Jake Quilty-Dunn

New paper, co-authored with Justin Wood, in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social: The Nativist-Empiricist Debate Is Broken We argue that radical nativism and radical empiricism are compatible and, in some cases, both plausibly true. So something is wrong. 🧵 Author share link here, valid til Oct 31:

I've trained my dog to salivate at the sound of a bell thanks to my invention, the edible bell

When and how do newborns see a face? @nmwilkinson.eurosky.social and colleagues identify a serious problem in how a foundational newborn study has been interpreted. But the Bluesky victory lap is leaving out a rather important detail: neonates track FACE drawings! bsky.app/profile/nmwi...

"are you ready to argue about nature vs nurture?" "pfft, I was *born* ready"

always important to remember that [catastrophic/life-changing AI prediction] has been 5 years away for 70 years

i recommend david's paper and this reply. i agree much more with @dlbarack.bsky.social but the whole conversation is helpful

Proud to have this paper out today at Nature Human Behaviour @nathumbehav.nature.com ! Heroic, creative work by Zekun Sun (w/ Zhiran Xie and me).

🤖🧠NEW PAPER🧠🤖 What is the relationship between neural networks & symbolic systems? Based on evidence from mechanistic interpretability, we argue for a quasi-symbolic view of cognition: Neural nets implement symbols but only approximately Link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/n

How come Wikipedia is doing better than academic publishing? Btw love that icon: 🚫🤖 🔗 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmat...

Social media doesn't just feed you bad information. It trains you in how to treat information: who to trust, how much evidence is enough, what counts as a good explanation. And it trains you for a world that doesn't exist. New @PPR (yay!) and free here: philpapers.org/rec/FLOBMS

great, this bullshit correlates with some other bullshit we don’t understand

they're calling it the most depressing train ride of the decade

cold take: it is weird to put a job you were offered and declined on your cv

I don't understand this. 52 years later, why try and replicate the original? It's obviously not going to be the same study. The world has changed; cars, traffic, and people have changed. If one is interested in false memory, why not design the best study you can? What can you conclude meaningfully?

A new paper, to appear in Dev Psych. Why do kids as old as 5 or 6 count parts of things as though they were whole objects? We argue that this is pragmatic failure due to kids' inability to access alternative descriptions like "piece of fork". osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you are in the greater Washington DC area on Friday 6 November and have an afternoon to spare, I’m giving a talk at George Mason University. I’d love to see you there. (baboon skull diagram from Theibault et al. 2026) 1/7

Delighted to say that my paper "E Pluribus Unum: Costly Inference and Fragmented Belief" has been accepted for publication in Mind! You can find the paper at this PhilPapers link. Abstract follows in a reply. philpapers.org/rec/SPIEPU

Accepted to Linguistic Inquiry! I argue on syntactic grounds “some of the apples” is really “some apples of the apples” with NP-ellipsis. This explains which quantifiers and which modifiers (adjectives, prepositional phrases, relative clauses) can’t appear. Preprint: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009...

in academia if you wear a tie people react like you're wearing a tuxedo and holding a sign that says "I'm a fancy boy"

we've always had the secret hack of 'cheating'. You could, in principle, pay a qualified human to fully write your materials for you. If you see what's wrong with that, apply that reasoning to using genAI for this. If you see nothing wrong with that, I don't know what to tell you.

it’s 2026, high schoolers should have to read fodor

It’s crazy. I’m reading a Nature Communications paper. I can’t get through it. So much data. So little of it matters. So many conclusions drawn about nothing.

new preprint: "Directing large language models to follow the letter or spirit of the law" arxiv.org/pdf/2609.23083 (by Qian , Li, Chen, Murthy @soniakmurthy.bsky.social , Belinkov, and me) this is particularly cool/important, and I'm allowed to say it because it was headed by @pqian.bsky.social

everything I know about will stancil i learned against my will

New paper! “Order of Explanation: Having it Both Ways” is now forthcoming in Noûs. It’s been a really fun paper to write and I’m stoked to share it.

Human thought is thought to be systematic: Do reasoning models have systematicity of thought? With @brendenlake.bsky.social we study this question in our new preprint arxiv.org/abs/2609.13948 Thread 🧵

Excited to share our new paper in Cerebral Cortex (w/ Ellen Lau)! In this MEG study on visual working memory (VWM), we showed that uni- and multi-variate signals complementarily track different aspects of VWM representations across different regions. academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

psychologists love to call one second '1000 ms'

I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a paper as much as this one. Such clear thinking. Beyond the compelling nativism-empiricism argument, it's among the best illustrations/explanations of levels of analysis I've seen. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This is interesting, but I'm having trouble with parts of the argument. It says that the same phenomena support both radical positions, but it doesn't seem to be the same phenomena. The data from newborn chicks supports nativism, but the "data" from ML support empiricism. These are different.

This is a very interesting paper that makes some useful clarifications between different senses of learning, however I think it overstates the extent to which the nativism vs. empiricism debate stems purely from terminological confusion. (1/x)

A thought-provoking piece by my esteemed colleague Jake! Although I disagree that the framework dissolves the nativist-empiricist debate, at least not for folk psychologists (and developmentalists like myself). More in our recent Psych Sci paper bsky.app/profile/jinj...

when we met at a conference as grad students, jake asked a great question about my anti-fodor talk, listened to my reply, and then declared "you're, like, my arch-nemesis" afraid the common ground we've since achieved can only mean we've gotten old

Really important and interesting paper