Joseph McCaffrey In honour of Dementia Awareness Week 2015 (17th-23rd May), we have a post by Joseph McCaffrey , a graduate student in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of History and Philosophy of Science . Here Joseph summarises his recent article ' Reconceiving Conceptual Vehicles: Lessons from Semantic Dementia ', published in Philosophical Psychology . We take our concepts for granted. When you explore the world, you automatically categorize the objects around you, tapping into a bewildering array of information. You see (or hear) a sheep and instantaneously know it is is a mammal, an animal, a provider-of-wool, a white fluffy thing that bleats, and much more. As a philosopher of cognitive science, I am interested in how the mind stores, accesses, and manipulates this conceptual knowledge. In semantic dementia, a rare variant of frontotemporal dementia , patients lose concept knowledge in a progressive and debilitating fashion. Early on, ...
A blog at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and mental health