CURRICULUM VITAEOrlin K Vakarelov[PDF] [Education] [Publications] [Conferences] [Research Positions] [Teaching] [Graduate Courses] [References] [Awards] [Service] Areas of Specialization:Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind and AI, Philosophy of Information, Mathematical Logic Areas of Competence:Epistemology, Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mathematics, Information and Computer Ethics, Theory of Complex Systems EducationUniversity of Arizona Carnegie Mellon University University of Toronto Publications:Journals“The Information Medium”, Philosophy & Technology, 25 (1):47-65, 2012, DOI: 10.1007/s13347-011-0016-9 “The Cognitive Agent: Overcoming Informational Limits”, Adaptive Behavior, 19 (2), 2011, DOI 10.1177/1059712311404090 "Pre-cognitive Semantic Information", Knowledge, Technology and Policy, 23(2), 2010 (Special Issue), DOI: 10.1007/s12130-010-9109-5 "An objectivist argument for thirdism", with the OSCAR seminar, Analysis, 2008 Proceedings“The Cognitive Agent”, Proceedings of the 2009 Metanexus conference, http://www.metanexus.net/conference2009/articles/Default.aspx?id=10851 Works in Preparation:“Informational Networks: A Meta-architecture for Situated Cognition” “The Historical Necessity of Life for Cognition” "Does Mathematics have a Domain?" Doctoral Dissertation Summary:The dissertation is based on four papers that together offer a theory of General Situated Cognition. The project has two overarching goals: (1) to unify existing foundational approaches to cognition by investigating cognition within the framework of the philosophy of information; (2) to characterize the function of cognition and suggest a general (meta-)framework for cognitive architecture. Two of the papers, “Pre-cognitive Semantic Information” and “The Information Medium”, deal primarily with the concept of information. They offer a pragmatic and structural account of information, as well as a novel and more general theory of meaning appropriate for simple, non-linguistic organisms – the interface theory of meaning. The papers lay the theoretical and conceptual machinery needed for the other two papers, “The Cognitive Agent: Overcoming Informational Limitations” and “Information Networks: A Meta-architecture for Situated Cognition”, which investigate cognition as a general natural phenomenon. They specify the function of cognition as the mechanism in an organism that overcomes informational deficits. They also offer a broad architecture of cognitive systems based on networks of information media, which encompasses, and thus unifies existing approaches to cognition, such as the computational/symbolic approach, the connectionist approach, the dynamicist approach and the ecological embodied approach.
Research PositionsRA OSCAR Project, University of Arizona, 2003-2004
RA APROS Project, Carnegie Mellon University, 2001-2003
RA Center for Cognitive Robotics, University of Toronto, Summer 1999
Awards:UA Excellence Graduate Fellowship in the Social Sciences – Spring 2010 Graduate and Professional Student Counsel Travel Grant Innis College Book Award – 1995, 1996, 1997
Conference Presentations:Pre-cognitive Semantic Information, The International Association for Computing And Philosophy Annual Meeting, Aarhus University, Denmark, July 2011 Science is coming out of your ears: How scientific theories extend the enactive mind, The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Annual Conference 2011, Sussex, UK, July 2011 Between Thermostats and Humans: Towards Pre-cognitive Information, Philosophy Department Colloquium; University of Arizona, Tucson AZ, December 2009 The Cognitive Agent: Overcoming informational limits
Informational Networks: A Meta-architecture for Situated Cognition
The Historical Necessity of Life for Cognition, Southeastern Graduate Philosophy Conference; University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, April 2009 Order and Information: How cognition emerges in life and how it leaves life behind, Contemporary Philosophy Seminar; Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria, July 2008 General Situated Cognition
Information from Dynamics, Arizona Student Workshop in Philosophy V; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, October 2006 Information and Non-propositional Knowledge, Arizona Student Workshop in Philosophy III; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, July 2004 Towards a Better Understanding of the Representational Role of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences, 32nd Annual Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy; University of Maryland, College Park, MD, May 2004
Conference CommentatorOn "A Formalism for Embodied Computation Oriented Toward Artificial Morphogenesis" by Bruce MacLennan, The 2009 North American Conference on Computing and Philosophy; University of Indiana, Bloomington, IN, June 2009 On “Miss information and Mis-transfer of Information” by Martin Frické, Information Ethics Roundtable; University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, April 2009 On “Saving Time: How Attention Explains the Utility of Supposedly Superfluous Representations” by Jason Ford, Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association; Pasadena, CA, April 2008 On "Models and Recursivity" by Walter Dean, Pitt-CMU Philosophy Graduate Student Conference; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, March 2002
Teaching Experience:Courses independently taughtU of Arizona: Teaching assistantU of Arizona: GraderU of Arizona:
Professional ServiceChair of the track "Philosophy of Information and Cognition" at the annual conference of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP’11), Aarhus, Denmark, July, 201 Referee Journal: Mind; Philosophy & Technology; International Studies in the Philosophy of Science Referee Conference: 2009 Cognitive Science Society annual meeting Organizer for 2002 Pitt-CMU Graduate Student Conference
Graduate courses taken* Indicates course was audited Cognitive Science and Mind:Minds, Machines and Knowledge (Seidenfeld, Fall 00) Philosophy of Science:Relativity Theory I (Dyer, Fall 96)* Logic:Barwise & Etchemendy The Liar (Urquhart, Spring 97) Philosophy of MathematicsDedekind & Hilbert (Sieg, Spring 01)* Epistemology and Metaphysics:Natural Kinds (Hacking, Fall 98)* Philosophy of Language:Brandom’s Making it Explicit (Heath, Fall 98) Early Analytic Philosophy:Seminar in Early Analytic Philosophy (Tulley, Fall 97) HistorySeminar on Hume (Owen, Spring 05) Value theoryThe Purpose of Moral Theory (Schmidtz, Fall 04) References:Jenann Ismael Richard Healey Shaughan Lavine Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini Luciano Floridi Rachana Kamtekar (Teaching)
|
| [†] Regents Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of Cognitive Science John Pollock passed away in September 2009. His place on the committee was taken over by Shaughan Lavine. |