Philosopher Awarded £977K Grant for “Mindreading”
Philosopher Richard Moore, who will be moving to Warwick University from The Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin next year, has been awarded a £977,000 (roughly $1,200,000) grant from the UK government to fund a project on “mindreading.”
“Mindreading” here refers to our cognitive capacities related to predicting the behavior of others and attributing various mental states to them. According to Dr. Moore, the project “will conduct empirical and philosophical research on the developmental relationship between mindreading in communication in ontogeny, phylogeny, and in human history”
The funding was in the form of a UK Research and Industry Future Leaders Fellowship from UK Research and Innovation,
Those interested in the project and positions it may fund can follow Dr. Moore on Twitter at @CommunicatMind.
Thanks for posting this Justin.
Since I’m the only philosopher to have got this grant so far, I’ve also been asked by the head of the UKRI humanities panel to encourage others to apply for it. While there is a clear skew towards people in the natural and medical sciences among the current fellowship holders, the fellowship is open to and supportive of applications from the humanities and social sciences.
Candidate projects should be able to contribute something to both UK academia and have some non-academic payoff. They should also exist between traditional disciplinary boundaries. The grant is open to all ‘young’ researchers – where this seems to be defined only very loosely and includes anyone who hasn’t already held an equivalent grant. (In my cohort someone has a PhD from 2006, so there doesn’t seem to be a restrictive limit there.)
Since the body of the grant application is not much longer than ten pages and the success rate is currently 19% it’s well worth applying for this. The application is initially for a four year-project (worth up to £1.2m), but that can be extended for a further three years if satisfactory progress is made. The next pre-registration deadline is October 8th, but that requires only a short description of the project’s goals and a letter of departmental support.
I’ll be happy to walk anyone through the application process.