•  193
    Should the Study of Homo sapiens be Part of Cognitive Science?
    with H. Clark Barrett and Stephen Laurence
    Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (3): 379-386. 2012.
    Beller, Bender, and Medin argue that a reconciliation between anthropology and cognitive science seems unlikely. We disagree. In our view, Beller et al.’s view of the scope of what anthropology can offer cognitive science is too narrow. In focusing on anthropology’s role in elucidating cultural particulars, they downplay the fact that anthropology can reveal both variation and universals in human cognition, and is in a unique position to do so relative to the other subfields of cognitive science…Read more
  •  334
    The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents (edited book)
    Oxford University Press USA. 2005.
    This is the first volume of a projected three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psychology, and allied disciplines these volumes provide a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. The Innate Mind: Structure and Co…Read more
  •  39
    The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents (edited book)
    Oxford University Press on Demand. 2005.
    This is the first of three volumes on the subject of innateness. The extent to which the mind is innate is one of the central questions in the human sciences, with important implications for many surrounding debates. This book along with the following two volumes provide assess of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. This book is concerned with the fundamental architecture of the mind, addressing such question as: what capacities, processes, representati…Read more
  •  10
    The Innate Mind, Volume 2: Culture and Cognition (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 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?
  •  5
    The Innate Mind, Vol. III, 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
  •  418
    Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?
    Philosophical Psychology 26 (5): 629-638. 2013.
    Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people's moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers' moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philoso…Read more
  •  1043
    Gender and the Philosophy Club
    with Wesley Buckwalter
    The Philosophers' Magazine 52 (52): 60-65. 2011.
    If intuitions are associated with gender this might help to explain the fact that while the gender gap has disappeared in many other learned clubs, women are still seriously under-represented in the Philosophers Club. Since people who don’t have the intuitions that most club members share have a harder time getting into the club, and since the majority of Philosophers are now and always have been men, perhaps the under-representation of women is due, in part, to a selection effect.
  •  30
    Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?
    with Shaun Nichols
    Mind and Language 7 (1-2): 35-71. 1992.
  •  366
    Folk psychology
    In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Blackwell. pp. 35-71. 2002.
    For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. Doing…Read more
  •  1517
    Normativity and epistemic intuitions
    Philosophical Topics, 29 (1-2): 429-460. 2001.
    In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence sugges…Read more
  •  12
    Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?
    Philosophical Issues 3 225-270. 1993.
  •  118
    Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality and Restricted Simulation
    Mind and Language 12 (3-4): 297-326. 1997.
    Heal (1996a) maintains that evidence of cognitive penetrability doesn't determine whether stimulation theory or theory theory wins. Given the wide variety of mechanisms and processes that get called ‘simulation’, we argue that it's not useful to ask‘who wins?’. The label ‘simulation’picks out no natural or theoretically interesting category. We propose a more fine‐grained taxonomy and argue that some processes that have been labelled ‘simulation’, eg.,‘actual‐situation‐simulation’, clearly do ex…Read more
  •  22
    Are we really moralizing creatures through and through?
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 351-352. 2010.
    Knobe contends that in making judgments about a wide range of matters, moral considerations and scientific considerations are and thus that We argue that his own account of the mechanism underlying these judgments does not support this radical conclusion
  •  253
    A cognitive theory of pretense
    Cognition 74 (2): 115-147. 2000.
    Recent accounts of pretense have been underdescribed in a number of ways. In this paper, we present a much more explicit cognitive account of pretense. We begin by describing a number of real examples of pretense in children and adults. These examples bring out several features of pretense that any adequate theory of pretense must accommodate, and we use these features to develop our theory of pretense. On our theory, pretense representations are contained in a separate mental workspace, a Possi…Read more
  •  24
    Introduction: nativism past and present
    In Peter Carruthers (ed.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press New York. 2005.
    Elaborates some of the background assumptions made by the chapters that follow and situates the theory that the author espouses within a wider context and range of alternatives. More specifically, it distinguishes between creature consciousness and state consciousness, and between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. And it defends representationalist accounts of consciousness against brute physicalist accounts. The chapter also introduces the remaining 11 chapters.
  •  284
    Rationality and psychology
    In Piers Rawling & Alfred R. Mele (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 279-300. 2004.
    Samuels and Stich explore the debate over the extent to which ordinary human reasoning and decision making is rational. One prominent cluster of views, often associated with the heuristics and biases tradition in psychology, maintains that human reasoning is, in important respects, normatively problematic or irrational. Samuels and Stich start by sketching some key experimental findings from this tradition and describe a range of pessimistic claims about the rationality of ordinary people that t…Read more
  •  1837
    Nothing at Stake in Knowledge
    with David Rose, Edouard Machery, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma E. Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, In-Rae Cho, Daniel Cohnitz, Florian Cova, Vilius Dranseika, Ángeles Eraña Lagos, Laleh Ghadakpour, Maurice Grinberg, Ivar Hannikainen, Takaaki Hashimoto, Amir Horowitz, Evgeniya Hristova, Yasmina Jraissati, Veselina Kadreva, Kaori Karasawa, Hackjin Kim, Yeonjeong Kim, Minwoo Lee, Carlos Mauro, Masaharu Mizumoto, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Christopher Y. Olivola, Jorge Ornelas, Barbara Osimani, Carlos Romero, Alejandro Rosas Lopez, Massimo Sangoi, Andrea Sereni, Sarah Songhorian, Paulo Sousa, Noel Struchiner, Vera Tripodi, Naoki Usui, Alejandro Vázquez del Mercado, Giorgio Volpe, Hrag Abraham Vosgerichian, Xueyi Zhang, and Jing Zhu
    Noûs 53 (1): 224-247. 2019.
    In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some …Read more
  •  348
    Reading one's own mind: Self-awareness and developmental psychology
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (sup1): 297-339. 2004.
    The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the 20th century, however, this idea came under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology.1 The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growin…Read more
  •  28
    Philosophy: asking questions--seeking answers
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    Featuring a remarkably clear writing style, Philosophy is a brief and accessible guide that is comprehensive enough to be used on its own or as a supplement to any introductory anthology. Focusing on the key issues in Western philosophy, this text presents balanced coverage of each issue andchallenges students to think critically.
  • The quest for the boundaries of morality
    In Aaron Zimmerman, Karen Jones & Mark Timmons (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Moral Epistemology, Routledge. 2018.
  •  1
    The Innate Mind, 3 volumes, 2005-2007 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
  •  16
    Moral parochialism misunderstood: a reply to Piazza and Sousa
    with Daniel M. T. Fessler, Colin Holbrook, Martin Kanovsky, H. Clark Barrett, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, Christopher von Rueden, and Stephen Laurence
    Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 283. 2016.
  •  10
    Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies
    with Daniel M. T. Fessler, H. Clark Barrett, Martin Kanovsky, Colin Holbrook, Joseph Henrich, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, Christopher von Rueden, and Stephen Laurence
    Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 282 20150907. 2015.
    Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspon…Read more
  •  144
    Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment
    with H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Martin Kanovsky, Geoff Kushnick, Anne Pisor, Brooke A. Scelza, Chris von Rueden, Wanying Zhao, and Stephen Laurence
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113 (17). 2016.
    Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) i…Read more
  •  4
    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
  •  131
    Demographic Differences in Philosophical Intuition: a Reply to Joshua Knobe
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2): 401-434. 2023.
    In a recent paper, Joshua Knobe (2019) offers a startling account of the metaphilosophical implications of findings in experimental philosophy. We argue that Knobe’s account is seriously mistaken, and that it is based on a radically misleading portrait of recent work in experimental philosophy and cultural psychology.
  • Normativity and Epistemic Institutions
    with Jonathan M. Weinberg and Shaun Nichols
    In Joshua Michael Knobe & Shaun Nichols (eds.), Experimental Philosophy, Oup Usa. 2008.
  •  116
    Theory theory to the Max
    Mind and Language 13 (3): 421-449. 1998.
  •  37
    Rethinking co-cognition: A reply to Heal
    Mind and Language 13 (4): 499-512. 1998.