Gualtiero Piccinini is a philosopher working primarily on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is an associate professor in the Philosophy and Psychology Departments and the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.[1]
Piccinini is best known for his mechanistic account of what it takes for a physical system to perform computations. He has argued that computation is a kind of mechanistic process that does not require representation.[2] Piccinini is also known for his critique of pancomputationalism[3] and for his view about first-person data such as data from first-person reports[4]. He has argued that first-person data are scientifically legitimate because they are public like other scientific data. Piccinini has also published on computational theories of cognition, concepts, and consciousness.
Piccinini has received several awards and fellowships, including a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Scholars' Award by the National Science Foundation.
He is the founder and administrator of Brains, an academic group blog in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience.
“Information Processing, Computation, and Cognition” (with Andrea Scarantino). Journal of Biological Physics, 37.1 (2011), pp. 1-38.
“The Mind as Neural Software? Understanding Functionalism, Computationalism, and Computational Functionalism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81.2 (2010), pp. 269-311.
“Computation in Physical Systems,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
“First-Person Data, Publicity, and Self-Measurement.” Philosophers’ Imprint, 9.9 (2009), pp. 1–16.
“Computation without Representation,” Philosophical Studies, 137.2 (2008), pp. 205–241.
“Computational Modeling vs. Computational Explanation: Is Everything a Turing Machine, and Does It Matter to the Philosophy of Mind?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85.1 (2007), pp. 93–115.