The UF Philosophy Department will be making a strong showing at the 2026 meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, with five faculty members, postdocs, and graduate students headed to Atlanta in February! The SSPP is one of the longest continuously operating philosophy conferences in the US and a premier venue for philosophy of cognitive science.
Dr. Cameron Buckner and Arjun Kumar will be presenting a paper entitled “Faithful Links in Chains-of-Thought: Self-Talk, Transparency, and (Artificial) reason.”
Abstract: New “reasoning” models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Deepseek have blown through previous upper limits on even very difficult mathematical, reasoning, and multi-step planning problems. These models operate by learning to adaptively self-generating “chains-of- thought”, on analogy with the role played by inner speech in human higher cognition and problem solving. There is now a burgeoning empirical literature in CS attempting to determine whether these chains of thought are “faithful” explanations of the underlying computations that LLM-based agents use to produce their answers. Here, we critique existing work in CS on faithfulness as unduly extensional and behavioristic, and propose three more intensional and philosophically-motivated explications of faithfulness—syntactic faithfulness, configural faithfulness, and strategic faithfulness—that could be used fruitfully in future research into what chains-of-thought may or may not reveal about LLMs’ capacity to reason.
Arjun Kumar will also be presenting his own paper entitled, “Representational Similarity Analysis, Models and Content”
Abstract: Recent work in neuroscience and the philosophy of neuroscience has focused on a particular analytic method called representational similarity analysis (RSA). It has been claimed that when RSA is used to compare convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the human visual system, a high correlation in the test is evidence that both systems have similar representational content. Recent philosophical work has raised two challenges for RSA: (1) that the targets of RSA are merely proxies for vehicles of representation in humans, and (2) that content identified by RSA cannot explain misrepresentations. In this paper, I extend these critiques by showing that given theories of representational content that tie representational content to reducing future misrepresentation, high correlation in RSA is not sufficient to establish content similarity. This is because RSA is concerned with activation space considered synchronically and the theory of content under consideration here ties content to learning which is tied to the evolution of activation space over time and to changes in weight space. It shows that to properly identify content, it is necessary to consider learning and therefore activation spaces diachronically.
Steven Clark will be presenting a paper entitled”Enacted Accountability in Dolphin Cooperation: A Minimal Theory of PRNR”
Abstract: In this paper, I introduce proto-rational norm responsiveness (PRNR), a minimal and practice-first framework for understanding enacted accountability in dolphin cooperation. It identifies four integrated dimensions of coordinated action and shows how they form a homeostatic profile that can be operationalized through simple field measures. A Cedar Key case study illustrates how dolphins sustain structured, answerable joint activity without language.
Dr. Phillip Kieval will be presenting a paper entitled “What is Dynamical Computation.”
Abstract: Recent research in cognitive neuroscience suggests that neural computations are realized by emergent population dynamics. Yet, this characterization remains puzzling given the presumed tension between computational and dynamical approaches to explaining cognition. I argue that models of dynamical computation merely appropriate the conceptual resources of dynamical systems theory to describe a distinctive kind computation involving continuous dynamics for which there is no well-defined way of breaking down transformations into discrete computational steps.
Dr. Bob Beddor is co-organizing a symposium is on “Standard Models and Non-Standard Cases in Action Theory” with Juan Piñeros Glasscock (Georgia State University), Alison Springle (University of Miami), and Tim Kearl (Flagler College). Dr. Beddor will be presenting a paper titled “Two Models of Intentional Action.”
For the full SSPP program, please click here.