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8Book reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 11 (1): 89-109. 1998.How to build a theory in cognitive science. Valerie Gray Hardcastle. Albany: State University of New York. Press, 1996Language, thought, and consciousness. Peter Carruthers. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1996. ISBN 0–521–48158–9 (hc)Young children's knowledge about thinking. John H. Flavell, Frances L. Green & Eleanor R. Flavell with Commentary by Paul L. Harris & Janet Wilde Astington. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1995, 60 (1, Serial No, 243) Chicago: T…Read more
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32Book reviews (review)Philosophical Psychology 8 (4): 389-431. 1995.Speaking: from Intention to Articulation Willem J. M. Levelt, 1989 (1993 paperback) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–12137–9(hb), 0–262–62089–8(pb)Rules for Reasoning Richard E. Nisbett (Ed.), 1993 Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates ISBN: 0–8058–1256–3(hb), 0–8085–1257–1 (pb)Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science Alvin I. Goldman, 1993 Cambridge, MA, MIT Press ISBN: 0–262–07153–3(hb), 0–262–57100–5(pb)Language Comprehension in Ape and Child, Monographs of the Society for Resear…Read more
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2Semantics and the Social Sciences (review)Review of Metaphysics 36 (3): 723-723. 1983.This book, by two philosophers at Bradford University, immediately strikes the American reader with two differences in the British philosophical scene. One is the enveloping commitment to "Davidsonian linguistics" which still seems the central topic for many of Oxford's younger philosophers. In this slim volume Davidsonian semantics is thought to provide that some measure of cross-cultural understanding is possible, that humanistic descriptions of human activity are irreplaceable and unrevisable…Read more
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34From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science (review)Review of Metaphysics 38 (4): 907-908. 1985.This vigorously written and clearly argued Bradford Book is a must for anyone interested in intentionality, functionalism, and the status and prospects of scientific and folk psychology. It is a measure of how much has changed in the philosophy of psychology that the familiar arguments--masterfully marshalled and extended here-against the reducibility of everyday psychological statements to statements about brain states within an experimental cognitive science are here, for Stich, arguments agai…Read more
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13Comments on Robert M. Farr, "the significance of the skin as a natural boundary in the sub-division of psychology."Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2&3). 1997.
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22Paradigmatic ImmoralityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 4 (4). 1975.The notion of moral philosophy that has been dominant in Anglo-American philosophizing since G.E. Moore is peculiar. Reviewing traditional works such as Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Hume's Treatise, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Mill's Utilitarianism, one is tempted to call this new notion of moral philosophy a different subject; and if one does this, it is less peculiar. However, let us accept that this new sort of moral philosophy does belong to the previous tradition; granted this, I…Read more
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35The Politics of Linguistics (review)Review of Metaphysics 42 (3): 633-634. 1989.This book is a clear, judicious, explanatory, and short analysis of the development of linguistics, particularly in this century. While describing the ups and downs of autonomous linguistics, in its structuralist and various generativist phases, and the humanist, Marxist, and sociological opposition, Newmeyer from time to time makes striking points about the strong influence of national political agendas, as expressed in research money, on the waxing or waning of theoretical orientations in ling…Read more
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1Language and problems of knowledge: The managua lectures Noam Chomsky (review)Philosophical Psychology 2 (2): 244. 1989.
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103Turing and the fragility and insubstantiality of evolutionary explanations: A puzzle about the unity of Alan Turing's work with some larger implicationsPhilosophical Psychology 14 (1): 83-94. 2001.As is well known, Alan Turing drew a line, embodied in the "Turing test," between intellectual and physical abilities, and hence between cognitive and natural sciences. Less familiarly, he proposed that one way to produce a "passer" would be to educate a "child machine," equating the experimenter's improvements in the initial structure of the child machine with genetic mutations, while supposing that the experimenter might achieve improvements more expeditiously than natural selection. On the ot…Read more
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6           “I’ve written a story!†My eighty year old father’s rich, booming voice fired up the phone line, briefly burning through the fuzzy enunciation that stemmed from a minor stroke of three years back. It hadn’t been the stroke but rather his growing blindness that had slowed his production. Through dictation he’d still kept up his short monthly magazine column (in one of the last and most gravely scatological of these he’d inadvertently shamed my Enlightenment scho…Read more
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12An Invitation To Cognitive ScienceBlackwell. 1991.Professor Leiber's exuberant but incisive book illuminates the inquiry's beginnings in Plato, in the physiology and psychology of Descartes, in the formal work of Russell and Gödel, and in Wittgenstein's critique of folk psychology.
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32Nature’s Experiments, Society’s ClosuresJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2&3). 1997.The Wild Child, who lives through much of childhood without exposure to language or culture, is exceedingly rare. I examine three of the most famous and most well authenticated cases: Helen Keller, who was isolated from eighteen months until her seventh year; ‘Victor’, the wild boy of the forest near Aveyron, whom Itard studied; and ‘Genie,’ who was isolated from language from age two until the middle of her thirteenth year. Attention is paid both to the development of these individuals and to t…Read more
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28The light bulb and the Turing-tested machineJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 22 (1). 1992.
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22K. T. Fann "Symposium on J. L. Austin" (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 32 (1): 118. 1971.
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77Helen Keller as cognitive scientistPhilosophical Psychology 9 (4). 1996.Nature's experiments in isolation—the wild boy of Aveyron, Genie, their name is hardly legion—are by their nature illusive. Helen Keller, blind and deaf from her 18th month and isolated from language until well into her sixth year, presents a unique case in that every stage in her development was carefully recorded and she herself, graduate of Radcliffe College and author of 14 books, gave several careful and insightful accounts of her linguistic development and her cognitive and sensory situati…Read more
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27Dickins, Cosmides, reasoning, modularity, and Wason's taskJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35 (3). 2005.
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21Psychology without brainsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (2): 366-367. 1997.Rachlin's is a dubious melange. Of Aristotle's four basic the scientists and philosophers of the modern era expelled the last, or teleology, from science. Adaptionist evolutionary biologists now sometimes sanction talk of the function or purpose of organisms' structures and behavioral repertoires as a first step because they believe evolution through natural selection makes natural organisms look asif they are purposively designed. But, as Aristotle himself insisted, humans are as much artificia…Read more
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23Philosophers concerned with speech acts, or Wittgenstein's uses of language , mostly fix their attention on actions done by issuing just a phrase or short sentence (in the appropriate circumstances with the proper qualifications, feeling, intent, uptake, etc.). "Five red apples" is Wittgenstein's paradigm example in his Philosophical Investigations . "There's a bittern at the bottom of your garden" plays a similar role in J. L. Austin's most central and ambitious essay, "Other Minds." Indeed, as…Read more
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42The Wiles of evolutionary psychology and the indeterminacy of selectionPhilosophical Forum 39 (1). 2008.
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Florida State UniversityRegular Faculty
Tallahassee, Florida, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |