Sheffield, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  1
    The Innate Mind, 3 volumes, 2005-2007 (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2005.
  •  848
    Making sense of domain specificity
    Cognition 240 (C): 105583. 2023.
    The notion of domain specificity plays a central role in some of the most important debates in cognitive science. Yet, despite the widespread reliance on domain specificity in recent theorizing in cognitive science, this notion remains elusive. Critics have claimed that the notion of domain specificity can't bear the theoretical weight that has been put on it and that it should be abandoned. Even its most steadfast proponents have highlighted puzzles and tensions that arise once one tries to go …Read more
  •  3
    Concepts
    In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. 2003.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Definitional Structure Probabilistic Structure Theory Structure Concepts Without Structure Rethinking Conceptual structure.
  •  45
    Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and their Representation
    with Eric Margolis
    Analysis 69 (1): 171-172. 2009.
    This collection of 16 original articles by prominent theorists from a variety of disciplines provides an excellent insight into current thinking about artifacts. The four sections address issues concerning the metaphysics of artifacts, the nature and cognitive development of artifact concepts, and the place of artifacts in evolutionary history. The most overtly philosophical contributions are in the first two sections. Metaphysical issues addressed include the ‘mind-dependence’ of artifacts and …Read more
  •  193
    Should the Study of Homo sapiens be Part of Cognitive Science?
    with H. Clark Barrett and Stephen Stich
    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
  • Is linguistics a branch of psychology?
    In Alex Barber (ed.), Epistemology of language, Oxford University Press. 2003.
  •  12
    Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies
    with Bailey R. House, Joan B. Silk, Joseph Henrich, H. Clark Barrett, Brooke A. Scelza, Adam H. Boyette, Barry S. Hewlett, and Richard McElreath
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (36): 14586-14591. 2013.
    Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and sub…Read more
  •  13
    Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies
    with H. Clark Barrett, Tanya Broesch, Rose M. Scott, Zijing He, Renee Baillargeon, Di Wu, Matthias Bolz, Joseph Henrich, Peipei Setoh, and Jianxin Wang
    Proceedings of the Royal Society, B (Biological Sciences) 280 (1755). 2013.
  •  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, Stephen P. Stich, and Christopher von Rueden
    Proceedings of the Royal Society; B (Biological Sciences) 283. 2016.
  •  133
    What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered (review)
    European Journal of Philosophy 9 242-247. 2008.
    Fiona Cowie's book What's Within: Nativism Reconsidered offers an important critical assessment of nativist views of the mind. She provides an account of what nativism consists in, and discusses prominent nativist views of concept acquisition and language acquisition. In the latter case, she also offers an empiricist alternative to Chomskyan nativist accounts, and claims that the main arguments for an innate language faculty—one that embodies Universal Grammar—don't work. We provide an overview …Read more
  •  10
    Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies
    with Daniel M. T. Fessler, H. Clark Barrett, Martin Kanovsky, Stephen P. Stich, Colin Holbrook, Joseph Henrich, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Matthew M. Gervais, Michael Gurven, Geoff Kushnick, Anne C. Pisor, and Christopher von Rueden
    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
  •  404
    Many philosophers reject the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOT) on the grounds that is leads to an explanatory regress problem. According to this line of argument, LOT is invoked to explain certain features of natural language, but the language of thought has the very same features and consequently no explanatory progress has been made. In an earlier paper (“Regress Arguments against the Language of Thought”, Analysis 57.1), we argued that this regress argument doesn’t work and that even propo…Read more
  •  152
    Concepts
    In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 190-213. 2003.
    This article provides a critical overview of competing theories of conceptual structure (definitional structure, probabilistic structure, theory structure), including the view that concepts have no structure (atomism). We argue that the explanatory demands that these different theories answer to are best accommodated by an organization in which concepts are taken to have atomic cores that are linked to differing types of conceptual structure.
  •  315
    Concepts
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.
    This entry provides an overview of theories of concepts that is organized around five philosophical issues: (1) the ontology of concepts, (2) the structure of concepts, (3) empiricism and nativism about concepts, (4) concepts and natural language, and (5) concepts and conceptual analysis.
  •  542
    Concept Nativism and Neural Plasticity
    In Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence (eds.), The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, Mit Press. pp. 117-147. 2015.
    One of the most important recent developments in the study of concepts has been the resurgence of interest in nativist accounts of the human conceptual system. However, many theorists suppose that a key feature of neural organization—the brain’s plasticity—undermines the nativist approach to concept acquisition. We argue that, on the contrary, not only does the brain’s plasticity fail to undermine concept nativism, but a detailed examination of the neurological evidence actually provides powerfu…Read more
  •  992
    Abstraction and the Origin of General Ideas
    Philosophers' Imprint 12 1-22. 2012.
    Philosophers have often claimed that general ideas or representations have their origin in abstraction, but it remains unclear exactly what abstraction as a psychological process consists in. We argue that the Lockean aspiration of using abstraction to explain the origins of all general representations cannot work and that at least some general representations have to be innate. We then offer an explicit framework for understanding abstraction, one that treats abstraction as a computational pr…Read more
  •  412
    Should we trust our intuitions? Deflationary accounts of the analytic data
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (3): 299-323. 2003.
    At least since W. V. O. Quine's famous critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction, philosophers have been deeply divided over whether there are any analytic truths. One line of thought suggests that the simple fact that people have ' intuitions of analyticity' might provide an independent argument for analyticities. If defenders of analyticity can explain these intuitions and opponents cannot, then perhaps there are analyticities after all. We argue that opponents of analyticity have some un…Read more
  •  159
    The Conceptual Mind’s twenty-four newly commissioned essays cover the most important recent theoretical developments in the study of concepts, identifying and exploring the big ideas that will guide further research over the next decade. Topics include concepts and animals, concepts and the brain, concepts and evolution, concepts and perception, concepts and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptua…Read more
  •  1334
    The poverty of the stimulus argument
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2): 217-276. 2001.
    Noam Chomsky's Poverty of the Stimulus Argument is one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and the mind. Though widely endorsed by linguists, the argument has met with much resistance in philosophy. Unfortunately, philosophical critics have often failed to fully appreciate the power of the argument. In this paper, we provide a systematic presentation of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument, clarifying its structure, content, and evidential base. We defend the …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, Stephen Stich, Chris von Rueden, and Wanying Zhao
    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
  •  356
    The Scope of the Conceptual
    In Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels & Stephen Stich (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press. 2012.
    This chapter provides a critical overview of ten central arguments that philosophers have given in support of a distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. We use these arguments to examine the question of whether (and in what sense) perceptual states might be deemed nonconceptual and also whether (and in what sense) animals and infants might be deemed to lack concepts. We argue that philosophers have implicitly relied on a wide variety of different ways to draw the conceptual/no…Read more
  •  483
    Boghossian on analyticity
    Analysis 61 (4): 293-302. 2001.
    Paul Boghossian (1997) has argued that there is much to be said on behalf of the notion of analyticity so long as we distinguish epistemic analyticity and metaphysical analyticity. In particular, (1) epistemic analyticity isn’t undermined by Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, (2) it can explain the a prioricity of logic, and (3) epistemic analyticity can’t be rejected short of embracing semantic irrealism. In this paper, we argue that all three of these claims are mistaken.
  •  1398
    In defense of nativism
    Philosophical Studies 165 (2): 693-718. 2013.
    This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four parts.…Read more
  •  454
    Lewis' strawman
    Philosophical Quarterly 52 (206): 55-65. 2002.
    In a survey of his views in the philosophy of mind, David Lewis criticizes much recent work in the field by attacking an imaginary opponent, Strawman. His case against Strawman focuses on four central theses which Lewis takes to be widely accepted among contemporary philosophers of mind. These theses concern (1) the language of thought hypothesis and its relation to folk psychology, (2) narrow content, (3) de se content, and (4) rationality. We respond to Lewis, arguing that he underestimates St…Read more
  •  1131
    What is a concept? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question, reflecting a wide variety of approaches to the study of mind and language. Nonetheless, at the most general level, there are two dominant frameworks in contemporary philosophy. One proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the other proposes that they are abstract objects. This paper looks at the differences between these two approaches, the prospects for combining them, and the issues that are inv…Read more
  •  318
    Beyond the Building Blocks Model
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 139-140. 2011.
    This article is a commentary on Carey (2009) The Origin of Concepts. Carey rightly rejects the building blocks model of concept acquisition on the grounds that new primitive concepts can be learned via the process of bootstrapping. But new primitives can be learned by other acquisition processes that do not involve bootstrapping, and bootstrapping itself is not a unitary process. Nonetheless, the processes associated with bootstrapping provide important insights into conceptual change.
  •  289
    Concepts and Theoretical Unification
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 219-220. 2010.
    This article is a commentary on Machery (2009) Doing without Concepts. Concepts are mental symbols that have semantic structure and processing structure. This approach (1) allows for different disciplines to converge on a common subject matter; (2) it promotes theoretical unification; and (3) it accommodates the varied processes that preoccupy Machery. It also avoids problems that go with his eliminativism, including the explanation of how fundamentally different types of concepts can be co-ref…Read more
  •  347
    Theories of number concepts often suppose that the natural numbers are acquired as children learn to count and as they draw an induction based on their interpretation of the first few count words. In a bold critique of this general approach, Rips, Asmuth, Bloomfield [Rips, L., Asmuth, J. & Bloomfield, A.. Giving the boot to the bootstrap: How not to learn the natural numbers. Cognition, 101, B51–B60.] argue that such an inductive inference is consistent with a representational system that clearly d…Read more
  •  37
    This volume is a comprehensive survey of contemporary thought on a wide range of issues and provides students with the basic background to current debates in metaphysics
  •  44
    Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross‐Cultural Study
    with H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Tanya Broesch, Emma Cohen, Peggy Froerer, Martin Kanovsky, and Mariah G. Schug
    Cognitive Science 45 (6). 2021.
    It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from s…Read more