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320Eugenic traitsEugenics Archives. 2014.Certain traits, such as intelligence and mental deficiency, have been the focus of eugenic research and propaganda. This focus on such eugenic traits builds on three commonsense ideas: (1) People differ with respect to some of their traits, such as eye-colour and height; (2) Many traits run in families, being passed on from parents to their children; (3) Some traits are desirable, while others are undesirable. These three ideas about traits—their variability, heritability, and desirability—fed t…Read more
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147I, primate (review)Biology and Philosophy 17 (2): 285-299. 2002.This is a joint review of Shirley Strum and Linda Fedigan's Primate Encounters: Models of Science, Gender, and Society (Chicago, 2000) and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (Pantheon, 1999).
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377Two views of realizationPhilosophical Studies 104 (1): 1-31. 2001.This paper examines the standard view of realization operative incontemporary philosophy of mind, and proposes an alternative, generalperspective on realization. The standard view can be expressed, insummary form, as the conjunction of two theses, the sufficiency thesis andthe constitutivity thesis. Physicalists of both reductionist and anti-reductionist persuasions share a conception of realization wherebyrealizations are determinative of the properties they realize and physically constitutiv…Read more
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352Embodied cognitionStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent's body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing. In general, dominant views in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have considered the body as peripheral to understanding the nature of mind and cognition. Proponents of embodied cognitive science view this as a serious mistake. Sometimes the nature …Read more
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541The Drink You Have When You’re Not Having a DrinkMind and Language 23 (3). 2008.The Architecture of the Mind is itself built on foundations that deserve probing. In this brief commentary I focus on these foundations—Carruthers’ conception of modularity, his arguments for thinking that the mind is massively modular in structure, and his view of human cognitive architecture
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826The concept concept: The wayward path of cognitive science (review)Mind and Language 15 (2-3): 308-318. 2000.Critical discussion of Jerry Fodor's Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (1998).
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111Review of Derek Melser, The Act of Thinking (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2005.This is a book that challenges the current orthodoxy, both in the philosophy of mind and in the cognitive sciences, that thinking (construed broadly to include perceiving, imagining, remembering, etc.) is a mental process in the head. Such a view has been largely taken for granted since the demise of behaviorism in the 1960s, and it underpins both the representational and computational theories of mind, including their connectionist and dynamicist variants. While the orthodoxy has been rejected …Read more
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277Roles of science in eugenicsEugenics Archives. 2014.The relationship of eugenics to science is intricate and many-layered, starting with Sir Francis Galton’s original definition of eugenics as “the science of improving stock”. Eugenics was originally conceived of not only as a science by many of its proponents, but as a new, meliorative science emerging from findings of a range of nascent sciences, including anthropology and criminology in the late 19th-century, and genetics and psychiatry in the early 20th-century. Although during the years betw…Read more
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55Pointers, codes, and embodimentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (4): 757-758. 1997.This commentary raises three questions about the target article: What are pointers or deictic devices? Why insist on deictic codes for cognition rather than deixis simpliciter? And in what sense is cognition embodied, on this view?
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314Eugenics as wrongfulEugenics Archives. 2014.In a landmark legal case in 1996, eugenics survivor Leilani Muir successfully sued the province of Alberta for wrongful confinement and sterilization. The legal finding implied that Ms. Muir should never have been institutionalized at the Provincial Training School of Alberta as a “moron” and sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta. The trial itself revealed many unsettling features of the province’s practice of eugenics, raising questions about how a seemingly large number of p…Read more
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486IndividualismIn Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 256--287. 2002.An overview of individualism in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
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