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125Review: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgement (review)Mind 115 (458): 390-393. 2006.
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122Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality and Restricted SimulationMind and Language 12 (3-4): 297-326. 1997.Heal (1996a) maintains that evidence of cognitive penetrability doesn't determine whether stimulation theory or theory theory wins. Given the wide variety of mechanisms and processes that get called ‘simulation’, we argue that it's not useful to ask‘who wins?’. The label ‘simulation’picks out no natural or theoretically interesting category. We propose a more fine‐grained taxonomy and argue that some processes that have been labelled ‘simulation’, eg.,‘actual‐situation‐simulation’, clearly do ex…Read more
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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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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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110From folk psychology to cognitive science: The case against beliefIn a Woodfield (ed.), Philosophical Review, Mit Press. pp. 418-421. 1982.
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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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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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105Two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying moralityIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind, Vol. III, Foundations and the Future, Oxford University Press. 2008.In this paper we compare two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality. One theory, proposed by Sripada and Stich (forthcoming), posits an interlocking set of innate mechanisms that internalize moral norms from the surrounding community and generate intrinsic motivation to comply with these norms and to punish violators. The other theory, which we call the M/C model was suggested by the widely discussed and influential work of Elliott Turiel, Larry Nucci and others on the “mo…Read more
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100Connectionism, eliminativism and the future of folk psychologyPhilosophical Perspectives 4 499-533. 1990.
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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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97Second thoughts on simulationIn Martin Davies & Tony Stone (eds.), Mental Simulation, Blackwell. 1995.The essays in this volume make it abundantly clear that there is no shortage of disagreement about the plausibility of the simulation theory. As we see it, there are at least three factors contributing to this disagreement. In some instances the issues in dispute are broadly empirical. Different people have different views on which theory is favored by experiments reported in the literature, and different hunches about how future experiments are likely to turn out. In 3.1 and 3.3 we will conside…Read more
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97Is 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..
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92The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive EvaluationPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (166): 98. 1992.
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90Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregard…Read more
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89Philosophy and WEIRD intuitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 110-111. 2010.From Plato to the present, philosophers have relied on intuitive judgments as evidence for or against philosophical theories. Most philosophers are WEIRD, highly educated, and male. The literature reviewed in the target article suggests that such people might have intuitions that differ from those of people in other groups. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that they do.
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86Why there might not be an evolutionary explanation for psychological altruismStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56 3-6. 2016.
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86Mental Representation: A Reader (edited book)Blackwell. 1994.This volume is a collection of new and previously published essays focusing on one of the most exciting and actively discussed topics in contemporary philosophy: naturalistic theories of mental content. The volume brings together important papers written by some of the most distinguished theorists working in the field today. Authors contributing to the volume include Jerry Fodor, Rugh Millikan, Fred Dretske, Ned Block, Robert Cummins, and Daniel Dennett.
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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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82Reply to Clark and Smolensky: Do connectionist minds have beliefs?In C. Macdonald & Graham F. Macdonald (eds.), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. 1995.
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80Logical form and natural languagePhilosophical Studies 28 (6): 397-418. 1975.The central thesis of the article is that there are two quite distinct concepts of logical form. Theories of logical form employing one of these concepts are different both in method of justification and in philosophical and psychological implications from theories employing the other concept
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80Stephen P. Stich: The Fragmentation of ReasonPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1): 189-193. 1991.
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73What every speaker knowsPhilosophical Review 80 (4): 476-496. 1971.The question I hope to answer is brief: What does every speaker of a natural language know? My answer is briefer still: Nothing, or at least nothing interesting. Explaining the question, and making the answer plausible, is a longer job.
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72Empiricism, innateness, and linguistic universalsPhilosophical 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
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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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69Moral philosophy and mental representationIn R. Michod, L. Nadel & M. Hechter (eds.), The Origin of Values, Aldine De Gruyer. pp. 215--228. 1993.Here is an overview of what is to come. In Sections I and II, I will sketch two of the projects frequently pursued by moral philosophers, and the methods typically invoked in those projects. I will argue that these projects presuppose (or at least suggest) a particular sort of account of the mental representation of human value systems, since the methods make sense only if we assume a certain kind of story about how the human mind stores information about values. The burden of my argument in Sec…Read more
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69Reading One's Own Mind: Self-Awareness and Developmental PsychologyCanadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (sup1): 297-339. 2004.The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of …Read more
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68The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents (edited book)Oxford University Press on Demand. 2005.This is the first of three volumes on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. This book along with the following two volumes provide assess of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. This book is concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, addressing such question as: what capacities, processes, representati…Read more
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63Building belief: Some queries about representation, indication, and functionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (4): 801-806. 1990.
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63Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societiesEvolution and Human Behavior 41 (5): 415-429. 2020.Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judgin…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |