Bayesian cognitive science, predictive brains, and the nativism debate
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The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms-or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way to talk precisely and transparently about the kinds of mechanisms and representations underlying the acquisition of psychological traits without a commitment to an innate language of thought.
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Without direct empirical markers of prediction error precision or falsifiable predictions about symptom onset or treatment response, Bayesian models of schizophrenia offer little more than descriptive reinterpretation.
“Without direct empirical markers of prediction error precision or falsifiable predictions about symptom onset or treatment response, such models offer little more than descriptive reinterpretation (Bowers and Davis 2012; Colombo 2018).”
From The myth of the Bayesian brain (2025) · cites this paper as Colombo 2018
The Conclusion (page unavailable) discusses Bayesianism as a modelling approach to the acquisition of psychological traits, not models of schizophrenia. Searches for schizophrenia, prediction-error precision, empirical markers, and symptom onset or treatment response found no passage addressing the attributed claim. (LLM, conf=0.76)
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The myth of the Bayesian brain
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“Other critiques have highlighted the difficulty of empirically constraining priors and loss functions in perceptual models (Colombo 2018), and the problematic metaphysical overreach of the Free Energy Principle in its attempts to explain life, cognition, and action through a single variational…”
- Authors
- Colombo, M.
- Affiliations
- Tilburg University (NL)
- Corresponding author
- Colombo, Matteo
- ORCID
- Colombo, Matteo
- Venue
- Synthese
- Published
- 2017-05-22
- Volume
- 195
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 4817-4838
- ISSN
- 0039-7857 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-0964
- PMC
- PMC6404666
- OpenAlex
- W2611485873
- Cited by
- 15
- References
- 103
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 3 · 2019: 3
- FWCI
- 0.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Synthese (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Research portal (Tilburg University) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PhilSci-Archive (University of Pittsburgh) (acceptedVersion)
- Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Funders
- Tilburg University
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Philosophy and History of Science
- Keywords
- Bayesianism, nativism, empiricism, predictive processing, language of thought, cognitive mechanisms, philosophy of mind
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