Instrumentalism and Realism in Science

In 2021, Raja et al. published ‘The Markov Blanket Trick’, which argued that “the FEP [Free Energy Principle] is not the general principle it is claimed to be, and that active inference is not the all-encompassing process theory it is purported to be either.” This led to a flurry of responses from within the active inference community, with commentaries published by Friston, Ramstead and Albarracin & Pitliya, amongst others. In this episode of Active Inference Insights, we unpick this controversial paper with the help of its primary author, Vicente Raja, and Jeff Beck, a computational neuroscientist studying probabilistic reasoning in humans and animals.