Project Description
Home / Members / Graduate Students / Eysan Demirkaya
RESEARCH AREAS:
Philosophy of Neuroscience
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Philosophy of Mind
CONTACT:
Rotman Institute of Philosophy
Western University
Western Interdisciplinary Research Building
London, Ontario, Canada
N6A 3K7
EYSAN DEMIRKAYA
Doctoral Student;
Department of Philosophy, Western University
Eysan received her BA in Philosophy (2018), and BSc in Molecular Biology and Genetics (2018) (Double Major) from Koc University. Also, she minored in Psychology (2018), and Media and Visual Arts (2018); and she had certificates in Cognitive and Brain Sciences (2018) and Design (2018). She received her MA in Philosophy (2021) from Bilkent University. Her MA thesis was on pathological, chronic pain, and pain avoidance behavior within the predictive processing framework. Her primary research interests are Philosophy of Neuroscience, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, and Philosophy of Mind. Currently, She is researching the notions of representations and the representational theories of mind.
The goal of my current research project is to analyze the concept representation with/without an explanatory role employed in the cognitive sciences, especially in neuroscience. To do so, I examine some representational theories in neuroscience. Particularly, a wide array of questions that I reiterate encapsulates: Do the states characterized as representation in explanatory framework X serve as representation, given the process and mechanism put forth? (Ramsey, 2007), What can be treated as a representation?, What does it mean for something to serve as a representation or a representational state?, What does to stand in for or to represent refer to?, What might it mean to invoke representations as explanatory posits in cognitive science?, Does the notion of inner representation do important explanatory work in a given account of cognition?, What does the positing of internal representations amount to?, When is it useful to do so and when is it not?, Exactly what is being claimed about the mind/brain when it is claimed to have representational states?, What does it mean to say that a given notion of representation is doing important explanatory work?, What might a successful job description for cognitive representation look like? (Ramsey, 2007: 27), Is there some explanatory benefit in describing an internal element of a physical or computational process in representational terms?, Is there an element of a proposed process or architecture that is functioning as a representation in a sufficiently robust or recognizable manner, and if so, how does it do this?, Given that theory X invokes internal representations in its account of process Y, are the internal states playing this sort of role, and if so, how? (Ramsey, 2007: 34), What is a neural representation leveraged in neuroscience (Poldrack, 2020), and What do the representational notions contribute to the explanations? (Richmond, 2023), What is a mental representation operates in psychology? (Anderson & Champion, 2022), and What is an artificial representation exploited in deep learning or representation learning? (Poldrack, 2020; Anderson & Champion, 2022). The reason lurking behind the objective of the project is familiarizing myself with “the representation wars” (Clark, 2015), and getting the hang of the current direction in which the neuroscientific explanations are headed because these areas are beyond the scope of my previous knowledge regarding the philosophy of mind, that of cognitive sciences, and that of neuroscience.
TA Courses
2024
Media Ethics (Dr. Dean Proessel) – Western University
2022-2023
Philosophy of Mind (Dr. Istvan Aranyosi) – Bilkent University
Embodied Cognition (Dr. Istvan Aranyosi) – Bilkent University
2021- 2022
Philosophy of Mind (Dr. Istvan Aranyosi) – Bilkent University
2020- 2021
Social and Political Philosophy I (Dr. Istvan Aranyosi) – Bilkent University
Philosophy of Science (Dr. Istvan Aranyosi) – Bilkent University