Manolo Martínez
Description: Philosophy of representations in cognitive science
Welcome to the website for the Varieties of Information research project. We are a small team of philosophers, from the universities of Barcelona , València , and Girona . We investigate the notion of representation in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, and regularly organize workshops and other events on this topic. We are currently funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation , through grant PGC2018-101425-B-I00.
I respond to an objection recently formulated by Barlassina and Hayward against first-order imperativism about pain, according to which it cannot account for the self-directed motivational force of pain. I am going to agree with them: it cannot. This is because pain does not have self-directed motivational force. I will argue that the alternative view—that pain is about dealing with extramental, bodily threats, not about dealing with itself—makes better sense of introspection, and of empirical research on p
Recent research on bacteria and other microorganisms has provided interesting insights into the nature of life, cooperation, evolution, individuality or species. In this paper, I focus on the capacity of bacteria to produce molecules that are usually classifed as ‘signals’ and I defend two claims. First, I argue that certain interactions between bacteria should actually qualify as genuine forms of communication. Second, I use this case study to revise our general theories of signaling. Among other things, I
Manolo Martínez