•  48
    Taxonomy: Psychological and biological (review)
    Biology and Philosophy 12 (2): 275-280. 1997.
  •  782
    Natural kinds as nodes in causal networks
    Synthese 195 (4): 1379-1396. 2018.
    In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects in recurrent causal processe…Read more
  •  667
    Interactive kinds
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61 (2): 335-360. 2010.
    This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘interactive kinds’ first identified by Ian Hacking. An interactive kind is one that is created or significantly modified once a concept of it has been formulated and acted upon in certain ways. Interactive kinds may also ‘loop back’ to influence our concepts and classifications. According to Hacking, interactive kinds are found exclusively in the human domain. After providing a general account of interactive kinds and outlining their philosophical significa…Read more
  •  245
    Carving nature at the joints
    Philosophy of Science 60 (1): 100-113. 1993.
    This paper discusses a philosophical issue in taxonomy. At least one philosopher has suggested thc taxonomic principle that scientific kinds are disjoint. An opposing position is dcfcndcd here by marshalling examples of nondisjoint categories which belong to different, cocxisting classification schcmcs. This dcnial of thc disjoinmcss principle can bc recast as thc claim that scientific classification is "int<-:rcst—rclativc". But why would anyone have held that scientific categories arc disjoint…Read more
  •  165
    The Arab Street: Tracking a Political Metaphor
    Middle East Journal 63 (1): 11-29. 2009.
    Understanding Arab public opinion is central to the search for sustainable po- litical solutions in the Middle East. The way Westerners think about Arab public opinion may be affected by how it is referred to in their news media. Here, we show that Arab public opinion is rarely referred to as such in the US media. Instead, it is usually referred to as the Arab street, a metaphor that casts Arab public opinion as irrational and volatile. We trace the origins of this metaphor to similar expression…Read more
  •  598
    Nature and nurture in cognition
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (2): 251-272. 2002.
    This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky. The "triggering model" of innateness, first made explicit by Stich ([1975]), explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific popula…Read more
  •  666
    Innateness as a natural cognitive kind
    Philosophical Psychology 29 (3): 319-333. 2016.
    Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innaten…Read more
  •  431
    Averroes’s Method of Re-Interpretation
    International Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2): 175-185. 1998.
    One contentious issue in contemporary interpretations of medieval Islamic philosophy is the degree of esotericism espoused by its proponents, and therefore the degree of interpretive effort required by its modem readers to ascertain the author's real beliefs. One philosopher who has been accused of esotericism is Averroes (Ibn Rushd), particularly because he is quite explicit in distinguishing among the different types of reasoning appropriate to different classes of people: philosophers, theolo…Read more
  •  303
    The Pitfalls of Microphysical Realism
    Philosophy of Science 78 (5): 1156-1164. 2011.
    Microphysical realism is the position that the only real entities and properties are found at the most fundamental level of nature. In this article, I challenge microphysical realism concerning properties and natural kinds. One argument for microphysical realism about entities, the “nothing-but argument,” does not apply to properties and kinds. Another argument, the “causal exclusion argument,” cannot be sustained in light of modern physics. Moreover, this argument leads to an objection against…Read more
  •  632
    In this paper, I argue that Edward Said’s central thesis in Orientalism has a direct explanatory role to play in our understanding of the work produced in at least one area of scholarship about the Arab and Islamic worlds, namely Arab-Islamic philosophy from the classical or medieval period. Moreover, I claim that it continues to play this role not only for scholarship produced in the West by Western scholars but also within the Arab world itself. After recalling some traditional varieties of Or…Read more
  •  93
    Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (review)
    with Alicia Juarrero
    Philosophical Review 110 (3): 469. 2001.
    Action theory has given rise to some perplexing puzzles in the past half century. The most prominent one can be summarized as follows: What distinguishes intentional from unintentional acts? Thanks to the ingenuity of philosophers and their thought experiments, we know better than to assume that the difference lies in the mere presence of an intention, or in its causal efficacy in generating the action. The intention might be present and may also cause the intended behavior, yet the behavior may…Read more
  •  363
    Two concepts of concept
    Mind and Language 10 (4): 402-22. 1995.
