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156Can animals and machines be persons?: a dialogueHackett Pub. Co.. 1985.COMMISSIONER KLAUS VERSEN: Counselors, I want to remind you both of two matters. First, this commission is not bound by the statutes or legal precedents of ...
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155Linguistic analysis and existentialismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 32 (1): 47-56. 1971.
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114Language without linguisticsSynthese 120 (2): 193-211. 1999.Though Mr. Lin purports to attack “Chomsky's view of language” and to defend the “common sense view of language”, he in fact attacks “views” that are basic and common to linguists, psycholinguists, and developmental psychologists. Indeed, though he cites W. V. O. Quine, L. Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin in his support, they all sharply part company from his views, Austin particularly. Lin's views are not common sense but a set of scholarly and philological prejudices that linguistics disparaged …Read more
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104Instinctive incest avoidance: A paradigm case for evolutionary psychology evaporatesJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 36 (4). 2006.Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively av…Read more
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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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85Turing's golden: How well Turing's work stands todayPhilosophical Psychology 19 (1): 13-46. 2006.A. M. Turing has bequeathed us a conceptulary including 'Turing, or Turing-Church, thesis', 'Turing machine', 'universal Turing machine', 'Turing test' and 'Turing structures', plus other unnamed achievements. These include a proof that any formal language adequate to express arithmetic contains undecidable formulas, as well as achievements in computer science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, biology, and cognitive science. Here it is argued that these achievements hang together and have p…Read more
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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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64Semantics and the Social Sciences (review)Review of Metaphysics 36 (3): 723-724. 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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49Descartes: The Smear and Related MisconstrualsJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41 (4): 365-376. 2011.In part because he is known through his Meditations, a short pamphlet he wrote, rightly in fear, to conciliate (unsuccessfully) with the church, and because his rationalism is misconstrued when interpreted empirically, Descartes is subject to a variety of misunderstandings. It does not help that he is dogged by a canard invented in the late 1600s and revived by the animal rights movement, a canard that was designed to denigrate the then burgeoning mechanistic new science, discovered cruelly cutt…Read more
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41The Wiles of evolutionary psychology and the indeterminacy of selectionPhilosophical Forum 39 (1). 2008.
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37Russell and Wittgenstein: A Study in Civility and ArroganceThe Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly 122. 2004.
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35Coming of age in Olduvai and the Zaire rain forestBehavioral and Brain Sciences 18 (1): 196-197. 1995.ProbablyHomo habilisis two species not one; similarly for Pan troglodytes. Although amenable to training, in naturePan paniscusmay be a “specialized insular dwarf.” Language is uniquely human, but symbolic behavior and intelligence are widespread among animals with little respect for phylogenetic closeness toHomo sapiens.
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34George Graham, philosophy of mind: An introduction (review)Minds and Machines 9 (2): 293-295. 1999.
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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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34Faculty before folkBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 579-580. 1998.Pace Atran, (1) folk physics, (2) folk biology, and (3) folk psychology rest on informationally encapsulated modules that emerge before language: a gifted austic person who can see objects and animals perfectly well can nonetheless be incommunicatively mind blind.
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34The 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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31Nature’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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30Book 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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29Knowledge and the Flow of Information (review)Review of Metaphysics 40 (3): 569-570. 1987.That this is one of the most distinguished books in the excellent Bradford Books cognitive science/philosophy series is suggested by the March 1983 issue of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in which we find a precis of the book, some twenty commentaries, and Dretske's replies. Physicalists and anti-physicalists in psychology have both stressed the importance of "top-down" strategies and have debated, prospectively, about the likelihood that we eventually will have suitable reductions, or explanato…Read more
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28James H. Fetzer, philosophy and cognitive science, second edition: Revised and expanded, paragon issues in philosophy (review)Minds and Machines 9 (3): 435-437. 1999.
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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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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 |