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4Some questions from the not-so-hostile worldAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (3). 2004.Kim Sterelny has written a terrific book! It is brimming over with important and original ideas, rich in empirical detail, and written in a lucid and engaging style that makes it accessible to readers with a wide variety of backgrounds. The book does not fit comfortably into familiar categories since it makes significant contributions to philosophy, evolutionary biology, anthropology, and cognitive science. Sterelny addresses cutting edge issues in each of these disciplines with impressive sophi…Read more
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14Between 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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259Grammar, 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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4Relativism, rationality, and the limits of intentional ascriptionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (3): 211. 1984.
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1Ending the Rationality Wars: How to Make Disputes about Human Rationality DisappearIn Renée Elio (ed.), Common sense, reasoning, & 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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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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6The recombinant DNA debatePhilosophy and Public Affairs 7 (3): 187-205. 1978.The debate over recombinant DNA research is a unique event, perhaps a turning point, in the history of science. For the first time in modern history there has been widespread public discussion about whether and how a promising though potentially dangerous line of research shall be pursued. At root the debate is a moral debate and, like most such debates, requires proper assessment of the facts at crucial stages in the argument. A good deal of the controversy over recombinant DNA research arises …Read more
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12Deconstructing 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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18Naturalizing epistemology: Quine, Simon and the prospects for pragmatismIn C. Hookway & D. Peterson (eds.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Supplement no. 34, Cambridge University Press. pp. 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.1 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 cou…Read more
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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. 1991.
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2The Future of Folk PsychologyIn Scott M. Christensen & Dale R. Turner (eds.), Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind, L. Erlbaum. pp. 93. 1993.
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Kelby Mason, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, andIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2008.
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11Inferential competence: right you are, if you think you areBehavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3): 353-354. 1981.
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137The 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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2Israel 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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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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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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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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2On 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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7Connectionism, eliminativism and the future of folk psychologyPhilosophical Perspectives 4 499-533. 1990.
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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.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |