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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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94The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive EvaluationPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (166): 98. 1992.
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7Introduction: the idea of innatenessIn Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 1-22. 1975.
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1573Do 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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106Justification 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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21The 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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107Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality1Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 228-236. 2008.No Abstract
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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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422Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversitySynthese 74 (3): 391-413. 1988.
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117Between 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
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258Grammar, Psychology, and IndeterminacyJournal 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
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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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29Rethinking Rationality: From Bleak Implications to Darwinian ModulesIn Kepa Korta, Ernest Sosa & Xabier Arrazola (eds.), Cognition, Agency and Rationality, 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
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158Ending the Rationality Wars: How to Make Disputes about Human Rationality DisappearIn Renee Elio (ed.), Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality, Oxford University Press. pp. 236-268. 2002.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
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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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Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychologyIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 311. 1995.
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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, Blackwell. pp. 6--300. 1999.
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216Deconstructing the mindIn Deconstructing the mind, Oxford University Press. pp. 479-482. 1996.Over the last two decades, debates over the viability of commonsense psychology have been center stage in both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Eliminativists have argued that advances in cognitive science and neuroscience will ultimately justify a rejection of our "folk" theory of the mind, and of its ontology. In the first half of this book Stich, who was at one time a leading advocate of eliminativism, maintains that even if the sciences develop in the ways that eliminativists fo…Read more
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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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508The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of SciencePhilosophy of Science 65 (1): 33-49. 1998.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
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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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35Inferential competence: right you are, if you think you areBehavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3): 353-354. 1981.
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199Reason and rationalityIn M. Sintonen, J. Wolenski & I. Niiniluoto (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 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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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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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.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |