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272Moral judgmentIn Sarah Robins, John Francis 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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72The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2003.Comprising a series of specially commissioned chapters by leading scholars, this comprehensive volume presents an up-to-date survey of the central themes in the philosophy of mind. It leads the reader through a broad range of topics, including Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Dualism, Emotions, Folk Psychology, Free Will, Individualism, Personal Identity and The Mind-Body Problem. Provides a state of the art overview of philosophy of mind. Contains 16 newly-commissioned articles, all of w…Read more
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338Moral 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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111Sosa’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.
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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.
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429Autonomous psychology and the belief/desire thesisThe 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
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83What 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
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111From folk psychology to cognitive science: The case against beliefIn a Woodfield (ed.), Philosophical Review, Mit Press. pp. 418-421. 1982.
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461Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychologyIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 499-533. 1991.
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25Jerrold J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and its Philosophical Import (review)Philosophical Review 83 (2): 259-263. 1974.
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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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5On the ascription of contentIn Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought And Object: Essays On Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1982.
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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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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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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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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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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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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
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |