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91Why Don't Concepts Constitute a Natural Kind?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3). 2010.Machery argues that concepts do not constitute a natural kind. We argue that this is a mistake. When appropriately construed, his discussion in fact bolsters the claim that concepts are a natural kind
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90Restricted nominalism about number and its problemsSynthese 203 (5): 1-23. 2024.Hofweber (Ontology and the ambitions of metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2016) argues for a thesis he calls “internalism” with respect to natural number discourse: no expressions purporting to refer to natural numbers in fact refer, and no apparent quantification over natural numbers actually involves quantification over natural numbers as objects. He argues that while internalism leaves open the question of whether other kinds of abstracta exist, it precludes the existence of natural numbe…Read more
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88Neologicism, Frege's Constraint, and the Frege‐Heck ConditionNoûs 54 (1): 54-77. 2018.One of the more distinctive features of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism about arithmetic is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint – roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. In particular, they maintain that, if adopted, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation – Hume’s Principle – and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind-Peano axioms. In what foll…Read more
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79The Magical Number Two, Plus or Minus: Dual Process Theory as a Theory of Cognitive KindsIn Keith Frankish & Jonathan St B. T. Evans (eds.), In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 129--146. 2009.
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78Review. Species of mind: The philosophy and biology of cognitive ethology. C Allen, M BekoffBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2): 375-380. 2000.
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65Cardinals, Ordinals, and the Prospects for a Fregean FoundationRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82 77-107. 2018.There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is ‘more basic’ or ‘more fund…Read more
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54Is innateness a confused notion?In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press On Demand. 2005.
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43Hale’s argument from transitive countingSynthese 198 (3): 1905-1933. 2019.A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. According to these neologicists, if legitimate, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation—Hume’s Principle—and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind–Peano axioms. In this paper, we consider a recent argument for legitimat…Read more
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40Review of Colin Allen and Marc Bekoff: Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2): 375-380. 2000.
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40Computability, Notation, and de re Knowledge of NumbersPhilosophies 7 (1): 20. 2022.Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of _which number_ is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of _notation_. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship b…Read more
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39The spatial reorientation data do not support the thesis that language is the medium of cross-modular thoughtBehavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6): 697-698. 2002.A central claim of the target article is that language is the medium of domain-general, cross-modular thought; and according to Carruthers, the main, direct evidence for this thesis comes from a series of fascinating studies on spatial reorientation. I argue that the these studies, in fact, provide us with no reason whatsoever to accept this cognitive conception of language.
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34Analytic Pragmatism and Universal LX VocabularyPhilosophia 45 (4): 1-25. 2017.In his recent John Locke Lectures – published as Between Saying and Doing – Brandom extends and refines his views on the nature of language and philosophy by developing a position that he calls Analytic Pragmatism. Although Brandom’s project bears on an extraordinarily rich array of different philosophical issues, we focus here on the contention that certain vocabularies have a privileged status within our linguistic practices, and that when adequately understood, the practices in which these vo…Read more
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29Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian ModulesIn Kepa Korta, Ernest Sosa & Xabier Arrazola (eds.), Cognition, Agency and Rationality, Springer Verlag. pp. 21-62. 1999.There is a venerable philosophical tradition that views human beings as intrinsically rational, though even the most ardent defender of this view would admit that under certain circumstances people’s decisions and thought processes can be very irrational indeed. When people are extremely tired, or drunk, or in the grip of rage, they sometimes reason and act in ways that no account of rationality would condone. About thirty years ago, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and a number of other psychologi…Read more
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25Unwarranted philosophical assumptions in research on ANSBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and critically evaluate one core assumption: the identity thesis.
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22Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Science (edited book)Bloomsbury. 2019.This volume gathers together leading philosophers of science and cognitive scientists from around the world to provide one of the first book-length studies of this important and emerging field. Specific topics considered include learning and the nature of scientific knowledge, the cognitive consequences of exposure to explanations, climate change, and mechanistic reasoning and abstraction. Chapters explore how experimental methods can be applied to questions about the nature of science and show …Read more
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20What Brains Won’t Tell Us About the Mind: A Critique of the Neurobiological Argument Against Representational NativismMind and Language 13 (4): 548-570. 2002.In their recent and influential book Rethinking Innateness, Jeffrey Elman and his co‐authors argue that evidence from neurobiology provides us with grounds to reject representational nativism (RN). I argue that Elman et al.’s argument fails because it makes a series of unwarranted assumptions about RN and about the extent to which neurobiological data constrain claims about the innateness of mental rep‐resentations. Moreover, I briefly discuss how we ought to understand RN and argue that on two …Read more
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13The Concept of Innateness as an Object of Empirical EnquiryIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.The concept of innateness has historically exerted an influence in many regions of biology and it continues to play a significant role in cognitive science especially, developmental psychology and linguistics. This chapter provides an overview of some recent efforts to empirically study the innateness concept, both as deployed in folk contexts and among scientists. It considers whether this research really bolsters the standard criticism. The chapter describes research by Paul Griffiths and his …Read more
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4Could Emotion Development Really Be the Acquisition of Emotion Concepts?Developmental Psychology 55 (9): 2015-2019. 2019.Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appe…Read more
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1Massively Modular Minds: The Nature, Plausibility and Philosophical Implications of Evolutionary PsychologyDissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1998.This dissertation focuses on the massive modularity hypothesis defended by evolutionary psychologists---the hypothesis that the human mind is composed largely or perhaps even entirely of special purpose information processing organs or "modulees" that have been shaped by natural selection to handle the sorts of recurrent information processing problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears. ;In discussing MMH, I have three central goals. First, I aim to clarify the hypothesis and develop…Read more
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NativismIn Sarah Robins, John Francis Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Routledge. 2009.
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The magical number two, plus or minus: Dual-process theory as a theory of cognitive kindsIn Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond. 2009.ARRAY
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PsychologyIn Stathis Psillos & Martin Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, . 2008.
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PaulThagardMind: Introduction to Cognitive Science1996MIT Press0 262 20106 2Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 156. 1997.
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Is the human mind massively modular?In Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.
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Massive modularityIn E. Margolis, R. Samuels & S. Stich (eds.), Oxford handbook of philosophy of cognitive science, Oxford University Press. 2012.
Columbus, Ohio, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |