Faculty

Linda Palmer

Research Scientist Faculty

Department of Philosophy
135 Baker Hall

412.268.8046

lpalmer@cmu.edu

Linda Palmer received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine, and has been a department member since 2004. She is a member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition , a joint project of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University; her CNBC faculty page may be seen here.

Research Interests

My specialization is unusual: I work in two areas, Kantian philosophy and neuroscience.

Philosophy

The philosophical side of my project centers on Immanuel Kant’s theory of empirical cognition, particularly as further developed in his third and final Critique, the Critique of Judgment. This work contains remarkable developments of his theory of how human beings use and create systems of knowledge. Much of my work is addressed to this account, its relationship to the problem of induction in the context of his discussions of empirical natural science, and his discussions of the relationship between cognitive and aesthetic judgment. While Kant's Critique of Pure Reason had famously proposed the existence of “a priori conditions” of human cognition (attempting to address such questions as the applicability of mathematics to the natural world and the justification of the concept of “cause” in the face of Hume’s skepticism about induction), in the Critique of Judgment Kant addresses the a posteriori, empirical side of cognition: where do empirical concepts and natural laws come from, and what justifies our use of them? He proposes an entirely novel approach to these question with his "principle of reflective judgment".
 
Neuroscience

The human ability to create and use general concepts rests, I take it, on a more fundamental ability: to detect and encode regularities in the environment. This requires determining which regularities to encode, of all the many possibilities offered by the environment, and this can be a delicate problem. In so-called supervised learning paradigms a training signal - reward or punishment for “correct” responses - is provided, while unsupervised learning involves no explicit training. My current experiments investigate the neuronal substrates of animal learning, using an unsupervised paradigm: spontaneous exploration of a novel environment, a behavior typical of mammalian species from rodents to human beings. If detection and encoding of regularities is both an evolutionary precursor of, and a prerequisite for, the higher-level conceptual subsumption that is characteristic of human cognition, then investigating its neuronal bases - along with other interdisciplinary work at both philosophical and empirical levels - can contribute to a better understanding of human cognition and its conditions.

Selected Publications

All PDFs are intended for personal academic use only.

• Palmer, L.C. (2008). “A Universality Not Based on Concepts: Kant’s Key to the Critique of Taste”, Kantian Review 13(1). [PDF]


• Palmer, L.C. (2008). “Kant and the Brain: A New Empirical Hypothesis”,  General Review of Psychology, forthcoming. [PDF (extended version)]


• Fedulov, V, Rex C.S., Simmons D.A., Palmer L.C., Gall C.M., Lynch G. (2007). “Evidence that long-term potentiation occurs within individual hippocampal synapses during learning”, Journal of Neuroscience 27(30): 8031-9. [PDF]


• Lynch G., Colgin L, and Palmer, L.C. (2003). “Spandrels of the night?” In: Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsiderations, eds. E.F. Pace-Schott, M. Solms, M. Blagrove and S. Harnad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 178. [PDF]


• Palmer L.C. (2001). “The Epistemological Norm in Taste: The Need for a New Principle”,  Kant und die Berliner Aufklärung: Akten des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses vol 3, Berlin, pp. 434-442. [PDF]


• Palmer L.C., Hess U.S., Larson J., Rogers G.A., Gall C.M, Lynch G. (1997). “Comparison of the effects of an ampakine with those of methamphetamine on aggregate neuronal activity in cortex vs. striatum”, Molecular Brain Research 46, 127-135. [PDF]


• Palmer, L.C. (1994). “Beauty and the Possibility of Coherent Experience”,  Conceptus vol. 70, 97-148. [PDF]
  

Presentations

• Commentary on Lara Ostaric’s “Reflective Judgment's Principle of Nature's Purposiveness and Its 'Subjective' and 'Merely Subjective' Applications”. American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division Meeting, Pasadena, CA, March 22, 2008.


• “Differential activation of hippocampal subfields in an unsupervised learning task.” Palmer, L.C., Jarrett, K., Gall, C.M., Lynch G.L. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, November 2007. [PDF]


• “Aesthetics and Cognition: Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and the Brain.” Conference title: From the Brain to Human Culture: Intersections between the Humanities and Neuroscience, Bucknell University, Lewisburg PA, April 20-21, 2007.


• “An Additional Condition of Cognition.” Invited talk, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana PA, Feb 9 2007.


• “Kantian ‘Common Sense’: A Testable Hypothesis?” Northwest Philosophy Conference, University of Portland, Portland, Oregon, November 4-5, 2006.


• “Common and differential effects of acute antidepressants on regional patterns of neuronal activity.” Hess U.S., Palmer L.C., Nichols J., Staubli U., Lynch G. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 2003.


• Commentary on Michelle Grier’s “Kant and the Aesthetics of the Sublime”. American Society for Aesthetics, Pacific Division Meeting, Asilomar, CA, March 28, 2002.


• “3-D representation of spatio-temporal patterns of rhythmic activity.” Palmer L.C., Cotman C.A, Brucher F.A, Staubli U., Lynch G., Colgin L.L. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, November 2001.


• “Superordinate States of the Cortical Telencephalon.” Palmer, L.C. and Lynch, G. Conference on Decentralization, Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Irvine, February 1999.


• “Positive modulators of AMPA receptors increase neuronal activity in neocortex relative to striatum: an adjunct treatment for schizophrenia?” Palmer L.C., Hess U.S, Larson J., Gall C.M., Lynch G. Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, November 1996. [PDF]

Patent

G. Lynch, R. Granger, C. Gall, L. Palmer. Assays for Determination of Neuronal Activity in Brain Tissue. U.S. Patent No. 5,998,139; issued: December 17, 1999.

Teaching

Undergraduate
80-115: Freshman Seminar on Consciousness
80-251: Modern Philosophy
80-252: Kant
80-258: Leibniz, Locke, and Hume

Graduate
80-256: Seminar on Kant's Critique of Judgment

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