Stephen Mann

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
e-mail: stephen_mann@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de
ORCiD GoogleScholar GitHub
PhilPeople Twitter Personal website
About me
Curriculum Vitae
Publications
About me

I'm a philosopher of science studying the role of information and representation in cognitive science and biology. Currently I am investigating active inference (a modelling framework) and the free energy principle (a related collection of hypotheses) which have been proposed to explain many features of cognitive and biological systems.
Curriculum Vitae
since 2021 | Guest researcher at DLCE |
2016-2020 | PhD in philosophy at the Australian National University, Canberra: "Communication and cooperation in evolutionary biology". Awarded December 2020 |
2013-2015 | PhD in philosophy at King's College, London: withdrawn December 2015 as part of transfer to ANU |
2010-2013 | Software developer at Weaveability Ltd, Manchester, UK |
2006-2010 | M.Sci in Mathematics and Philosophy, University of Bristol, UK. Equivalent to 3 year Bachelors + 1 year Masters |
My full CV is available for download here.
Publications
2023
Turner, C. R., Mann, S. F., Spike, M., Magrath, R. D., & Sterelny, K. (2023). Joint evolution of traits for social learning. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 77: 47. |
2022
Mann, S. F., & Pain, R. (2022). Teleosemantics and the hard problem of content. Philosophical Psychology, 35(1), 22-46. |
|
Mann, S. F., & Pain, R. A. (2022). Teleosemantics and the free energy principle. Biology and Philosophy, 37: 34. |
|
Mann, S. F., Pain, R., & Kirchhoff, M. D. (2022). Free energy: a user’s guide. Biology & Philosophy, 37(4): 33. |
2020
Mann, S. F. (2020). Communication and cooperation in evolutionary biology. PhD Thesis, The Australian National University, Canberra. |
|
Mann, S. F. (2020). Consequences of a functional account of information. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(3), 669-687. |
|
Roberts, S. G., Killin, A., Deb, A., Sheard, C., Greenhill, S. J., Sinnemäki, K., Segovia-Martín, J., Nölle, J., Berdicevskis, A., Humphreys-Balkwill, A., Little, H., Opie, C., Jacques, G., Bromham, L., Tinits, P., Ross, R. M., Lee, S., Gasser, E., Calladine, J., Spike, M., Mann, S. F., Shcherbakova, O., Singer, R., Zhang, S., Benítez-Burraco, A., Kliesch, C., Thomas-Colquhoun, E., Skirgard, H., Tamariz, M., Passmore, S., Pellard, T., & Jordan, F. (2020). CHIELD: The causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database. Journal of Language Evolution, 5(2), 101-120. |
2018
Mann, S. F., & Pfeifer, J. (2018). [Book review] Studying animal languages without translation: An insight from Ants / by Zhanna Reznikova. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 93(1), 38-38. |
|
Mann, S. F. (2018). Attribution of information in animal interaction. Biological Theory, 13(3), 164-179. |