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63Building 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.
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73What every speaker knowsPhilosophical Review 80 (4): 476-496. 1971.The question I hope to answer is brief: What does every speaker of a natural language know? My answer is briefer still: Nothing, or at least nothing interesting. Explaining the question, and making the answer plausible, is a longer job.
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72Empiricism, innateness, and linguistic universalsPhilosophical Studies 33 (3): 273-286. 1978.For the last decade and more Noam Chomsky has been elaborating a skein of doctrines about language learning, linguistic universals, Empiricism and innate cognitive mechanisms. My aim in this paper is to pull apart some of the claims that Chomsky often defends collectively. In particular, I want to dissect out some contentions about the existence of linguistic universals. I shall argue that these claims, while they may be true, are logically independent from a cluster of claims Chomsky makes abou…Read more
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89Philosophy and WEIRD intuitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 110-111. 2010.From Plato to the present, philosophers have relied on intuitive judgments as evidence for or against philosophical theories. Most philosophers are WEIRD, highly educated, and male. The literature reviewed in the target article suggests that such people might have intuitions that differ from those of people in other groups. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that they do.
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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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36Davidson's Semantic ProgramCanadian Journal of Philosophy 6 (2): 201-227. 1976.Donald Davidson did it. He did it slowly, deliberately, in more than a half dozen widely noted essays. What he did was to elaborate a program for the study of empirical semantics. Nor did he stop there. He went on to apply his program to some of the problems that have long bedeviled semantics: action sentences, indirect discourse and propositional attitudes. My goal in this paper is to assess Davidson's achievement. The first step is to assemble the program from the sketches and hints scattered …Read more
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272Moral judgmentIn Sarah Robins, John Francis Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, Routledge. 2009.Questions regarding the nature of moral judgment loom large in moral philosophy. Perhaps the most basic of these questions asks how, exactly, moral judgments and moral rules are to be defined; what features distinguish them from other sorts of rules and judgments? A related question concerns the extent to which emotion and reason guide moral judgment. Are moral judgments made mainly on the basis of reason, or are they primarily the products of emotion? As an example of the former view, Kant held…Read more
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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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337Moral psychology: Empirical approachesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Moral psychology investigates human functioning in moral contexts, and asks how these results may impact debate in ethical theory. This work is necessarily interdisciplinary, drawing on both the empirical resources of the human sciences and the conceptual resources of philosophical ethics. The present article discusses several topics that illustrate this type of inquiry: thought experiments, responsibility, character, egoism v . altruism, and moral disagreement
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1George Botterill and Peter Carruthers, The Philosophy Of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 310 pp., $60.00 , $22.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 392-394. 2002.
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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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429Autonomous 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
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83What 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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110From folk psychology to cognitive science: The case against beliefIn a Woodfield (ed.), Philosophical Review, Mit Press. pp. 418-421. 1982.
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25Jerrold J. Katz, The Underlying Reality of Language and its Philosophical Import (review)Philosophical Review 83 (2): 259-263. 1974.
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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
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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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461Connectionism, eliminativism, and the future of folk psychologyIn William Ramsey, Stephen P. Stich & D. Rumelhart (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 499-533. 1991.
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7Introduction: the idea of innatenessIn Innate Ideas, University of California Press. pp. 1-22. 1975.
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1570Do 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
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Meta-Ethics |
Cognitive Sciences |