Tobias Sandoval

One goal of scientific inquiry is delineating between real kinds that are grounded in the world and permit of scientifically valuable generalizations, predictions, projections, and explanations and merely nominal or arbitrary categories. In psychology, cognitive science, and psychiatry, this project has been seen as particularly difficult, as many of the categories we employ are largely heterogenous, context sensitive, and socially malleable. Much of my current research attempts to reconcile these two facts.

Recently, I have been interested in how background conditions account for a wide range of variability in putative real kinds such as water, beryllium, tuberculosis, and E. coli and how these facts can be extended to account for the variability in psychological categories without threatening their status as real kinds.

• A paper on the role of background conditions on the variability of emotional kindsUnder Review

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  Philosophers and psychologists have raised concerns about the scientific use of emotion categories on the basis that they are too variable, heterogeneous, and context sensitive. In other words, variability appears to discount the status of emotion categories as real kinds with genuine scientific utility. In this paper, I will argue that the problem of emotional variability is insufficient to reject the existence of emotions that are real kinds. To do so, I show that emotional variability can be characterized similarly to variability in other scientific domains, whereby background conditions work in conjunction with a stable set of core properties to cause particular derivative properties. I characterize a notion of background condition with respect to real kinds, show how background conditions function across domains of chemistry, biology, and medical science, and employ this notion to argue that no relevant difference exists between emotional variability and variability in paradigmatic real kinds. More broadly, since background conditions have been relatively neglected in the literature on real kinds, this paper aims to serve as a starting point for further research on the relationship between real kinds and background conditions.

• A paper about cascading kinds in psychiatry

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  Philosophers of psychiatry have recently been advocating for an etiological approach to psychiatric classification, or one that identifies real psychiatric kinds. The standard view claims that psychiatric kinds are mechanistic property cluster (MPC) kinds, or clusters of properties (such as signs and symptoms) that reliably co-occur due to underlying causal mechanisms. Here, I will argue that we ought to expand our notion of psychiatric kinds beyond MPC kinds since causal mechanisms are not apt for characterizing all psychiatric kinds. Instead, I will introduce a cascading account of some psychiatric kinds, following Lauren Ross’ recent work on distinguishing between mechanisms and cascades. Using panic disorder as a case study, I show that some psychiatric kinds are recurring cascade kinds, or kinds that initiate with an onset cascade, sustain via a maintenance state, and periodically re-intensify through subsequent, flaring cascades. I then discuss upshots a cascade view of psychiatric kinds provides.

Even before Hume coined the term "mental geography," which he claimed was the "delineation of the distinct parts and powers of the mind" (EHU, 1.13), philosophers in the Early Modern period (and earlier) were interested in taxonomizing the mind into a variety of faculties and parts. For this reason, a large chunk of my research traces the historical movement of this classificatory project, focusing primarily on figures in Early Modern Philosophy. At the moment, I am particularly interested in Margaret Cavendish's work on this subject.

• 2025
  Going through the Motions: Memory and Remembrance in Cavendish

  British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 33(5), 1120–1142

• A paper on Cavendish's views of custom, habit, and self-knowledge

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  Margaret Cavendish defines 'remembrance', or remembering, as a voluntary repetition of a past motion. In a recent paper, I (Sandoval, 2025) argue that Cavendishian remembrances take a representational and nonrepresentational form. Representational remembrances occur when an animal creature voluntarily repeats past mental representations that were originally stored in memory via rational matter in sense perception and conception. These remembrances account for our contemporary notion of declarative memory, or the remembering of past experiences and facts. However, he additionally argues that Cavendish allows for remembrances that are nonrepresentational and not grounded in any storage of memories. Examples of nonrepresentational remembrance include repeated motions performed by custom or habit in a creature such as respirating, circulating, digesting, photosynthesis, etc., all of which stem directly from what Cavendish calls the creature's "self-knowledge" rather than stored memories. This appears to leave Cavendish with a very broad and undemanding account of remembrance. That is, in what sense should we understand the claim that circulation and digestion are kinds of remembrance?

  In this paper, I bridge the gap between representational and nonrepresentational remembrance in Cavendish. First, I develop an understanding of nonrepresentational remembrance as Cavendish's version of procedural memory, which not only encompasses actions such as riding a bike and typing on a keyboard but also actions such as respiration, circulation, photosynthesis, etc. A creature's customs and habits are learned through the process of memory (storage) and consistent remembrance (recall). I then connect this account to the growing literature on Cavendish's notion of creaturely self-knowledge. Cavendish claims that all creatures have a 'fixt' self-knowledge that is responsible for the creature's knowing how to perform actions that are natural for it. Theorists debate about how to understand this self-knowledge and, particularly, how creatures know which actions are natural. Using my account of procedural memory in Cavendish, I argue that often times creatures do not start with this knowledge but arrive at it through the process of learning via memory and remembrance. This explains Cavendish's claim that "what is natural is a constant Habit or Custome" as well as her insistence that what distinguishes things in nature are their customs and habits.

• A paper connecting Cavendish's broad view of memory and contemporary work on unconventional memory systems

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  In contemporary memory literature, philosophers and psychologists often argue that instances of our immune system reacting more efficiently to antigens it has previously encountered do not count as real memory. Two arguments against immune memory as real memory Colaço (2025) calls the "mere causal argument" and the "error argument." The mere causal argument claims that, while complete explanations of instances of conventional memory (e.g. episodic memory) require appeal to mental representations, instances of immune memory can be explained in causal terms alone. The error argument claims that, because immune memory can be explained without appeal to representations, it cannot be said to make errors similar to those exemplified in conventional memory.

  In this paper, I use these contemporary arguments against immune memory as genuine memory to develop and motivate analogous arguments against Cavendish's seemingly undemanding account of remembrance. I then consider ways in which Cavendish might successfully respond to these challenges using her views on occasional causation, disorder, mental representation, and creaturely self-knowledge. In doing so, I believe we arrive at a clearer idea about what remembrance is for Cavendish.