Cameron Buckner's Professonal Web Site

Welcome

I am a philosopher working primarily on the philosophical foundations of cognitive science. My research is interdisciplinary and covers a number of areas, including philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, and psychology. I'm particularly interested in the way that these fields can inform and constrain one another. For example, my dissertation analyzed conceptual problems arising in comparative psychology pertaining to the distinction between cognition and mere association. I argue that a particular kind of flexible representational capacities is crucial to making out the distinction, but that the kind of representational capacities at issue can only be precisely characterized by drawing upon recent findings in cognitive neuroscience. I then provide a novel account of the representational contents of these neural states by drawing from recent work in computational neuroscience--more specifically, from connectionist modeling of the medial temporal lobes.

Research Interests

My research focuses on the intersection of the following issues:
Memory and learning
Conceptual issues in cognitive neuroscience (esp. of the hippocampal system)
Animal cognition and comparative psychology
The role of rationality in cognitive science
Formal knowledge representation and reasoning (esp. non-monotonic reasoning, computational ontologies, and information extraction)
Ontological questions in the special sciences
Heuristics (both Heuristics & Biases and Simple Heuristics schools)
The cognitive science of concepts (esp. prototypes, exemplars, and non-conceptual content)
Innovative uses of technology to enhance research and pedagogy in the arts & sciences

Awards

Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, Ruhr-University Bochum 2011-
2011 Brian Michael Goldberg Memorial Award for Outstanding Graduate Work in Computing and Philosophy, from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, with stipend and plenary session at IACAP in Aarhus University, Denmark July 2-4 2011
Travel Stipend to attend Success Strategies for Emerging Faculty, University of Delaware, Sept 11-13 2010
Grant from Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin to attend the Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality, July 5-12 2010
College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Year Fellowship, Indiana University, Fall 2009-Spring 2010
Grant from DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) to attend International Center for Computational Logic Summer School, August 24-September 6, 2008
Nelson Dissertation Fellowship, IUB Department of Philosophy, Fall 2008-Spring 2009
Oscar R. Ewing Essay award, IUB Philosophy Department, for "Inherence, Transitivity, & Paronymy: Mountains and Molehills in the Categories", May 2006
Award for Graduate Academic Excellence, IUB Philosophy Department, 2005-2006 academic year

Representative Publications

Buckner, C. (Forthcoming). Two Approaches to the Distinction between Cognition and "Mere Association". International Journal of Comparative Psychology. Link.
Buckner, C. (Forthcoming). Review of Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel. Philosophical Psychology. Link.
Murdock, J., Buckner, C., and Allen, C. (Forthcoming). Two Methods for Evaluating Dynamic Ontologies. Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development. Link.
Buckner, C., Niepert, M., & Allen, C. (Forthcoming). From encyclopedia to ontology: Toward dynamic representation of the discipline of philosophy. Forthcoming in Synthese. Link.
Weinberg, J., Gonnerman, C., Buckner, C., and Alexander, J. (Forthcoming). Are Philosophers Expert Intuiters? Forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology. Link.
Niepert, M., Buckner, C., and Allen, C. (2009). Working the Crowd: Design Principles and Early Lessons from the Social-Semantic Web. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Web 3.0: Merging Semantic Web and Social Web at ACM Hypertext, Turin, Italy, 2009. Link.
Niepert, M. Buckner, C. & Allen, C. (2008). Answer set programming on expert feedback to populate and extend dynamic ontologies. In Proceedings of 21st FLAIRS. AAAI Press; 500-505. Link.
(A full list of publications can be found on my CV)

Employment History

I have held (and currently hold) a number of interesting jobs:
Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2012-
Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Houston Department of Philosophy, 2011-
Postdoctoral Researcher, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 2012-
Webmaster, IUB Philosophy Department, 2007-2011
Project Developer and Research Assistant on Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project with Colin Allen (PI) and Mathias Niepert, Summer 2006-Present
Assistant Instructor with Indiana University Bloomington Department of Philosophy, 2004-2011

For my full CV, click here.

Volunteer Work & Activism

picture of cameron's fijian students I have taught computer studies courses at the high school level in Savusavu, Fiji for two summers. I served as a volunteer teacher at Savusavu Secondary School and St. Bede's Secondary School during the summers of 2004 and 2005. I also helped organize the Rava Computer Club, and participated in a number of other projects with the Savusavu Rotary Club. Research has kept me busy the past few summers, but I hope to be able to return again some summer in the not-too-interminably-distant future.

In Bloomington, I began volunteering with a great organization, PALS, in May 2008. PALS (People and Animal Learning Services) is a non-profit equestrian therapy provider supplying therapeutic horseback riding to children and adults with cognitive, emotional, physical, and psychological disabilities. You can check out the organization (and chip in) at their web site here.

I started the World Turing Petition as a show of solidarity for Graham-Cumming's effort in the UK; it is for those of us who are not British citizens. Please sign and pass along.

World Turing Petition

UPDATE: The petition received over 11,000 signatures from dozens of countries. Click here to see No. 10's response to the British petition.

I also maintain a Facebook page with news updates concerning research on the medial temporal lobes:

InPhO Project

At the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project, we are using information extraction methods to dynamically build a formal ontology for the discipline of philosophy. We currently operate primarily on the content of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but we also draw information from a number of other sources. Our system efficiently harnesses expert feedback to semi-automatically build a conceptual taxonomy of philosophical ideas. See our project web site for papers and more information.
UPDATE 1/17/2012: The InPhO project, together with Katy Borner's visualization lab and collaborators in England, has received another grant from the excellent Digging Into Data challenge. The project is called "Digging Into Debating", and will focus on the automatic markup, modeling, and visualization of online debates.
UPDATE 8/4/2011: The InPhO project has received a $172,000 grant from a joint NEH-DFG project in conjunction with the University of Mannheim (which also received €126,400) to work on the LinkedHumanities initiative. More information here.
UPDATE 3/22/2009: The InPhO project has received a $400,000 preservation and access grant from NEH that will keep us fully-funded for the next two years!
UPDATE 8/16/2007: The InPhO Project has received an NEH Digital Humanities Start-up grant that will allow us to continue our research for another year. Huzzah!

Cameron Buckner, PhD

cjbuckner [at] uh [dot] edu