•  53
    Number Concepts: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry
    Cambridge University Press. 2024.
    This Element, written for researchers and students in philosophy and the behavioral sciences, reviews and critically assesses extant work on number concepts in developmental psychology and cognitive science. It has four main aims. First, it characterizes the core commitments of mainstream number cognition research, including the commitment to representationalism, the hypothesis that there exist certain number-specific cognitive systems, and the key milestones in the development of number cogniti…Read more
  •  6
    The concept of innateness has historically exerted an influence in many regions of biology and it continues to play a significant role in cognitive science especially, developmental psychology and linguistics. This chapter provides an overview of some recent efforts to empirically study the innateness concept, both as deployed in folk contexts and among scientists. It considers whether this research really bolsters the standard criticism. The chapter describes research by Paul Griffiths and his …Read more
  • Massive modularity
    In E. Margolis, R. Samuels & S. Stich (eds.), Oxford handbook of philosophy of cognitive science, Oxford University Press. 2012.
  •  127
    Cognitive Science and Explanations of Psychopathology
    In K. W. M. Fulford (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press. pp. 413-433. 2013.
    This chapter examines the core explanatory strategies of cognitive science and their application to the study of psychopathology. In addition to providing a taxonomy of different strategies, we illustrate their application, with special attention to Autism Spectrum Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder. We conclude by considering two challenges to the prospects of a developed cognitive science of psychopathology.
  •  135
    Cardinals, Ordinals, and the Prospects for a Fregean Foundation
    In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
    There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Nevertheless, some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is more “legitm…Read more
  •  34
    Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of _which number_ is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of _notation_. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship b…Read more
  •  250
    Saul Kripke once noted that there is a tight connection between computation and de re knowledge of whatever the computation acts upon. For example, the Euclidean algorithm can produce knowledge of which number is the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Arguably, algorithms operate directly on syntactic items, such as strings, and on numbers and the like only via how the numbers are represented. So we broach matters of notation. The purpose of this article is to explore the relationship betwe…Read more
  •  370
    Resolving Frege’s Other Puzzle
    Philosophica Mathematica 30 (1): 59-87. 2022.
    Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we …Read more
  •  190
    Hofweber’s Nominalist Naturalism
    In Gianluigi Oliveri, Claudio Ternullo & Stefano Boscolo (eds.), Objects, Structures, and Logics. pp. 31-62. 2022.
    In this paper, we outline and critically evaluate Thomas Hofweber’s solution to a semantic puzzle he calls Frege’s Other Puzzle. After sketching the Puzzle and two traditional responses to it—the Substantival Strategy and the Adjectival Strategy—we outline Hofweber’s proposed version of Adjectivalism. We argue that two key components—the syntactic and semantic components—of Hofweber’s analysis both suffer from serious empirical difficulties. Ultimately, this suggests that an altogether different…Read more
  •  729
    According to the Rationality Constraint, our concept of belief imposes limits on how much irrationality is compatible with having beliefs at all. We argue that empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning and the psychopathology of delusion undermines only the most demanding versions of the Rationality Constraint, which require perfect rationality as a condition for having beliefs. The empirical evidence poses no threat to more relaxed versions of the Rationality Co…Read more
  •  18
    Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and critically evaluate one core assumption: the identity thesis.
  •  187
    In this chapter we explain what experimental philosophy of science is, how it relates to the philosophy of science, and STS more broadly, and what sorts of contributions is can make to ongoing research in the philosophy of science.
  •  4
    Could Emotion Development Really Be the Acquisition of Emotion Concepts?
    Developmental Psychology 55 (9): 2015-2019. 2019.
    Emotion development research centrally concerns capacities to produce emotions and to think about them. We distinguish these enterprises and consider a novel account of how they might be related. On one recent account, the capacity to have emotions of various kinds comes by way of the acquisition of emotion concepts. This account relies on a constructionist theory of emotions and an embodied theory of emotion concepts. We explicate these elements, then raise a challenge for the approach. It appe…Read more
  •  33
    Hale’s argument from transitive counting
    with Eric Snyder and Stewart Shaprio
    Synthese 198 (3): 1905-1933. 2019.
    A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. According to these neologicists, if legitimate, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation—Hume’s Principle—and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind–Peano axioms. In this paper, we consider a recent argument for legitimat…Read more
  •  16
    This volume gathers together leading philosophers of science and cognitive scientists from around the world to provide one of the first book-length studies of this important and emerging field. Specific topics considered include learning and the nature of scientific knowledge, the cognitive consequences of exposure to explanations, climate change, and mechanistic reasoning and abstraction. Chapters explore how experimental methods can be applied to questions about the nature of science and show …Read more
  •  453
    Classical Computational Models
    In Mark Sprevak & Matteo Colombo (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, Routledge. pp. 103-119. 2018.
  •  83
    One of the more distinctive features of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism about arithmetic is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint – roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. In particular, they maintain that, if adopted, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation – Hume’s Principle – and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind-Peano axioms. In what foll…Read more
  •  55
    Cardinals, Ordinals, and the Prospects for a Fregean Foundation
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82 77-107. 2018.
    There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is ‘more basic’ or ‘more fund…Read more
  •  1
    Massively Modular Minds: The Nature, Plausibility and Philosophical Implications of Evolutionary Psychology
    Dissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 1998.
    This dissertation focuses on the massive modularity hypothesis defended by evolutionary psychologists---the hypothesis that the human mind is composed largely or perhaps even entirely of special purpose information processing organs or "modulees" that have been shaped by natural selection to handle the sorts of recurrent information processing problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears. ;In discussing MMH, I have three central goals. First, I aim to clarify the hypothesis and develop…Read more
  •  27
    Analytic Pragmatism and Universal LX Vocabulary
    with Kevin Scharp
    Philosophia 45 (4): 1-25. 2017.
    In his recent John Locke Lectures – published as Between Saying and Doing – Brandom extends and refines his views on the nature of language and philosophy by developing a position that he calls Analytic Pragmatism. Although Brandom’s project bears on an extraordinarily rich array of different philosophical issues, we focus here on the contention that certain vocabularies have a privileged status within our linguistic practices, and that when adequately understood, the practices in which these vo…Read more
  •  240
    Nativism in cognitive science
    Mind and Language 17 (3): 233-65. 2002.
    Though nativist hypotheses have played a pivotal role in the development of cognitive science, it remains exceedingly obscure how they—and the debates in which they figure—ought to be understood. The central aim of this paper is to provide an account which addresses this concern and in so doing: a) makes sense of the roles that nativist theorizing plays in cognitive science and, moreover, b), explains why it really matters to the contemporary study of cognition. I conclude by outlining a range of…Read more
  •  137
    Do accounts of scientific theory formation and revision have implications for theories of everyday cognition? We maintain that failing to distinguish between importantly different types of theories of scientific inference has led to fundamental misunderstandings of the relationship between science and everyday cognition. In this article, we focus on one influential manifestation of this phenomenon which is found in Fodor's well-known critique of theories of cognitive architecture. We argue that …Read more
  •  16
    In their recent and influential book Rethinking Innateness, Jeffrey Elman and his co‐authors argue that evidence from neurobiology provides us with grounds to reject representational nativism (RN). I argue that Elman et al.’s argument fails because it makes a series of unwarranted assumptions about RN and about the extent to which neurobiological data constrain claims about the innateness of mental rep‐resentations. Moreover, I briefly discuss how we ought to understand RN and argue that on two …Read more
  •  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
  •  162
    Is the human mind massively modular?
    In Robert J. Stainton (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Cognitive Science, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.
    Among the most pervasive and fundamental assumptions in cognitive science is that the human mind (or mind-brain) is a mechanism of some sort: a physical device com- posed of functionally specifiable subsystems. On this view, functional decomposition – the analysis of the overall system into functionally specifiable parts – becomes a central project for a science of the mind, and the resulting theories of cognitive archi- tecture essential to our understanding of human psychology
  •  74
    Review. Species of mind: The philosophy and biology of cognitive ethology. C Allen, M Bekoff
    with G. Purpura
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2): 375-380. 2000.