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Andrew Richmond

Postdoctoral Associate

Rotman Institute
​Western University

• Biography
• Publications
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I received my PhD from Columbia University, where I worked on computation and representation in cognitive science. I work mainly in philosophy of science, blending methods from philosophy and psychology to study scientific reasoning. Currently, I’m developing ways to apply methods and concepts from computational neuroscience to help understand the behavior of AI systems. I also have projects on cognitive neuroscience, philosophical methodology, and consciousness. My work on all these issues has led me to develop and defend a more general view in philosophy of science — methodological nominalism — which claims that, in trying to understand scientific practice, it is rarely useful to think about the properties or kinds that technical concepts (representation, function, etc.) refer to. Instead, we should investigate the concepts themselves and their role in science's explanatory economy: what they help scientists to do, and how.​

• Richmond, A (forthcoming). How Computation Explains.​ Mind & Language. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22668
• Richmond, A (2023). Commentary: Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences. Frontiers in Psychology, 14. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1259808​
• Preprint: Richmond, A (2023). What is a Theory of Neural Representation For? http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22668
• Preprint: ​Richmond, A (2023). What really lives in the swamp? Kinds and the illustration of scientific reasoning. ​http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/22874

​Personal website with papers in progress, syllabi, etc: andrewrichmond.net​

Presentations on the philosophy of representation and computation​, for neuroscientists (both at the Neuromatch conference):

An interview about my work, on the Dialexicon podcast: