I work in philosophy of science, blending methods from philosophy and psychology to study scientific reasoning. Currently I spend most of my time thinking about how philosophy, neuroscience, and AI can work together to make complex systems, like brains and neural networks, intelligible. I take a pragmatic approach, and one of my main projects is to elaborate and defend that approach by showing how our methodology as philosophers of science should be sensitive to lessons from the psychology of scientific explanation.
Papers
(* = first/co-first authors)
Forthcoming
Drafts
Concept clarification as scientific methodology
Scientists devote high-profile articles and special issues to clarifying concepts like representation and computation. But they rarely discuss methodology: what do we aim to achieve by clarifying our concepts, and what methods could serve those goals? I describe methods from psychology and philosophy, show how they serve different purposes (e.g., explaining why one uses a concept oneself vs coordinating on a shared target of investigation), and argue for a more sophisticated and pluralistic methodology on those grounds.
Naturalism and philosophy of mind
Philosophers of mind tend to accept three claims. (1) Philosophy of mind should deliver a metaphysics of mind: an account of what it is to be/have a mind. (2) The most promising approach to that task is computational and representational. (3) Philosophy of mind should draw support from cognitive science. I argue that these claims are only consistent on a naïve view of cognitive science and the explanations it provides — specifically, a view of those explanations as metaphysically loaded. Starting from a more plausible understanding of cognitive science, I bring out the inconsistency of the three claims and discuss how we can move forward by dropping one of them.
Mysterianism, or the cosmic horror of the self
Mysterians argue that the nature of consciousness is fundamentally unknowable. I argue that this sense of unknowability is identical to the sense of unknowability that characterizes the objects of cosmic or Lovecraftian horror. I use this comparison to bring out some puzzles for philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness, especially concerning their relationship to the aesthetics of consciousness.
Gamification and domain transfer
I discuss the use of gamification in pedagogy, highlighting a lack of consensus on best practices and some difficulties we face trying to derive those best practices from empirical research. I then show that gamification is an example of domain transfer, and derive a tentative set of best practices based on a broader understanding of domain transfer in science, business, and other domains.
The Antikythera mechanism as a model organism for philosophy of cognitive science
Philosophers of cognitive science aim to illuminate cognitive science's various distinctive forms of explanation, e.g., computational, representational, and functional explanation. To do so, they often study the way we explain toy systems, e.g., how we would computationally explanation a simple circuit. But because these toy explanations of these toy systems do not operate with the same goals or under the same constraints as real scientific explanations, they cannot be very informative about the latter. In place of toy systems, I suggest a model organism approach: we should find real examples of scientific explanations, but ones that are simpler than the (cognitive scientific) explanations we are ultimately targeting. I offer, as a 'model organism,' the scientific explanation of the Antikythera mechanism: an ancient Greek calculating device that has been studied in detail over the last 50 years. Scientists have applied many of the same forms of explanation to this device that cognitive science applies to the brain, but the explanations in question are far simpler, making them an ideal 'model organism' for philosophers studying cognitive scientific explanation.
Papers
(* = first/co-first authors)
Forthcoming
- Richmond, A. What really lives in the swamp? Kinds and the illustration of scientific reasoning. Philosophy of Science.
- Baker, B.,* Lange, R.,* Richmond, A.,* Kriegeskorte, N., Cao, R., Pitkow, X., Schwartz, O., & Achille, A. Use and usability: Three levels of neural representation. Neurons, Behavior, Data, and Theory.
- Richmond, A. (2025). What is a theory of neural representation for? Synthese, 205(14).
- Richmond, A. (2025). How Computation Explains. Mind & Language, 40(1).
- Richmond, A.,* Bowen, J. G., Kayssi, L. F., Küçük, K., Ravikumar, V., Şahin, Y., Anderson, M.L. (2024). Imposing vs finding unity. Cognitive Neuroscience.
- Richmond, A (2023). Commentary: Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.
- Richmond, A. Pragmatism in philosophy of cognitive science (under commission, Philosophy Compass)
- Richmond, A. Computational externalism (under review)
- Richmond, A. Social AI: Mechanisms and consequences (in preparation, see the policy brief here)
- Richmond, A. Experimental philosophy of science: Beyond categories (in preparation)
- Richmond, A. How theories travel: Representation in explainable AI (in preparation)
Drafts
Concept clarification as scientific methodology
Scientists devote high-profile articles and special issues to clarifying concepts like representation and computation. But they rarely discuss methodology: what do we aim to achieve by clarifying our concepts, and what methods could serve those goals? I describe methods from psychology and philosophy, show how they serve different purposes (e.g., explaining why one uses a concept oneself vs coordinating on a shared target of investigation), and argue for a more sophisticated and pluralistic methodology on those grounds.
Naturalism and philosophy of mind
Philosophers of mind tend to accept three claims. (1) Philosophy of mind should deliver a metaphysics of mind: an account of what it is to be/have a mind. (2) The most promising approach to that task is computational and representational. (3) Philosophy of mind should draw support from cognitive science. I argue that these claims are only consistent on a naïve view of cognitive science and the explanations it provides — specifically, a view of those explanations as metaphysically loaded. Starting from a more plausible understanding of cognitive science, I bring out the inconsistency of the three claims and discuss how we can move forward by dropping one of them.
Mysterianism, or the cosmic horror of the self
Mysterians argue that the nature of consciousness is fundamentally unknowable. I argue that this sense of unknowability is identical to the sense of unknowability that characterizes the objects of cosmic or Lovecraftian horror. I use this comparison to bring out some puzzles for philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness, especially concerning their relationship to the aesthetics of consciousness.
Gamification and domain transfer
I discuss the use of gamification in pedagogy, highlighting a lack of consensus on best practices and some difficulties we face trying to derive those best practices from empirical research. I then show that gamification is an example of domain transfer, and derive a tentative set of best practices based on a broader understanding of domain transfer in science, business, and other domains.
The Antikythera mechanism as a model organism for philosophy of cognitive science
Philosophers of cognitive science aim to illuminate cognitive science's various distinctive forms of explanation, e.g., computational, representational, and functional explanation. To do so, they often study the way we explain toy systems, e.g., how we would computationally explanation a simple circuit. But because these toy explanations of these toy systems do not operate with the same goals or under the same constraints as real scientific explanations, they cannot be very informative about the latter. In place of toy systems, I suggest a model organism approach: we should find real examples of scientific explanations, but ones that are simpler than the (cognitive scientific) explanations we are ultimately targeting. I offer, as a 'model organism,' the scientific explanation of the Antikythera mechanism: an ancient Greek calculating device that has been studied in detail over the last 50 years. Scientists have applied many of the same forms of explanation to this device that cognitive science applies to the brain, but the explanations in question are far simpler, making them an ideal 'model organism' for philosophers studying cognitive scientific explanation.
