Professor Paweł Gładziejewski

Associate Professor
Research Areas
My research interests focus on areas where cognitive science intersects with more traditio-nal issues in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. For a long time, I have been engaged with questions about the nature of mental representations (internal models of reality con-structed by our brains) and have explored the philosophical implications of the idea that perception is a form of unconscious inference (so-called predictive processing, or Bayesian models of perception). Recently, my interests have increasingly shifted toward the cognitive mechanisms and philosophical significance of radically altered states of consciousness, par-ticularly those induced by psychedelic substances and meditative practice.
Key Publications
- Gładziejewski, P. (2025). From altered states to metaphysics: The epistemic status of psychedelic-induced metaphysical beliefs. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 16, 175–197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-023-00709-6
- Gładziejewski, P. (2023). The rational role of the perceptual sense of reality. Mind & Language, 38(4), 1021–1040. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12445
- Gładziejewski, P. (2016). Predictive coding and representationalism. Synthese, 193(4), 559–582. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0762-9
Full list of publications on: ORCID / Scholar
Projects and Grants
- Principal Investigator: NCN OPUS Project No. 2019/33/B/HS1/00677. Project title: Is the Predictive Brain Rational? Epistemology of Predictive Processing (2020–2023).
- Principal Investigator: NCN FUGA Project No. 2014/12/S/HS1/00343 (conducted at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Prof. Marcin Miłkowski). Project title: Cognition as Internal Modeling: The Role of Internal Models and Simulations in Philosophical and Cognitive Theories of Knowledge (2014–2017).
- Researcher: Emerging Field IDUB Projects (Nicolaus Copernicus University, 2021–2024): PeCoLa (Perception, Cognition, Language) and CD&We (Culture, Development & Wellbeing).
- Academic Supervisor: Diamond Grant (Ministry of Science and Higher Education, DI2018 010448) awarded to Wiktor Rorot (University of Warsaw). Project title: Mechanisms of Spatial Representation from the Perspective of Predictive Processing.
Academic Activities
- START Scholarship from the Foundation for Polish Science
- Scholarship for Outstanding Young Researchers from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education
- Author of the monograph “Explaining with Mental Representations: A Mechanistic Perspective” (2015), selected for publication under the Foundation for Polish Science’s Monographs competition
- Peer reviewer for academic journals, including: Australasian Journal of Philosophy, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Consciousness and Cognition, Erkennt-nis, European Journal for Philosophy of Science, Filozofia Nauki, Hybris, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Topics in Cognitive Science.
- Board Member, Polish Cognitive Science Society, since 2021
Contact
Email: pawel.gla[@]umk.pl
Office: Room 214, Institute of Psychology Nicolaus Copernicus University, ul. Gagarina 39, 87-100 Toruń, Poland