impressive paper, Bruineberg et al. (2021) make a significant contribution to the Free Energy Principle literature by distinguishing between 'Pearl blankets' and 'Friston blankets', identifying the former as an epistemic tool, and the latter in terms of its novel metaphysical use. We note the oft-forgotten theoretical context of these stat...
Preprint
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In their important contribution to the free energy principle (FEP) literature, Raja et al. (2021) point out crucial shortcomings and issues for the FEP to meet its ambitious goals, including the provision of a unified science with specific focus on cognitive and biological sciences. and the FEP ambition to establish an operationally defined, object...
Article
Full-text available
This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition,...
Article
Full-text available
Autism research is increasingly moving to a view centred around sensorimotor atypicalities instead of traditional, ethically problematical, views predicated on social-cognitive deficits. We explore how an enactivist approach to autism illuminates how social differences, stereotypically associated with autism, arise from such sensorimotor atypicalit...
Article
Full-text available
The free energy principle (FEP) purports to provide a single principle for the organizational dynamics of living systems, including their cognitive profiles. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from part...
Article
Full-text available
The free energy principle (FEP) portends to provide a unifying principle for the biological and cognitive sciences. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its (information-theoretic) free energy. Under the FEP, to minimise free energy is equivalent to engaging in approximate Bayesi...
Article
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Whether perception involves the manipulation of representations is currently heavily debated. The embedded view (EV) advanced by Nico Orlandi seeks a middle passage between representationalism and radical enactivism. In this paper I argue for a non-representational take on EV. I argue that this is the best way to resolve the objections EV has recei...
Article
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The free energy principle provides an increasingly popular framework to biology and cognitive science. However, it remains disputed whether its statistical models are scientific tools to describe non-equilibrium steady-state systems (which we call the instrumentalist reading), or are literally implemented and utilized by those systems (the realist...
Article
Full-text available
Predictive processing is an increasingly popular approach to cognition, perception and action. It says that the brain is essentially a hierarchical prediction machine. It is typically construed in a representationalist and inferentialist fashion so that the brain makes contentful inferences on the basis of representational models. In this paper, I...
Article
Full-text available
The free energy principle (FEP) is an information-theoretic approach to living systems. FEP characterizes life by living systems’ resistance to the second law of thermodynamics: living systems do not randomly visit the possible states, but actively work to remain within a set of viable states. In FEP, this is modelled mathematically. Yet, the statu...

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