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31Introduction: What makes science possibleIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich & Michael Siegal (eds.), The Cognitive Basis of Science, Cambridge University Press. 2002.
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1031Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophical TraditionIn Wesley Buckwalter & Justin Sytsma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Blackwell. pp. 5. 2016.
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48Manifesto (Epistemology for the Rest of the World)In Masaharu Mizumoto, Stephen P. Stich & Eric S. McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world, Oxford University Press. 2018.Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philos…Read more
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871Behavioral Circumscription and the Folk Psychology of Belief: A Study in Ethno-MentalizingThought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (3): 193-203. 2017.Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first ta…Read more
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36Inferential competence: right you are, if you think you areBehavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3): 353-354. 1981.
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519The 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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92Why 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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6Robert Cummins, Meaning and Mental Representation Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 10 (5): 177-180. 1990.
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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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348Evolution, culture, and the irrationality of the emotionsIn Dylan Evans & Pierre Cruse (eds.), Emotion, Evolution, and Rationality, Oxford University Press. 2004.For about 2500 years, from Plato’s time until the closing decades of the 20th century, the dominant view was that the emotions are quite distinct from the processes of rational thinking and decision making, and are often a major impediment to those processes. But in recent years this orthodoxy has been challenged in a number of ways. Damasio (1994) has made a forceful case that the traditional view, which he has dubbed _Descartes’ Error_, is quite wrong, because emotions play a fundamental role …Read more
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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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100Connectionism, eliminativism and the future of folk psychologyPhilosophical Perspectives 4 499-533. 1990.
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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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62Dissonant notes on the theory of referenceNoûs 4 (4): 385-397. 1970.I will contend that Quine's optimism about the theory of reference is incompatible with his pessimism about the theory of meaning. For, on Quine's own account, the problems that discourage him about the theory of meaning beset the theory of reference as well. And of the three arguments Quine advances to show the theory of reference better off than the theory of meaning, two are unsound and the third is in conflict with his further views on reference.
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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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62You can't have it both ways: What is the relation between morality and fairness?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1). 2013.Baumard and colleagues put forward a new hypothesis about the nature and evolution of fairness. In this commentary, we discuss the relation between morality and their views about fairness
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53Jackson'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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20The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2008.This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how innateness is related to such things as heritability…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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20Collected Papers, Volume 1: Mind and Language, 1972-2010Oup Usa. 2011.This volume collects the best and most influential essays that Stephen Stich has published in the last 40 years on topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. They discuss a wide range of topics including grammar, innateness, reference, folk psychology, eliminativism, connectionism, evolutionary psychology, simulation theory, social construction, and psychopathology. However, they are unified by two central concerns. The first is the viability of the commonsense conceptio…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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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
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |