David Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014)
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What is the central claim of David Danks’s “Unifying the Mind”?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Robert Teleis, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with David Danks, who's professor of philosophy and psychology. Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. His book, Unifying the Mind Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models, is out from MIT Press. For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation, in some sense because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different ways that are are or at least seem to be incompatible in at least some important respects.
In his new book, Danx proposes a version of the basic theory that links the mind closely with the computational framework used in machine learning: the idea that thinking involves manipulation of symbols encoded as graphical models. Danx argues that graphical models provide a unifying explanation of why we're able to move smoothly between different cognitive processes and why we're able to focus on features. Of situations that are relevant to our goals. While the book includes the mathematics behind graphical models, Denks explains his proposal in accessible yet precise terms for the non-mathematically trained reader. He discusses how graphical models work in causal reasoning, categorization, and other processes, how his view is related to more familiar cognitive frameworks, and some implications of the
Let's turn to the interview. David Danks, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really uh looking forward to our conversation about your new book, Unifying the Mind. Before we get to the content of the book itself. Uh it'd be nice to have a little bit of idea of how you came to be a philosopher. I mean you're a professor of philosophy and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, so there's an interesting story to be told there obviously. Uh so can you tell us how you came to be a philosopher and how you came to write this book?
Yeah, so um in some ways I I kind of stumbled into philosophy. I started my undergraduate education as a math major and realized after a couple of years that it It wasn't exactly what I wanted to be doing. I enjoyed studying it, but I didn't want to do it. And I discovered that there was this wonderful thing called philosophy of mathematics, uh, that would enable me to study math and think about math and logic and these kinds of formal notions of inquiry, uh, without having to continue to do more math and found a bit of a loophole such that I could have that be my main focus as an undergraduate. Um, so it was less about falling in love with philosophy, I think as it is widely understood, and more that it was uh a wonderful place for me to get to ask the questions that were really interesting to me.
And that was really the theme and has been the theme ever since in terms of going to graduate school in philosophy because I wanted to ask questions about the nature of mathematics, the nature of cognition, uh, the nature of uh epistemolog epistemology and sort of inquiry into the world and how that connects to the scientific method more generally. And you know, philosophy was the place that I was able to ask those questions. Um, it wasn't some deep falling in love with the grand questions that were asked by uh the the the people that we often study in history classes, it was wanting to understand more about the world and the particular questions I wanted to ask about the world were being asked in philosophy departments.
Um so that's really what what led me to uh graduate school in philosophy and then Um, after a few years as a researcher, uh ended up in a tenure track position here at Carnegie Mellon.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central claim of David Danks’s “Unifying the Mind”?
0:08–10:02
2
How did Danks’s academic path lead him to combine philosophy and psychology?
10:02–18:16
3
What are graphical models and how do they represent relevance relations?
18:16–26:44
4
How do graphical models explain the acquisition and use of concepts (prototype, exemplar, theory‑theoretic)?
26:44–36:11
5
In what way do graphical models address the language‑of‑thought debate and systematicity?
36:11–44:47
6
How does the graphical‑model framework inform the discussion of modularity versus holistic cognition?
44:47–52:58
7
What are the limits of the graphical‑model approach and its relation to neural implementation?
52:58–1:01:04
8
What new research directions has Danks pursued since publishing the book?
1:01:04–1:08:38
Speakers
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