Gualtiero Piccinini
Gualtiero Piccinini is an Italian–American philosopher known for his work on the nature of mind and computation as well as on how to integrate psychology and neuroscience. He is the Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy and Curators' Distinguished Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Background
Piccinini was born and raised in Italy, and studied philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Turin, from which he earned a Bachelor of Arts, and graduated cum laude. He then went to graduate school at University of Pittsburgh, specializing in the history and philosophy of science. Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 2003, he held the position of "James S. McDonnell Post Doctoral Research Fellow" at the PNP program at Washington University in St. Louis. He started as an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, in 2005 and received early tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2010 and early promotion to full professor in 2014. From 2011 to 2014 he was the Chair of the Philosophy Department at the university. From 2015 to 2024, Piccinini was the Associate Director of the Center for Neurodynamics and an Affiliate in Gender Studies at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. He held the title of Curators' Distinguished Professor at the same university from 2019 to 2024.Piccinini has served as a visiting professor several times in his career, including at Washington University in St. Louis in spring 2015, a fellow at Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2011, as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the engineering graduate school of the Polytechnic University of Turin both in May 2007 and 2009, and in 2023, Piccinini was a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.
Work
Piccinini specializes in theories of Computation, Neuroscience, Psychology and the human Mind. An overview of his most influential work in these areas is below.Piccinini is known for his mechanistic account of computation. In his 2015 book Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account, he argues that a mechanistic account of physical computation satisfies the six desiderata better than competing accounts. He argues that computation is a kind of mechanistic process that does not require representation or information processing, but information processing does require computation.
Piccinini and co-author Sonya Bahar, a physicist and Director of the Center for Neurodynamics at University of Missouri, St. Louis, argue that neural computations are neither digital nor analog, but sui generis. In Piccinini's 2020 book Neurocognitive Mechanisms: Explaining Biological Cognition, he defends neural computational framework where he develops a multilevel mechanistic account of cognition grounded in cognitive neuroscience. In this book he also defends an egalitarian view of realization, a mechanistic form of functionalism, that cognition is computational, as well as further arguing that neural computations sui generis. Piccinini also argues that neuroscience should be integrated into cognitive science to complete the overall picture and understanding of the mind.
An edited volume he edited, Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind, provides evidence that cognitive neuroscience is developing into an interdisciplinary science by integrating computation, psychology, and neuroscience that is deepening our understanding of the mind. The chapters in the edited volume show how cognitive science integrated with neuroscience produces a unified, integrated, multilevel, mechanistic, neurocomputational account of the mind.
Piccinini is also widely known for his critique of pancomputationalism and for his view about first-person data such as data from first-person reports. He has argued that first-person data are scientifically legitimate because they are public like other scientific data. Piccinini has also published influential articles on computational theories of cognition, concepts, and consciousness.
Miscellaneous
Piccinini has received several grants, fellowships, and teaching releases, including two Scholars' Awards by the National Science Foundation. Piccinini has received several awards, including the 2019 Chancellor's Award for Research and Creativity from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, the 2018 K. Jon Barwise Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the 2014 Herbert Simon award by the International Association of Computing and Philosophy.He is the founder of, an academic group blog in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. He administered the blog until 2012. He is one of the founders of SLAPSA, a St. Louis-based organization for the philosophy of science, run by Piccinini, Carl Craver and Kent Staley.
He is also a founder of, a hub for connecting researchers around the globe in all areas of the philosophy of mind and related sciences, including but not limited to philosophy of psychology and philosophy of neuroscience.
Piccinini has done editorial work for multiple academic journals, including: Cognitive Science, Humanities, Journal of Cognitive Science, and The Rutherford Journal. He is also Editor-in-chief of "Studies in Brain and Mind", a Springer book series. He has held this position since 2010.