    Two main theories of concepts have emerged in the recent psychological literature: the Prototype Theory (which considers concepts to be self-contained lists of features) and the Theory Theory (which conceives of them as being embedded within larger theoretical networks). Experiments supporting the first theory usually differ substantially from those supporting the second, which suggests that these the· ories may be operating at different levels of explanation and dealing with different entities.…Read more
  •  91
    The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. …Read more
  •  254
    Innateness and Domain Specificity
    Philosophical Studies 105 (2): 191-210. 2001.
    There is a widespread assumption in cognitive science that there is anintrinsic link between the phenomena of innateness and domain specificity. Many authors seem to hold that given the properties of these two phenomena, it follows that innate mental states are domain-specific, or that domain-specific states are innate. My aim in this paper is to argue that there are no convincing grounds for asserting either claim. After introducing the notions of innateness and domain specificity, I consider s…Read more
  •  611
    Al-fārābi on the democratic city
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (3). 2003.
    This essay will explore some of al-Farabi’s paradoxical remarks on the nature and status of the democratic city (al-madinah al-jama'iyyah). In describing this type of non-virtuous city, Farabi departs significantly from Plato, according the democratic city a superior standing and casting it in a more positive light. Even though at one point Farabi follows Plato in considering the timocratic city to be the best of the imperfect cities, at another point he implies that the democratic city occupies…Read more
  •  256
    The perils of a science of intentional change
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (4): 427-428. 2014.
    The attempt to construct an applied science of social change raises certain concerns, both theoretical and ethical. The theoretical concerns relate to the feasibility of predicting human behavior with sufficient reliability to ground a science that aspires to the management of social processes. The ethical concerns relate to the moral hazards involved in the modification of human social arrangements, given the unreliability of predicting human action.
  •  352
    Should we eliminate the innate? Reply to Griffiths and Machery
    Philosophical Psychology 22 (4). 2009.
    Griffiths and Machery (2008) have argued that innateness is a folk notion that obstructs inquiry and has no place in contemporary science. They support their view by criticizing the canalization account of innateness (Ariew, 1999, 2006). In response, I argue that the criticisms they raise for the canalization account can be avoided by another recent account of innateness, the triggering account, which provides an analysis of the concept as it applies to cognitive capacities (Khalidi, 2002, 2007;…Read more
  •  1
    Meaning-Change and Theory-Change
    Dissertation, Columbia University. 1991.
    Some philosophers and historians of science have suggested that the meanings of scientific terms change in the course of the history of science in such a way that the comparison of successive theories becomes impossible. This claim of "incommensurability", usually associated with Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, has attracted attention for its relativist and anti-rationalist implications. It would seem to make the choice between two theories into a random affair, not one of direct comparison. ;T…Read more
  •  611
    How Scientific Is Scientific Essentialism?
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 40 (1): 85-101. 2009.
    Scientific essentialism holds that: (1) each scientific kind is associated with the same set of properties in every possible world; and (2) every individual member of a scientific kind belongs to that kind in every possible world in which it exists. Recently, Ellis (Scientific essentialism, 2001 ; The philosophy of nature 2002 ) has provided the most sustained defense of scientific essentialism, though he does not clearly distinguish these two claims. In this paper, I argue that both claims face…Read more
  •  443
    The inherent bias in positing an inherence heuristic
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (5): 493-494. 2014.
    There are two problems with Cimpian &amp; Salomon’s (C&amp;S’s) claim that an innate inherence heuristic is part of our cognitive makeup. First, some of their examples of inherent features do not seem to accord with the authors’ own definition of inherence. Second, rather than posit an inherence heuristic to explain why humans rely more heavily on inherent features, it may be more parsimonious to do so on the basis of aspects of the world itself and our relationship to it.