About me

I work as associate professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Warszawa, Poland. E-mail: marcin.milkowski@gmail.com

I am Head of the Section for Logic and COgnitive Science there.

In 2013, I published a book Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.) on computational explanation in cognitive science. The book was the basis of my habilitation in Poland (something like tenure).

Afterward, I led my project Cognitive Science in Search of Unity – funded by the National Science Centre, with a team of philosophers of cognitive science, to deal with a question of unification and mechanistic integration of models.

Right now, my group is focusing on cognitive metascience and issues of confidence crisis in mind and brain sciences.

I am associate editor of European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, editor in Paladyn. Journal of Behavioral Robotics, and member of the advisory board of Avant. Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies, Kognitywistyka i Media w Edukacji and Philosphical Alternatives.

For a more complete and up-to-date academic CV, including all publication data, see my Zotero page. My reviewer profile is available at WoS.

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Since the time I have created the first version of this webpage, which was in 1998, I have worked in computer linguistics, especially in lexicography (creating dictionaries using computer methods) and in computer-aided proofreading. The first major work I did was the English-Polish IT dictionary, which is was then improved for IDG. A new, improved version was published by C.H. Beck , including a Polish-English part that was created for the first time originally for Polish (and not as a translation of another dictionary). My last dictionary project was to build the biggest English-Polish and Polish-English dictionary ever. However, given that publishing industry is not interested in this project anymore, the Polish-English volume is unlikely to be finished anytime soon.

I also work on a Polish morphosyntactic lexicon in Morfologik project, and develop the proof-reading tool LanguageTool. With Daniel Naber, we received a Gold Prize in Sun Community Innovation Program for our work on LanguageTool. I’ve also created a Polish thesaurus. The icon you see below shows how I’m involved in various open-source projects (it’s clickable).

ohloh profile for Marcin Miłkowski

2 Replies to “About me”

  1. Dear Professor Milkowski,

    My name is Giacomo Romano, and I am an associate professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Siena (Italy). I teach an introductory course on the philosophy of cognition for the students in our Master’s program in Language & Mind. I recently came across your short essay in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Computational Theory of Mind,” which I found remarkably neat and clear. Therefore, I am considering proposing it as one of the introductory readings for my students.

    I have one perplexity, perhaps a matter of interpretation, regarding a statement you made: “CTM is often understood as a specific variant of the Representational Theory of Mind (RTM), which claims that cognition is manipulation of representation.” I had previously understood the relationship between CTM and RTM differently, namely, that RTM could be seen as a variant of CTM. I would like to hear your thoughts on this alternative interpretation. I hope my question is not too intrusive or disrespectful; I simply aim to better understand your position on this issue.

    Thank you and best regards,

    Giacomo Romano

    1. Dear Professor Romano,

      Yes, your interpretation is very much cogent.

      Note that I’m not saying that this view on the CTM/RTM relationship is necessarily true – that’s why I hedge this claim by saying “is often understood”. I only report this position, as this is an encyclopedia entry. I actually believe that your view is true (and I surely share this view in my own work), not the traditional one. But I don’t think I’m confabulating that many people would believe that CTM is implied by RTM. However, please bear in mind that under the semantic account of computation, all computation is semantic, and then, if you embrace Fodor’s views (or similar), RTM implies CTM. Perhaps this is why this view is quite prevalent. But I definitely believe that non-representational CTM is a consistent position (as defended by Dewhurst, for example), so the two can diverge. I don’t think that this position is compelling, but it cannot be excluded on purely conceptual grounds by saying that CTM must be representational by definition.

      Best regards,
      Marcin

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