EDUCATION

BSc University of Bristol (Philosophy & Psychology)

PhD University of Cambridge (Physiology)

PUBLICATIONS

Book

Chirimuuta, M.  (2024) The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience. MIT Press.

Chirimuuta, M.  (2015) Outside Colour: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Colour in Philosophy. MIT Press.

Articles: Philosophy of Neuroscience and Perceptual Psychology

Chirimuuta, M. (2023) “Haptic realism for neuroscience“. Synthese. 202:63

Chirimuuta, M. (2022) “The Case for Medium Dependence” (Comment on Neurocognitive Mechanisms by Gualtiero Piccinini). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 29:185-194

Chirimuuta, M. (2022) “Disjunctivism and Cartesian Idealisation.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 112:218–238

Chirimuuta, M. (2022) “Artifacts and Levels of Abstraction.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. DOI 10.3389/fevo.2022.952992

Chirimuuta, M. (2020) “Prediction Versus Understanding in Computationally Enhanced Neuroscience” Synthese https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02713-0

Chirimuuta, M. (2018) “Marr, Mayr, and MR: What functionalism should now be about“, Philosophical Psychology,31(3):403-418

Chirimuuta, M. (2018) Explanation in Computational Neuroscience: Causal and Non-causal British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69:849-880

Chirimuuta, M. (2017) “Précis of Outside Color and Responses to Gert, Gupta and Matthen”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 95(1):215-222, 244-255

Chirimuuta, M. (2017) Crash Testing an Engineering Framework in Neuroscience: Does the Idea of Robustness Break Down? Philosophy of Science 84:1140–1151.

Chirimuuta, M. (2017) Perceptual Pragmatism and the Naturalised Ontology of Colour Topics in Cognitive Science 9(1): 151 – 171

Chirimuuta, M. (2016) Vision, Perspectivism, and Haptic Realism Philosophy of Science 83(5):746

Chirimuuta, M. and Kingdom, F.A.A. (2015) The Uses of Colour Vision: Ornamental, Practical, and Theoretical Minds and Machines, 25(2):213-229

Chirimuuta, M. (2014) Psychophysical Methods and the Evasion of Introspection Philosophy of Science, 81(5):914-926

Chirimuuta, M. (2014) Minimal Models and Canonical Neural Computations: The Distinctness of Computational Explanation in Neuroscience, Synthese, 191:127-153

Chirimuuta, M. (2013) Extending, Changing, and Explaining the Brain, Biology & Philosophy, 28 (4):613-638

Chirimuuta, M. (2008) Reflectance Realism and Colour Constancy: What would count as scientific evidence for Hilbert’s ontology of colour? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 86(4), 563-582

Articles: History of Neurology and Psychology, History of Philosophy of Science

Chirimuuta, M. (2023) “Critical Realism and Technocracy – RW Sellars’ Radical Philosophy in its Context.” Topoi. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09982-7

Chirimuuta, M. (2023) “Rules, judgment and mechanisation.” Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law (CRCL) 1(3)

Chirimuuta, M. (2021) “Reflex theory, cautionary tale: misleading simplicity in early neuroscience.” Synthese. 199:12731-12751

Chirimuuta, M. (2020) “The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain: The Critique of Abstraction and its Application to Computationalism” Perspectives on Science

Chirimuuta, M. (2020) “Cassirer and Goldstein on Abstraction and the Autonomy of Biology” HOPOS. 10:471-503

Chirimuuta, M. (2019) “Synthesis of contraries: Hughlings Jackson on sensory-motor representation in the brain” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Science. 75:34-44

Chirimuuta, M. (2017) “Hughlings Jackson and the ‘doctrine of concomitance’: mind-brain theorising between metaphysics and the clinic“. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39(26).

Chirimuuta, M. (forthcoming) “Colour in the Scientific Image”. Dibner Lecture in History of Science and Technology, to be published as a pamphlet by the Smithsonian Libraries.

