•  340
    Moral psychology: Empirical approaches
    with John Doris
    Stanford 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
  •  52
    Is behaviorism vacuous?
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4): 647. 1984.
  •  39
    Editors' note (review)
    Synthese 122 (1-2): 1-1. 2000.
  • On the ascription of content
    In Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought And Object: Essays On Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 153-206. 1982.
  •  167
    Reason and rationality
    In 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.
  •  421
    Autonomous psychology and the belief/desire thesis
    The 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
  •  466
    Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychology
    with William Ramsey and J. Garon
    In William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. M. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophy and Connectionist Theory, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 499-533. 1991.
  •  6
    The virtues, challenges and implications of connectionism (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1047-1058. 1994.
  •  54
    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
  •  50
    The 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
  •  170
    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
  •  781
    Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel1
    Philosophy 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
  •  107
    Justification and the psychology of human reasoning
    with Richard E. Nisbett
    Philosophy 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
  •  29
    The 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
  •  30
    Some questions from the not-so-hostile world
    Australasian 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
  •  18
    Can 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
  •  119
    Between Chomskian rationalism and Popperian empiricism
    British 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
  •  34
    Grammar, Psychology, and Indeterminacy
    Journal of Philosophy 69 (22): 799-818. 1972.
    According to Quine, the linguist qua grammarian does not know what he is talking about. The goal of this essay is to tell him. My aim is to provide an account of what the grammarian is saying of an expression when he says it is grammatical, or a noun phrase, or ambiguous, or the subject of a certain sentence. More generally, I want to give an account of the nature of a generative grammatical theory of a language – of the data for such a theory, the relation between the theory and the data, and t…Read more
  •  29
    Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian Modules
    with Richard Samuels and Patrice D. Tremoulet
    In Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich & Patrice D. Tremoulet (eds.), Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian Modules, Springer Verlag. pp. 21-62. 1999.
    There is a venerable philosophical tradition that views human beings as intrinsically rational, though even the most ardent defender of this view would admit that under certain circumstances people’s decisions and thought processes can be very irrational indeed. When people are extremely tired, or drunk, or in the grip of rage, they sometimes reason and act in ways that no account of rationality would condone. About thirty years ago, Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman and a number of other psychologi…Read more
  •  141
    During the last 25 years, researchers studying human reasoning and judgment in what has become known as the “heuristics and biases” tradition have produced an impressive body of experimental work which many have seen as having “bleak implications” for the rationality of ordinary people (Nisbett and Borgida 1975). According to one proponent of this view, when we reason about probability we fall victim to “inevitable illusions” (Piattelli-Palmarini 1994). Other proponents maintain that the human m…Read more