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62Dissonant notes on the theory of referenceNoûs 4 (4): 385-397. 1970.I will contend that Quine's optimism about the theory of reference is incompatible with his pessimism about the theory of meaning. For, on Quine's own account, the problems that discourage him about the theory of meaning beset the theory of reference as well. And of the three arguments Quine advances to show the theory of reference better off than the theory of meaning, two are unsound and the third is in conflict with his further views on reference.
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62You can't have it both ways: What is the relation between morality and fairness?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1). 2013.Baumard and colleagues put forward a new hypothesis about the nature and evolution of fairness. In this commentary, we discuss the relation between morality and their views about fairness
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60Naturalizing Epistemology: Quine, Simon and the Prospects for PragmatismRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 34 1-17. 1993.In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about the prospects of developing a ‘naturalized epistemology’, though different authors tend to interpret this label in quite different ways. One goal of this paper is to sketch three projects that might lay claim to the ‘naturalized epistemology’ label, and to argue that they are not all equally attractive. Indeed, I'll maintain that the first of the three—the one I'll attribute to Quine—is simply incoherent. There is no way we could ge…Read more
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60The 20th century has been a tumultuous time in psychology – a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strategies prevailing …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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55The 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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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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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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49Causal holism and commonsense psychology: A reply to O'BrienPhilosophical Psychology 4 (2): 179-181. 1991.
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49Jackson's Empirical AssumptionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 637-643. 2001.Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be maki…Read more
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48Manifesto (Epistemology for the Rest of the World)In Masaharu Mizumoto, Stephen P. Stich & Eric S. McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world, Oxford University Press. 2018.Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philos…Read more
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47Benacerraf and His Critics (edited book)Blackwell. 1996.a collection of articles by philosophers of mathematics on themes associated with the work of Paul Benacceraf
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46Israel Scheffler, Beyond the Letter: A Philosophical Inquiry into Ambiguity, Vagueness and Metaphor in Language (review)Linguistics and Philosophy 5 (2): 295-297. 1982.
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46The baby in the lab-coat: Why child development is not an adequate model for understanding the development of scienceIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich & Michael Siegal (eds.), The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2002.Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human mind…Read more
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46Logical truth revisitedJournal of Philosophy 65 (17): 495-500. 1968.Thirty-two years ago W. V. Quine proposed a definition of 'logical truth' that has been widely repeated and reprinted. Quine himself seems to have recognized that this definition is wrong in detail; in section 1 we eliminate this fault. What has perhaps been less widely observed is that, in abandoning the model-theoretic account of logical truth in favor of a "substitutional" account, Quine's definition swells the ranks of the logical truths and makes the classification of a sentence as a logica…Read more
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45Some 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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43Reading one's own mind: A cognitive theory of self-awarenessIn Aleksandar Jokic & Quentin Smith (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2002.
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42Choice effects and the ineffectiveness of simulationMind and Language 10 (4): 437-45. 1995.Kühberger et al. show that producing the Langer effect is considerably more difficult than has been assumed. Although their results clearly demonstrate a need for further exploration of the Langer effect, none of their arguments undermines the evidence against simulation theory that we presented in Nichols et al. (1996). In our study the actor subjects did show an effect, but the prediction subjects did not predict it, despite the fact that they were provided with all the details of the actor's …Read more
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42From Descartes to Popper, philosophers have criticized and tried to improve the strategies of reasoning invoked in science and in everyday life. In recent years leading cognitive psychologists have painted a detailed, controversial, and highly critical portrait of common sense reasoning. Stephen Stich begins with a spirited defense of this work and a critique of those writers who argue that widespread irrationality is a biological or conceptual impossibility.Stich then explores the nature of rat…Read more
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41The recombinant DNA debatePhilosophy and Public Affairs 7 (3): 187-205. 1978.The debate over recombinant DNA research is a unique event, perhaps a turning point, in the history of science. For the first time in modern history there has been widespread public discussion about whether and how a promising though potentially dangerous line of research shall be pursued. At root the debate is a moral debate and, like most such debates, requires proper assessment of the facts at crucial stages in the argument. A good deal of the controversy over recombinant DNA research arises …Read more
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38Epistemology for the rest of the world (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2017.Today the use of English is dominant, and even epistemologists in the " use English, using " But why, and to what extent can this be justified? As the first volume ever to be dedicated solely to this topic, the papers collected here will contribute to this important topic and in epistemology in general.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |