Daniel Burnston
Tulane University
Spring Term 2019
Decision and Action as Biological Categories

Dan Burnston is an Assistant Professor at Tulane University, and a faculty member in the Tulane Brain Institute. Dan works on issues in philosophy of mind and philosophy of the life sciences, including the relationship between cognition and perception, functional explanation in systems neuroscience, and scientific representation and modeling in biology.

In Pittsburgh, Dan will be working on a book project in the neuroscience of decision making and intentional action control. The key questions of the project include: (i) how to functionally decompose the multifunctional brain networks involved in action control, (ii) whether and how commonsense psychological concepts like ‘intention’ fit into this organization, and (iii) what this can tell us about the psychology underlying agency and the phenomenology of intentional action.

Representative publications:

Burnston, D. C. (2016). Computational neuroscience and localized neural function. Synthese, 193(12), 3741-3762.

Burnston, D. C. (2016). A contextualist approach to functional localization in the brain. Biology & Philosophy, 31(4), 527-550.

Burnston, D. C. (2016). Data graphs and mechanistic explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 57, 1-12.

Burnston, D. C. (2017). Cognitive penetration and the cognition–perception interface. Synthese, 194(9), 3645-3668. doi:10.1007/s11229-016-1116-y

Burnston, D. C. (2017). Interface problems in the explanation of action. Philosophical Explorations, 20(2), 242-258.

Burnston, D. C. (2017). Real Patterns in Biological Explanation. Philosophy of Science, 84(5), 879-891. doi:10.1086/693964