Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences

by Muhammad Ali Khalidi

The search for the 'furniture of the mind' has acquired added impetus with the rise of new technologies to study the brain and identify its main structures and processes. Philosophers and scientists are increasingly concerned to understand the ways in which psychological functions relate to brain structures. Meanwhile, the taxonomic practices of cognitive scientists are coming under increased scrutiny, as researchers ask which of them identify the real kinds of cognition and which are mere vestiges of folk psychology. Muhammad Ali Khalidi present a naturalistic account of 'real kinds' to validate some central taxonomic categories in the cognitive domain, including concepts, episodic memory, innateness, domain specificity, and cognitive bias. He argues that cognitive kinds are often individuated relationally, with reference to the environment and etiology of the thinking subject, whereas neural kinds tend to be individuated intrinsically, resulting in crosscutting relationships among cognitive and neural categories.

220 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is a Palestinian philosopher. He earns his Ph.D., Philosophy, from Columbia University and
M.A., Philosophy, from Columbia University
B.S., Physics, from American University of Beirut.

He is a Presidential Professor of Philosophy at City
University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. Before that, he was Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He has also taught at the American University of Beirut, University of Nevada at Reno, and (as a post-doc) at the University of Chicago and Columbia University.


His main areas of research are in the philosophy of science (with an emphasis on cognitive science) and the philosophy of mind. He has been particularly focused on analyzing mental phenomena such as: memory, concepts, and innateness, and what role they play in contemporary cognitive science. He is also interested in scientific classification schemes and in the means of distinguishing artificial categories from real ones in both the natural and social sciences.