Richard Moore
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the EPP BA/BSc at the University of Warwick. My UKRI-funded FLF Communicative Mind project researches human and non-human great ape communication and cognition, and the evolution of language. 🇪🇺 he/him
- There's a question that keeps popping up in my head and it's really bothering me for a long time now. Why do many/some chess players point with their middle finger when indicating positions on the board? youtu.be/D3uvvA7dyoI?...
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View full thread@richardmoore.bsky.social might know of something.
- I quite like your hypothesis.
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- Pretty sure that believers think brains are solid, and what came out of JFK's head was liquid. QED the original hypothesis.
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- If what you're saying is true, how come RFK is so messed up?
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- Consider yourself refuted 😌
- Philosophy has jumped the shark. If anyone in the philosophy community wonders why their neuroscientist colleagues don’t pay them any mind, read this paper. bsky.app/profile/zoed...
- My paper 'Representations are (still) theoretical posits' is forthcoming in a special of Theoria on representations in cognitive science. Preprint available at philpapers.org/rec/DRARAS-2.
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- Hell no. Double down. This is top internet content 👻
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View full threadI see the appeal of a trade book, especially now that we're all incentivised to be more public facing. But it's not clear to me that academics think you need to choose between a trade book or a monograph. Your last book has a lot of crossover appeal, as does @susanamonso.com's.
- So are people no longer writing monographs, or has the idea of a monograph changed because people are now writing for a wider audience? For those of us doing interdisciplinary work, we often have to reach a wider academic audience - so accessibility becomes an end in itself.
- I don't think it's (a) really, because surely no one writes monographs for money. Also: (c) writing a monograph is hard. (I'm struggling to do it now.) Of course (c) isn't new, but the relative payoffs of books and articles don't line up well.
- I think that over the long term writing a book would do more for my career than four papers would. But the short term payoff of four papers is better. I'd be sorted for the REF, my productivity wouldn't stall, and it would probably be easier to fit the workload around teaching and admin.
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- The lyrics are subtle so the subtext is easily missed.
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- I will start saying it, even though it will hurt.
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- I have never said this and never would 🥹
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- I kind of think I'm winning here 🥹
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- I'm imagining the range of gestures that could accompany (3).
- House Speaker Micro Johnson says Congress will move to dismantle federal courts that rule against the Trump regime.
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- But are current Republican reps thinking people of good will? Is it something they could feasibly do?
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- He hated Sundays too.
- Sorry.
- I was a reviewer on this brilliant paper by @enactedmind.bsky.social. It came out yesterday in Proceedings B. At its core is a simple and elegant idea that may explain key differences in human and great ape social attention. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
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View full threadI'm writing up a commentary so my extended thoughts on the paper should be out towards the end of the month. In the meantime I wanted to flag its publication. It's a genuinely exciting and explanatorily powerful new idea.
- (Of course, there are no really new ideas. Here's an older paper I really like the defends some similar views, although I don't think Kliesch knew it when he first submitted his paper.) www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...
- Among other things, Kliesch's idea potentially explains why humans imitate when great apes emulate; and why unenculturated great apes tend to ignore human points.
- Kliesch packages his story in an enactivist framework which, frankly, I don't buy. But the central idea is ingenious and plausible, and isn't dependent upon Kliesch's other commitments to the nature of content.
- Curious young chimpanzees are mobile enough to explore their environment alone. In contrast, preverbal infants undergo an extensive period of restricted mobility, during which they learn about the world beyond them by attending to their caregivers’ responses to it.
- These different patterns of attention predispose humans and great apes to different kinds of learning, which persist into later life, with implications for behavioural differences in both communication and social learning.
- Kliesch argues that differences in the social attention of humans and great apes are a product of our postnatal social interactions. These result from humankind’s unique combination of early-developing cognitive skills and slow-developing motor skills.
- Really cool finding from @ejcvanleeuwen.bsky.social et al.
- #Bonobos react negatively to #inequity and are less willing to participate when they receive a worse reward than a partner. Study by Kia Radovanović, Daniel Haun, @ejcvanleeuwen.bsky.social & colleagues in @royalsocietypublishing.org. #fairness tinyurl.com/3u3w87pw & doi.org/10.1098/rspb...
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- People still care about the rule of law? That's so 2024.
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- If it were me, I think I'd be more inspired by someone who has lived her life on TV than by someone whose books I know but whose face I couldn't pick out of a lineup.
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- It's got to be more fun than heaven.
- I love it 🤷♂️
- The 2025 PAMBA prize has been awared to @giuliapalazzolo.bsky.social. The judges - @wileyprof.bsky.social, @kristinandrews.bsky.social, @susanamonso.com, @lgruen.bsky.social, and me - thought her a worthy winner. It was a very strong field, though.
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- Maybe it's time to broaden your horizons. There's plenty more people whose ideas you could have!
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- Why is 'animal minds' in inverted commas? Is that Leiter's way of announcing he's a sceptic?
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- omg
- I got an email telling me my ESTA Visa Waiver is expiring. Something about the logo seems off.
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- How do you reconcile that with academic freedom?
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- This comments projects a really weird vision of academic philosophy, as if we should somehow be divided optimally to handle a set workload of problems between us.
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- Wouldn't appointing them be every bit as political? Elections are one way of depriving rulers from placing their allies in key roles.
- The Guardian has published an Other Lives memorial on my father, Bob Moore. It was written by Charles West (@pseudo-isidore.bsky.social). I like it a lot. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...
- Last week I went to Rabat, where I gave a talk to the Centre for Collective Intelligence at UM6P. Since 2019 they've built an exciting department of cognitive scientists interested in questions about the nature of group wisdom, and how best to harness it for societal good. I had a great time.
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- This exchange feels very LinkedIn 😌
- The story behind this painting is fascinating, but also it looks uncannily like an Aphex Twin album cover.
- It was a really fun trip to a very exciting project. And it was great to see my former MPI colleagues Cathal O'Madagain and @rebeccakoomen.bsky.social.
- And also this Buthus maroccanus scorpion that Cathal and I found crossing the road by the Kasbah.
- The campus is beautiful, although it was a little deserted. UM6P has several campuses and the Rabat one is very new. Courses are being launched slowly. Since it's Ramadan, many of the current students were also away.
- The coastal city of Rabat is also great. It has beautiful Islamic architecture, with French colonial influences too. The first picture is part of the Kasbah de los Udayas in Rabat; the second is one of the gates to the City of Salé.
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- Like that seminar when you said Bob Dylan songs were "good".
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- Not just presentations. Also, and perhaps especially, abstracts. Sometimes I wonder how many conference marketing plans have been wrecked because senior academics wrote their abstracts half an hour before the deadline and were rejected in favour of ECRs who spent a week polishing theirs.
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- Feel better soon!
- Okay. In honor of this I want to hear your most inscrutable philosophical insult. The first one that springs to my mind is Quine's "has the form of a closed curve in space"
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- It's been on my to-read list for a long time, but Tim's comment makes me think I should prioritise Words and Things.
