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9Innate Mind: Volume 2: Culture and Cognition (edited book)Oup Usa. 2005.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?
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6Robert Cummins, Meaning and Mental Representation Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (5): 177-180. 1990.
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446Beliefs and subdoxastic statesPhilosophy of Science 45 (December): 499-518. 1978.It is argued that the intuitively sanctioned distinction between beliefs and non-belief states that play a role in the proximate causal history of beliefs is a distinction worth preserving in cognitive psychology. The intuitive distinction is argued to rest on a pair of features exhibited by beliefs but not by subdoxastic states. These are access to consciousness and inferential integration. Harman's view, which denies the distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states, is discussed and crit…Read more
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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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11George Botterill and Peter Carruthers: The Philosophy Of Psychology (review)Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 392-394. 2002.
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130Philosophy and Connectionist Theory (edited book)Lawrence Erlbaum. 1991.The philosophy of cognitive science has recently become one of the most exciting and fastest growing domains of philosophical inquiry and analysis. Until the early 1980s, nearly all of the models developed treated cognitive processes -- like problem solving, language comprehension, memory, and higher visual processing -- as rule-governed symbol manipulation. However, this situation has changed dramatically over the last half dozen years. In that period there has been an enormous shift of attenti…Read more
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26What every grammar does: A reply to prof. ArbiniPhilosophia 3 (1): 85-96. 1973.Prof. Arbini's attention is flattering; his conclusions rather less so. The issues over which Arbini and I divide are many. Yet fundamentally, I think, our differences may be traced to disagreement about the nature and promise of the theories produced by contemporary generative grammarians. It is here that I shall focus my attention. Some of the points at which Arbini aims his criticism are quite crucial if we are to appreciate what sort of theory a grammar is. At other points his critique can b…Read more
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Bealer, G. (1998). “Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy,” in M. DePaul & W. Ramsey, eds., Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
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20On the relation between occurrents and contentful mental statesInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 24 (October): 353-358. 1981.It is argued that the relation between ‘occurrents’ as characterized by Honderich and familiar ‘contentful’ mental states like beliefs and thoughts is a very murky one. Occurrents are distinct when and only when they can be distinguished by consciousness. By contrast, the criteria of individuation for contentful mental states invoke factors that are not distinguishable by consciousness. It is also suggested that Honderich's strategy for individuating occurrents may sometimes be difficult to appl…Read more
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156The Philosophy of psychologyIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2008.The 20 sup > th /sup > century has been a tumultuous time in psychology -- a century in which the discipline struggled with basic questions about its intellectual identity, but nonetheless managed to achieve spectacular growth and maturation. It’s not surprising, then, that psychology has attracted sustained philosophical attention and stimulated rich philosophical debate. Some of this debate was aimed at understanding, and sometimes criticizing, the assumptions, concepts and explanatory strateg…Read more
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351Dennett on intentional systemsPhilosophical Topics 12 (1): 39-62. 1981.During the last dozen years, Daniel Dennett has been elaborating an interconnected – and increasingly influential – set of views in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and those parts of moral philosophy that deal with the notions of freedom, responsibility, and personhood. The central unifying theme running through Dennett's writings on each of these topics is his concept of an intentional system. He invokes the concept to “legitimize” mentalistic predicates ("Brainstorms", p.…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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30Some questions from the not-so-hostile worldi'm grateful to Kent Bach, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Shaun Nichols for their helpful adviceAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3). 2004.No abstract
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31Collected Papers, Volume 2: Knowledge, Rationality, and Morality, 1978-2010Oxford University Press. 2012.This volume collects the best and most influential essays on knowledge, rationality and morality that Stephen Stich has published in the last 40 years. The volume includes a new introductory essay that offers an overview of the papers and traces the history of how they emerged
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49Jackson's Empirical AssumptionsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 637-643. 2001.Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be maki…Read more
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1619As a matter of fact : Empirical perspectives on ethicsIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2005.
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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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37Beyond Inference in PerceptionPSA: 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
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231Intentionality and naturalismMidwest 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.
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236A Framework for the Psychology of NormsIn 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
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374What is folk psychology?Cognition 50 447-68. 1994.For the last two decades a doctrine called ‘‘eliminative materialism’’ (or sometimes just ‘‘eliminativism’’) has been a major focus of discussion in the philosophy of mind. It is easy to understand why eliminativism has attracted so much attention, for it is hard to imagine a more radical and provocative doctrine. What eliminativism claims is that the intentional states and processes that are alluded to in our everyday descriptions and explanations of people’s mental lives and their actions are …Read more
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2The 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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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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220Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruismBiology and Philosophy 22 (2): 267-281. 2007.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.
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60Naturalizing Epistemology: Quine, Simon and the Prospects for PragmatismRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 34 1-17. 1993.In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about the prospects of developing a ‘naturalized epistemology’, though different authors tend to interpret this label in quite different ways. One goal of this paper is to sketch three projects that might lay claim to the ‘naturalized epistemology’ label, and to argue that they are not all equally attractive. Indeed, I'll maintain that the first of the three—the one I'll attribute to Quine—is simply incoherent. There is no way we could ge…Read more
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3The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future (edited book)Oup Usa. 2008.This is the third of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind providing a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Together these volumes point the way toward a synthesis that provides a powerful picture of our minds and their place in the natural order.
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Reply to Clark and Smolensky: Do Connectionist Minds Have Beliefs?In Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 2. 1995.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |