-
433Autonomous 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
-
22Will the concepts of folk psychology find a place in cognitive science?In Scott M. Christensen & Dale R. Turner (eds.), Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind, L. Erlbaum. pp. 82--92. 1993.
-
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
-
57On the Morality of Harm: A response to Sousa, Holbrook and PiazzaCognition 113 (1): 93-97. 2009.
-
466Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychologyIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 499-533. 1991.
-
6The virtues, challenges and implications of connectionism (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1047-1058. 1994.
-
50The 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
-
96The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive EvaluationPhilosophical Quarterly 42 (166): 98. 1992.
-
554The odd couple: The compatibility of social construction and evolutionary psychologyPhilosophy of Science 67 (1): 133-154. 2000.Evolutionary psychology and social constructionism are widely regarded as fundamentally irreconcilable approaches to the social sciences. Focusing on the study of the emotions, we argue that this appearance is mistaken. Much of what appears to be an empirical disagreement between evolutionary psychologists and social constructionists over the universality or locality of emotional phenomena is actually generated by an implicit philosophical dispute resulting from the adoption of different theorie…Read more
-
1592Do 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
-
107Justification 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
-
29The 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
-
45Some 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
-
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
-
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
-
5Relativism, rationality, and the limits of intentional ascriptionPacific Philosophical Quarterly 65 (3): 211. 1984.
-
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
-
158Ending the Rationality Wars: How to Make Disputes about Human Rationality DisappearIn Renee Elio (ed.), Common Sense, Reasoning and 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
-
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
-
220Deconstructing 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
-
168Naturalizing epistemology: Quine, Simon and the prospects for pragmatismIn C. Hookway & D. Peterson (eds.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 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
-
Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychologyIn Cynthia Macdonald & Graham Macdonald (eds.), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. pp. 311. 1995.
-
42The 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
-
Kelby Mason, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, andIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophy, Routledge. 2008.
-
10The Future of Folk PsychologyIn Scott M. Christensen & Dale R. Turner (eds.), Folk psychology and the philosophy of mind, L. Erlbaum. pp. 93. 1993.
-
35Inferential competence: right you are, if you think you areBehavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3): 353-354. 1981.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |