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212Moral judgmentIn Sarah Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Routledge. 2009.Questions regarding the nature of moral judgment loom large in moral philosophy. Perhaps the most basic of these questions asks how, exactly, moral judgments and moral rules are to be defined; what features distinguish them from other sorts of rules and judgments? A related question concerns the extent to which emotion and reason guide moral judgment. Are moral judgments made mainly on the basis of reason, or are they primarily the products of emotion? As an example of the former view, Kant held…Read more
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235 The Recombinant DNA Debate: a Difficulty for Pascalian-Style WageringIn Eleonore Stump & Michael J. Murray (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 6--300. 1999.
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36Davidson's Semantic ProgramCanadian Journal of Philosophy 6 (2): 201-227. 1976.Donald Davidson did it. He did it slowly, deliberately, in more than a half dozen widely noted essays. What he did was to elaborate a program for the study of empirical semantics. Nor did he stop there. He went on to apply his program to some of the problems that have long bedeviled semantics: action sentences, indirect discourse and propositional attitudes. My goal in this paper is to assess Davidson's achievement. The first step is to assemble the program from the sketches and hints scattered …Read more
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Narrow content meets fat syntaxIn Barry M. Loewer (ed.), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.
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33Aaron Sloman, The Computer Revolution in Philosophy: Philosophy, Science and Models of Mind (review)Philosophical Review 90 (2): 300-307. 1981.
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340Moral psychology: Empirical approachesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Moral psychology investigates human functioning in moral contexts, and asks how these results may impact debate in ethical theory. This work is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on both the empirical resources of the human sciences and the conceptual resources of philosophical ethics. The present article discusses several topics that illustrate this type of inquiry: thought experiments, responsibility, character, egoism v . altruism, and moral disagreement
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On the ascription of contentIn Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought And Object: Essays On Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 153-206. 1982.
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1George Botterill and Peter Carruthers, The Philosophy Of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 310 pp., $60.00 , $22.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 392-394. 2002.
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167Reason and rationalityIn Ilkka Niiniluoto, Matti Sintonen & Jan Woleński (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology, Kluwer Academic. pp. 1-50. 2004.Over the past few decades, reasoning and rationality have been the focus of enormous interdisciplinary attention, attracting interest from philosophers, psychologists, economists, statisticians and anthropologists, among others. The widespread interest in the topic reflects the central status of reasoning in human affairs. But it also suggests that there are many different though related projects and tasks which need to be addressed if we are to attain a comprehensive understanding of reasoning.
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421Autonomous psychology and the belief/desire thesisThe Monist 61 (October): 573-591. 1978.A venerable view, still very much alive, holds that human action is to be explained at least in part in terms of beliefs and desires. Those who advocate the view expect that the psychological theory which explains human behavior will invoke the concepts of belief and desire in a substantive way. I will call this expectation the belief-desire thesis. Though there would surely be a quibble or a caveat here and there, the thesis would be endorsed by an exceptionally heterogeneous collection of psyc…Read more
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22Will the concepts of folk psychology find a place in cognitive science?In Scott M. Christensen & Dale R. Turner (eds.), Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind, L. Erlbaum. pp. 82--92. 1993.
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114From folk psychology to cognitive science: The case against beliefIn a Woodfield (ed.), The Structure of Content, Mit Press. pp. 418-421. 1982.
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466Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychologyIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. M. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 499-533. 1991.
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6The virtues, challenges and implications of connectionism (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1047-1058. 1994.
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54Review of Bishop & Tout, Epistemology and the psychology of human judgement (review)Mind 115 (458): 390-393. 2006.Fred Dretske began his review of my book, The Fragmentation of Reason, with the warning that it would ‘get the adrenalin pumping’ if you are a fan of episte- mology in the analytic tradition (Dretske 1992). Well, if my book got the adrenalin pumping, this one will make your blood boil. Bishop and Trout (B&T) adopt the label ‘Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE)’ for ‘a contin- gently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English- speaking epistemology for much of the past cen…Read more
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57On the Morality of Harm: A response to Sousa, Holbrook and PiazzaCognition 113 (1): 93-97. 2009.
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96The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive EvaluationPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (166): 98. 1992.
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170The odd couple: The compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychologyPhilosophy of Science 67 (1): 133-154. 2000.Evolutionary psychology and social constructionism are widely regarded as fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to the social sciences. Focusing on the study of the emotions, we argue that this appearance is mistaken. Much of what appears to be an empirical disagreement between evolutionary psychologists and social constructionists over the universality or locality of emotional phenomena is actually generated by an implicit philosophical dispute resulting from the adoption of different theorie…Read more
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781Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1): 151-178. 2012.Intuitions play an important role in contemporary epistemology. Over the last decade, however, experimental philosophers have published a number of studies suggesting that epistemic intuitions may vary in ways that challenge the widespread reliance on intuitions in epistemology. In a recent paper, Jennifer Nagel offers a pair of arguments aimed at showing that epistemic intuitions do not, in fact, vary in problematic ways. One of these arguments relies on a number of claims defended by appeal to…Read more
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50The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that whenever the flight to reference strategy is invoked, there is a crucial step that is left undefended, an…Read more
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30Some questions from the not-so-hostile worldAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3). 2004.Kim Sterelny has written a terrific book! It is brimming over with important and original ideas, rich in empirical detail, and written in a lucid and engaging style that makes it accessible to readers with a wide variety of backgrounds. The book does not fit comfortably into familiar categories since it makes significant contributions to philosophy, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Sterelny addresses cutting edge issues in each of these disciplines with impressive sophi…Read more
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18Can Popperians learn to talk?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (2): 157-164. 1981.In several recent publications (Sampson [1978], [1980a]) Geoffrey Sampson has argued that an essentially Popperian language acquisition device could learn language much as a human child does. The device Sampson envisions would freely (or perhaps randomly) generate hypotheses about the grammar the child seeks to learn, and test these hypotheses against the data available to the child. If the data are incompatible with an hypothesis, the hypothesis is rejected and another one tried. If any hypothe…Read more
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107Justification and the psychology of human reasoningPhilosophy of Science 47 (2): 188-202. 1980.This essay grows out of the conviction that recent work by psychologists studying human reasoning has important implications for a broad range of philosophical issues. To illustrate our thesis we focus on Nelson Goodman's elegant and influential attempt to "dissolve" the problem of induction. In the first section of the paper we sketch Goodman's account of what it is for a rule of inference to be justified. We then marshal empirical evidence indicating that, on Goodman's account of justification…Read more
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29The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2006.This book is the second of a three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The book is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses such question as: to what extent are mature cognitive capacities a reflection of particular cultures and to what extent are they a product of innate elements? How do innate elements interact with culture to achieve mature cognitive capacities? How do minds generate and shape cultures? How are cultures processed by minds?Concerned with the fundamental architecture of the…Read more
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5Relativism, rationality, and the limits of intentional ascriptionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (3): 211. 1984.
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119Between Chomskian rationalism and Popperian empiricismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 30 (4): 329-47. 1979.Noam Chomsky's rationalist account of the human mind has won many adherents and attracted many critics. What has been little noticed on either side of the debate is that Chomsky's rationalism is best viewed as a pair of quite distinct doctrines about the mental mechanisms responsible for language acquisition. One of these doctrines, the one I will call rigid rationalism, entails the other, which I call anti-empiricism, but the entailment is not mutual. Rigid rationalism is much the stronger of t…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |