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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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60The 20th 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 strategies prevailing …Read more
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357Dennett 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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1646As 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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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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32Collected 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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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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38Beyond 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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241Intentionality 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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238A 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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85What 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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5On the ascription of contentIn Andrew Woodfield (ed.), Thought And Object: Essays On Intentionality, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1982.
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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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28Jerrold J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and its Philosophical Import (review)Philosophical Review 83 (2): 259-263. 1974.
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221Evolution, 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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60The role of psychology in the study of cultureBehavioral and Brain Sciences 29 (4): 355-355. 2006.Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena
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7Introduction: the idea of innatenessIn Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 1-22. 1975.
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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.
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12List of Publications by Stephen StichIn David Papineau (ed.), Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 65--17. 2009.
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15The Cognitive Basis of Science (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2002.The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scienti…Read more
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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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241Could man be an irrational animal?Synthese 64 (1): 115-35. 1985.1. When we attribute beliefs, desires, and other states of common sense psychology to a person, or for that matter to an animal or an artifact, we are assuming or presupposing that the person or object can be treated as an intentional system. 2. An intentional system is one which is rational through and through; its beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography…. Its desires are those it ought to have, given its biological needs and t…Read more
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98Is 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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435Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversitySynthese 74 (3): 391-413. 1988.
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65Building belief: Some queries about representation, indication, and functionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (4): 801-806. 1990.
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Genetic engineeringIn Tom Regan & Donald VanDeVeer (eds.), And justice for all: new introductory essays in ethics and public policy, Rowman & Littlefield. 1982.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |