•  111
    Sosa’s topic is the use of intuitions in philosophy. Much of what I have written on the issue has been critical of appeals to intuition in epistemology, though in recent years I have become increasingly skeptical of the use of intuitions in ethics and in semantic theory as well.
  •  38
    Beyond Inference in Perception
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982 (2): 553-560. 1982.
    The controversy over inference in perception turns on the nature of the processes that intervene between the stimulus and the perceptual experience or percept. Should the processes be viewed as something like inference and computation, or should they be viewed as psychologically primitive mechanisms whose workings are best accounted for at a neurological or physiological level? It is argued that the view that computational and inference-like processes play a role in perceptual processes should b…Read more
  •  241
    Intentionality and naturalism
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1): 159-82. 1994.
    ...the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives not from such relatively technical worries about individualism and holism as we.
  • Replies
    In Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
  •  238
    A Framework for the Psychology of Norms
    In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind, Volume 2: Culture and Cognition, Oxford University Press. 2005.
    Humans are unique in the animal world in the extent to which their day-to-day behavior is governed by a complex set of rules and principles commonly called norms. Norms delimit the bounds of proper behavior in a host of domains, providing an invisible web of normative structure embracing virtually all aspects of social life. People also find many norms to be deeply meaningful. Norms give rise to powerful subjective feelings that, in the view of many, are an important part of what it is to be a h…Read more
  •  85
    What i s Folk Psychology?
    Cognition 50 (1-3): 447-468. 1994.
    Eliminativism has been a major focus of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the last two decades. According to eliminativists, beliefs and other intentional states are the posits of a folk theory of mind standardly called "folk psychology". That theory, they claim, is radically false and hence beliefs and other intentional states do not exist. We argue that the expression "folk psychology" is ambiguous in an important way. On the one hand, "folk psychology" is used by many philosophers and …Read more
  •  5
    On the ascription of content
    In Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought And Object: Essays On Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1982.
  •  2
    The 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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    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.
  •  12
    List of Publications by Stephen Stich
    with Il Mulino
    In David Papineau (ed.), Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 65--17. 2009.
  •  60
    The role of psychology in the study of culture
    with Daniel Kelly, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, and Kelby Mason
    Behavioral 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
  •  7
    Introduction: the idea of innateness
    In Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 1-22. 1975.
  •  98
    Is 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..
  •  15
    The Cognitive Basis of Science (edited book)
    with Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich, and Michael Siegal
    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
  •  107
    Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality1
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 228-236. 2008.
    No Abstract
  •  241
    Could 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
  •  98
    Plato's method meets cognitive science
    Free 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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  •  26
    What every speaker cognizes
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 39-40. 1980.
  •  72
    Empiricism, innateness, and linguistic universals
    Philosophical 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
  •  342
    Moral judgment
    In 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
  •  2
    35 The Recombinant DNA Debate: a Difficulty for Pascalian-Style Wagering
    In Eleonore Stump & Michael J. Murray (eds.), Philosophy of Religion: The Big Questions, Blackwell. pp. 6--300. 1999.
  •  36
    Davidson's Semantic Program
    Canadian 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