Chirimuuta, M. (2016) Why the “stimulus-error” did not go away Studies in History & Philosophy of Science part A, 56:33–42

Book Chapters: 

Buccella, A. and M. Chirimuuta (2023) “Shine of bronze and sound of brass: The relational perceptual constructs of timbre and gloss.” In Mroczko-Wąsowicz and Grush (eds.) Sensory Individuals. Oxford University Press

Chirimuuta, M. (2023) “Neopragmatism in the Philosophy of Perception? The Case of Primitive Color.” In Gert (ed.) Neopragmatism: Interventions in First-order Philosophy. Oxford University Press

Chirimuuta, M. (2023) “The Critical Difference Between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Science.” In Donohue and Wolfe (eds.) Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy. Springer.

Chirimuuta, M. (2022) “Ideal Patterns and Non-Factive Understanding.” In Lawler, Khalifa, and Shech (eds.) Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences. Routledge

Chirimuuta, M. (2021) “Your brain is like a computer: function, analogy, simplification”. In Fabrizio Calzavarini and Marco Viola (eds.), Neural Mechanisms: New Challenges in the Philosophy of Neuroscience. Springer

Chirimuuta, M. (2019) “The Historiography of the Sciences of the Brain and Nervous System”. In Michael R. Dietrich, Mark E. Borello and Oren Harman (eds.) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Springer

Chirimuuta, M. (2020) “Charting the Heraclitean Brain: Perspectivism and Simplification in Models of the Motor Cortex,” in McCoy & Massimi (eds.) Scientific Perspectivism. New York: Routledge.

Chirimuuta, M. (2018) “Vision”. In Sprevak and Colombo (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of The Computational Mind

Chirimuuta, M. (2018) The Development and Application of Efficient Coding Explanation in Neuroscience (long/penultimate version) in Saatsi and Reutlinger (eds.) Explanation Beyond Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chirimuuta, M. (2020) Colour and Philosophy of Science in D. Brown and F. McPherson (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Colour 

Chirimuuta, M. (2014) The Metaphysical Significance of Colour Categorization: Mind, World, and their Complicated Relation. In Anderson, Biggam, Hough & Kay (eds.) Colour Studies: a Broad Spectrum. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins

Chirimuuta, M. & Paterson, M.W.D. (2014) A Methodological Molyneux Question: Sensory Substitution, Plasticity and the Unification of Perceptual Theory.  D. Stokes, S. Biggs & M. Matthen (eds.) Perception and its Modalities, Oxford University Press.

Chirimuuta, M  (2011) Touchy-Feely Colour. In Biggam, Hough and Simmons (eds.) New Directions in Colour Studies. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins

Chirimuuta, M. & Gold, I.J. (2009) The embedded neuron, the enactive field?. In Bickle, J. (ed.) Handbook of Philosophy and Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Articles: Vision Science

To, M.P.S., M. Chirimuuta, and D. J. Tolhurst (2017) Modelling grating contrast discrimination dippers: the role of surround suppression.Journal of Vision 17(12):23. doi:10.1167/17.12.23

Tolhurst, D.J., To, M.P.S., Chirimuuta, M., Lovell, P.G.,  Chua, P.Y. and  Troscianko, T. (2010) Magnitude of perceived change in natural images may be linearly proportional to differences in neuronal firing rate. Seeing and Perceiving, 23:349-372.

Chirimuuta, M., Morrone, M.C. & Burr, D. (2007). Perceptual learning of modality specific visual attentional effects.  Vision Research, 47, 60-70

Chirimuuta, M., & Tolhurst, D.J. (2005). Does a Bayesian model of V1 contrast coding offer a neurophysiological account of human contrast discrimination? Vision Research, 45, 2943-2959

Chirimuuta, M., & Tolhurst, D.J.  (2005). Accuracy or identification of grating contrast by human observers. Vision Research, 45, 2960-2971

Chirimuuta, M., Clatworthy, P.L. & Tolhurst, D.J. (2003). Coding of the contrasts in natural images by visual cortex (V1) neurons: A Bayesian approach. Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 20, 1253-1260.

Clatworthy, P.L., Chirimuuta, M., Lauritzen, J.S. & Tolhurst, D.J. (2003). Coding of the contrasts in natural images by populations of neurons in primary visual cortex (V1).  Vision Research, 43, 1983-2001.