The BJPS Popper Prize 2025

In ‘The Conceptual Format Debate and the Challenge from (Global) Supramodality’, Fabrizio Calzavarini rejects one of cognitive neuroscience’s most entrenched commitments and argues that such rejection reshapes high-profile debates in philosophy of cognitive science and empirically oriented philosophy of mind. For well over a century, a fundamental distinction has lain at heart of neuroscientists’ understanding of functionally relevant architecture of the brain: the distinction between modally specific cortex, on the one hand, and amodal or non-modal cortex, on the other. In his prize-winning paper, Calzavarini reviews a robust range of neuroscientific data suggesting that extensive portions of what are traditionally considered modality-specific cortices are in fact ‘supramodal’; they process information independently of perceptual modality. On the most radical (though not necessarily implausible) interpretation of these data, so-called sensory cortices should be treated as task-specific contributors, not individuated by their role in processing distinctive channels of sensory input. This fascinating and potentially ground-breaking contribution to our understanding of neural architecture has striking implications regarding cognitive ontology. For instance, proponents of embodied perspectives on cognition often emphasize what they take to be the distinctively sensory grounding of human concepts and the effects of modality-specific grounding on cognitive processing. Yet, if Calzavarini’s view is correct, the entire debate over embodied concepts would seem to rest on a misconception of the kind of material available for conceptual grounding.

For its impressive contribution to debates of central importance in the philosophy of cognitive science, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee judge ‘The Conceptual Format Debate and the Challenge from (Global) Supramodality’ to be worthy of the 2025 BJPS Popper Prize.

—Prof. Tim Lewens & Prof. Robert Rupert