Dr. Guillermo Del Pinal
Postdoctoral Fellow
Mercator Research Group
"Structure of Memory"
Department of Philosophy
Ruhr University of Bochum
Universitätsstraße 150
Room GA 04/142
44780 Bochum, Germany
Phone:
Fax:
Secretary: +49(0)234-32-29618
Email: guillermo.delpinal@rub.de
My research centers on two projects at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, language and cognitive neuroscience. The first project is to integrate compositional formal semantics with recent advances in the psychology of lexical concepts. The aim is to increase the explanatory and descriptive reach of formal semantics by introducing richer lexical representations. The challenge is to do this in a way that is sensitive to the worries philosophers have raised against theories---such as prototype and definitional theories---which attempt to go beyond lexical semantic atomism. The second project is to develop an account of the conditions under which neuroscientific studies can advance theories of higher-cognition. The aim is to develop a non-reductive account of the links between neural and cognitive levels. The challenge is to do this without assuming that there is a one-to-one mapping between cognitive representations or processes, on the one hand, and locations or patterns of neural activation on the other.
Publications
There and Up Again: On the Uses and Misuses of Neuroimaging for Psychology. Cognitive Neuropsychology 2013 Vol 30 Issue 4: pp. 233-252. (with Marco Nathan)
The Structure of Semantic Competence: Compositionality as an Innate Constraint of The Faculty of Language. Mind & Language, (forthcoming)