I’m interested in the intentionality of representational systems and the types of (cognitive) architecture that (can) underwrite them, in particular those proposed by the computational theory of mind. It would be nice to have a polished computational account of intentional systems that grounds them in the natural environment, where ‘natural’ has at least concerns spatio-temporal immediacy, evolutionary heritage, and social organization. Even if we get a naturalistic account off the ground, please don’t ask me how to square a computational theory of mind with externalism about content; its not yet clear to me how to harmonize the syntax with the semantics.

• I want to know what concepts are. I want to know whether they are best thought of as mental particulars or best thought of as complicated abilities. If concepts are constituents of thought, what it is about the “coming together” of n concepts that makes a thought complete? Is this conceptual glue a brute feature of our minds, or is it due to something else?
• Here’s something cool to think about: the relationship(s) between the contents of different perceptual modalities and thought. And in general the difference between propositional contents (like those in thought) and non-propositional contents (like those that characterize vision). Like others, I’d also like to know how animals represent and navigate their environments, and what distinguishes their ways of “thinking” from ours.
• We are both competent English speakers. As such, we have a remarkable ability: we can understand a completely novel utterance in a completely novel environment. But what is it that we know when we know English? And how is this knowledge brought to bear when parsing or generating a sentence? I’m curious whether this ability is modular, in particular whether it only accesses a proprietary domain of information (say, something at the level of syntax or logical form). I also want to find out whether contextualism about semantic content is consistent with the modularity of linguistic perception. This gets into some difficult issues about the primary bearers of semantic content: is it sentences or is it utterances of sentences (in contexts)?
  

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