The Architecture of Propositional Thought: From Cognitive Maps to Language and Reasoning

October 16-17, 2026

Dr. Gualtiero Piccinini, Florence G. Kline Professor of Philosophy and Curators' Distinguished Professor, is hosting an upcoming conference on the philosophy of mind, open to in-person and online participants. Speakers include leading scholars like Neil Burgess, University College London; Russell Epstein, University of Pennsylvania; Nina Kazanina, University of Geneva; Manuela Piazza, University of Trento; Charan Ranganath, UC Davis; and Nicholas Schuck, Universität Hamburg.

A growing body of work suggests that the hippocampus–entorhinal cortex system is not merely a spatial navigation system, but a general system for managing structured representations and sequences, supporting planning, memory, inference, imagination, and offline simulation. At the same time, complementary research highlights the role of frontoparietal control systems in maintaining, selecting, and flexibly manipulating these representations under task demands. Together, these findings motivate an architectural perspective in which navigation-like mapping and replay mechanisms interact with control, valuation, imagery, and language to support higher cognition.

Accordingly, the guiding idea behind this conference is to explore whether propositional thought itself—across linguistic and non-linguistic forms—can be understood as emerging from the reuse and extension of navigation-like architectures for offline control, simulation, and problem solving.

For to register and for more information about the conference, including conference schedule, check out the conference website here.