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2The aim of this paper is to demonstrate a prima facie tension between our commonsense conception of ourselves as thinkers and the connectionist programme for modelling cognitive processes. The language of thought hypothesis plays a pivotal role. The connectionist paradigm is opposed to the language of thought; and there is an argument for the language of thought that draws on features of the commonsense scheme of thoughts, concepts, and inference. Most of the paper (Sections 3-7) is taken up wit…Read more
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28Jerrold J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and its Philosophical Import (review)Philosophical Review 83 (2): 259-263. 1974.
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221Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruismBiology and Philosophy 22 (2): 267-281. 2007.Sober and Wilson have propose a cluster of arguments for the conclusion that “natural selection is unlikely to have given us purely egoistic motives” and thus that psychological altruism is true. I maintain that none of these arguments is convincing. However, the most powerful of their arguments raises deep issues about what egoists and altruists are claiming and about the assumptions they make concerning the cognitive architecture underlying human motivation.
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12List of Publications by Stephen StichIn David Papineau (ed.), Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 65--17. 2009.
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60The role of psychology in the study of cultureBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 355-355. 2006.Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena
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7Introduction: the idea of innatenessIn Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 1-22. 1975.
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Reply to Clark and Smolensky: Do Connectionist Minds Have Beliefs?In Cynthia MacDonald & Graham MacDonald (eds.), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 2. 1991.
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99Is Morality an Elegant Machine or a Kludge?Journal of Cognition and Culture 6 (1-2): 181-189. 2006.In a passage in A Theory of Justice, which has become increasingly influential in recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral phi- losophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the first stage of moral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attempt to describe our moral capacity – the capacity which underlies “the poten- tially infinite number and variety of [moral] judgments we are prepared..
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14The Cognitive Basis of Science (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scienti…Read more
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22Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 228-236. 2008.No Abstract
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233Could man be an irrational animal?Synthese 64 (1): 115-35. 1985.1. When we attribute beliefs, desires, and other states of common sense psychology to a person, or for that matter to an animal or an artifact, we are assuming or presupposing that the person or object can be treated as an intentional system. 2. An intentional system is one which is rational through and through; its beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography…. Its desires are those it ought to have, given its biological needs and t…Read more
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440Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversitySynthese 74 (3): 391-413. 1988.
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65Building belief: Some queries about representation, indication, and functionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (4): 801-806. 1990.
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Genetic engineeringIn Tom Regan & Donald VanDeVeer (eds.), And justice for all: new introductory essays in ethics and public policy, Rowman & Littlefield. 1982.
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98Plato's method meets cognitive scienceFree Inquiry 21 (2): 36-38. 2001.Normative questions – particularly questions about what we should believe and how we should behave – have always been high on the agenda for philosophers, and over the centuries there has been no shortage of answers proposed. But this abundance of answers raises yet another fundamental philosophical question: How should we evaluate the proposed answers; how can we determine whether an answer to a normative question is a good one? The best known and most widely used method for evaluating answers …Read more
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72Empiricism, innateness, and linguistic universalsPhilosophical Studies 33 (3): 273-286. 1978.For the last decade and more Noam Chomsky has been elaborating a skein of doctrines about language learning, linguistic universals, Empiricism and innate cognitive mechanisms. My aim in this paper is to pull apart some of the claims that Chomsky often defends collectively. In particular, I want to dissect out some contentions about the existence of linguistic universals. I shall argue that these claims, while they may be true, are logically independent from a cluster of claims Chomsky makes abou…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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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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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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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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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.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |