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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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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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35Jackson'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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82Reply to Clark and Smolensky: Do connectionist minds have beliefs?In Cynthia MacDonald & Graham MacDonald (eds.), Connectionism: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Blackwell. 1991.
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125Review: Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgement (review)Mind 115 (458): 390-393. 2006.
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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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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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21Deconstructing the MindOup Usa. 1996.In this book, Stich unravels - or deconstructs - the doctrine called "eliminativism". Eliminativism claims that beliefs, desires, and many other mental states we use to describe the mind do not exist, but are fiction posits of a badly mistaken theory of "folk psychology". Stich makes a u-turn in his book, opening up new and controversial positions.
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55Naturalizing 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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147Connectionism and three levels of nativismSynthese 82 (2): 177-205. 1990.Along with the increasing popularity of connectionist language models has come a number of provocative suggestions about the challenge these models present to Chomsky's arguments for nativism. The aim of this paper is to assess these claims. We begin by reconstructing Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus and arguing that it is best understood as three related arguments, with increasingly strong conclusions. Next, we provide a brief introduction to connectionism and give a quick …Read more
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5The 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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445Do animals have beliefs?Australasian Journal of Philosophy 57 (1): 15-28. 1979.Do animals have beliefs? Many of the philosophers who have thought about this question have taken the answer to be obvious. Trouble is, some of them take the answer to be obviously yes, others take it to be obviously no. In this disagreement both sides are surely wrong. For whatever the answer may be, it is not obvious. Moreover, as I shall argue, both sides are wrong in a more serious way, for on my view the issue itself is moot. If I am right that the issue is moot, it is not for any lack of i…Read more
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81Logical form and natural languagePhilosophical Studies 28 (6): 397-418. 1975.The central thesis of the article is that there are two quite distinct concepts of logical form. Theories of logical form employing one of these concepts are different both in method of justification and in philosophical and psychological implications from theories employing the other concept
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48Logical truth revisitedJournal of Philosophy 65 (17): 495-500. 1968.Thirty-two years ago W. V. Quine proposed a definition of 'logical truth' that has been widely repeated and reprinted. Quine himself seems to have recognized that this definition is wrong in detail; in section 1 we eliminate this fault. What has perhaps been less widely observed is that, in abandoning the model-theoretic account of logical truth in favor of a "substitutional" account, Quine's definition swells the ranks of the logical truths and makes the classification of a sentence as a logica…Read more
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14Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality1 (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (1): 228-236. 2008.
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49Causal holism and commonsense psychology: A reply to O'BrienPhilosophical Psychology 4 (2): 179-181. 1991.
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13Innate 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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451Beliefs 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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11George Botterill and Peter Carruthers: The Philosophy Of Psychology (review)Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 392-394. 2002.
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |