The Werner Callebaut Prize was established in 2015, and is awarded every two years. It is intended to advance the careers of recent graduates working at the intersection of the fields represented by ISHPSSB by recognizing the best manuscript utilizing an interdisciplinary approach based on a presentation at one of the two previous ISH meetings by someone who was, at the time of presentation, a graduate student. The prize is named in honor of Werner Callebaut, whose untimely death in 2014 was mourned by the philosophy of biology community worldwide and particularly by ISH members, and who made considerable contributions to the promotion of constructive dialogue and reciprocal respect in philosophical and scientific work, hence making a prize focused on interdisciplinarity most appropriate.
This year’s Werner Callebaut Prize was awarded to Sidney Carls-Diamante for her paper “Make up your mind: Octopus cognition and hybrid explanations”, which was presented at the 2017 ISHPSSB meeting in São Paulo. A revised version of the paper was published online in the journal Synthese in January 2019. Dr. Carls-Diamante completed her PhD at the University of Auckland in New Zealand* in 2018, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Klosterneuburg near Vienna.
Drawing on a detailed analysis of neuroscientific research on octopus movement and cognition, the paper examines its implications for philosophical issues of representation and cognition. Fetching behavior in the octopus, it turns out, cannot be completely accounted for by a representational model of cognition. Rather, what we see at work is a non-overlapping use of representational and non-representational explanatory frameworks. Building on this analysis, Carls-Diamante argues for the need of (or at least the openness to) pluralistic or hybrid explanations in cognitive science.
The committee agreed that the paper brought together animal research, cognitive science research, and philosophy of science in a rigorous and persuasive way. The scientifically detailed description of the fetching behavior in the octopus — a fascinating topic in its own right — was put to the service of an important argument for both philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of science, thus convincingly satisfying the criteria for the Callebaut prize.
*Correction: By mistake, it was stated previously here that Sidney Carls-Diamante had completed her PhD at the Konrad Lorenz Institute.
Soraya de Chadarevian, Chair of the Marjorie Grene and Werner Callebaut Prize Committee 2017–2019