Stephen Stich

Throughout the 20th century, an enormous amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world is not possible. These arguments, whose origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work of some of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, including Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of contemporary philosophers. (e.g., Cohen 1999, DeRose 1995, Hill 1996, Klein 1981, Lewis 1996, McGinn 1993, Nozick 1981, Schiffer 1996, Unger 1975, Williams 1996) Typically, these arguments make use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal to intuition, little or no defense is offered, and in many cases it is hard to see what else could be said in support of these premises. A number of authors have suggested that the intuitions undergirding these skeptical arguments are universal – shared by everyone (or almost everyone) who thinks reflectively about knowledge. In this paper we will offer some evidence indicating that they are far from universal. Rather, the evidence suggests that many of the intuitions epistemologists invoke vary with the cultural background, socioeconomic status and educational background of the person offering the intuition. And this, we will argue, is bad news for the skeptical arguments that rely on those intuitions. The evidence may also be bad news for skepticism itself – not because it shows that skepticism is false, but rather because, if we accept one prominent account of the link between epistemic intuitions and epistemic concepts, it indicates that skepticism may be much less interesting and much less worrisome than philosophers have taken it to be.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong-Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to engage in “reflective” thinking.

There is a parallel between a project pursued by the logical positivists and the contemporary effort to determine whether intentional properties can be naturalized. According to the verificationist account of meaningfulness advocated by the positivists, a sentence is meaningful, if and only if, it stands in an appropriate relation to observation sentences. Sentences that are not appropriately related to observation sentences are shunned as nonsense. Similarly, those concerned to naturalize the intentional hold that intentional properties are real, if and only if, they stand in an appropriate relationship to physical properties. The verificationist account of meaning suffered the death of a thousand failures. No one could produce a relation that did not include too much or exclude too much. I maintain that attempts to produce a relation that will do the work naturalists require, may well meet the same fate. On the pluralistic account of science that I favor, scientifically legitimate properties stand in many different relations to physical properties, and as science progresses, new properties are discovered that stand in new relations to physical properties.

A central premise in eliminativist arguments is that terms like “belief” and “desire” can be viewed as theoretical terms, in a tacit or unconscious theory of the mind, often called “folk psychology.” But the term “folk psychology” has been used as a label for a number of different sorts of things, and on some interpretations of the term, folk psychology could not turn out to be a false theory. Some philosophers, notably David Lewis, unpack the idea of folk psychology by appealing to the platitudes about the mind that everyone knows. Other philosophers unpack the idea by appeal to tacit principles that underlie the capacity to attribute mental states to other people and oneself. On this latter account, it could turn out that folk psychology consists entirely of procedural rules, or that it is encoded in a connectionist network that does not map onto a set of propositions in a unique and well‐motivated way. If things do turn out this way, then eliminativist arguments will not work, because folk psychology does not make claims that can be true or false. The chapter begins with a brief history of the idea that ordinary claims about mental states – both our own and those of other people – are subserved by a tacit theory. The basic idea is traced to the work of Wilfred Sellars. Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics made it plausible that we could use a complex theory, without having any conscious access to the principles of the theory.

Intentional irrealism is the view that nothing in the world instantiates intentional properties. If intentional irrealism is true, then there are no beliefs, desires or other intentional states. And that, according to Jerry Fodor, would be “the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species.” With considerable plausibility, Fodor also claims that the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism is the suspicion that “the intentional can’t be naturalized.” This chapter considers a number of accounts of what is required to “naturalize the intentional.” On some of these accounts, it is indeed plausible that the intentional cannot be naturalized, but nothing catastrophic would follow. On other accounts, it might well be catastrophic if the intentional cannot be “naturalized,” but on these accounts, there is no reason to believe that the intentional cannot be naturalized. Among the accounts of “naturalizing” considered are those that require conceptual analysis, those that require the existence of a scientifically discoverable essential property, and those that require supervenience on some set of nonintentional properties.

In cognitive science, the dominant strategy for explaining complex abilities, like the ability to understand and use natural language or the ability to predict the behavior of middle‐sized physical objects, is to posit the existence of an internally represented knowledge structure or tacit theory – typically a collection of rules or principles or propositions – which guides the execution of the capacity to be explained. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists have assumed that our “folk psychological” capacity to attribute mental states to other people, and to predict and explain their behavior must also be subserved by a tacit theory. However, a number of writers, including Robert Gordon and Alvin Goldman, have challenged this assumption. They maintain that we need not posit a rich, tacit theory in order to explain people's folk psychological abilities. Rather, they argue, these abilities can be explained by a special sort of mental simulation, in which we use ourselves as a model for the person whose mental states or behavior we are describing or predicting. This chapter offers a detailed interpretation and critique of simulation theory. It surveys many of the arguments offered by Gordon and Goldman, and argues that none of them are convincing. It also recounts some experimental evidence that is difficult for simulation theory to explain.

This chapter provides an example of the sort of argument that eliminativists have proposed. The central claim is that if a certain sort of connectionist model of belief or memory turns out to be correct, then folk psychology is seriously mistaken, and that would support eliminativism about propositional attitudes. Folk psychology depicts beliefs and other propositional attitudes as functionally discrete, semantically interpretable states that play a causal role in the production of other propositional attitudes, and ultimately in the production of behavior. But the family of connectionist models, described and illustrated, represents or encodes information in a widely distributed or holistic fashion, and the “hidden” units in the models have no comfortable semantic interpretation.

Though many arguments have been offered for eliminativism, they all have a common structure. They begin with the premise that beliefs, desires, and other commonsense mental states are the posits of a widely shared, largely tacit psychological theory – “folk psychology.” The second premise of the argument, defended in many different ways, is that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory. From these premises, eliminativists draw the conclusion that commonsense mental states do not exist. However, the premises do not entail the conclusion, so some additional premise is necessary. One way to fill the gap is to appeal to a description theory of reference. But the description theory of reference has been challenged by the causal‐historical theory of reference. So in order to determine whether the eliminativist argument is sound, it appears we must determine which theory of reference is the correct one, and to do this, we must say what a theory of reference is supposed to do – what facts it is supposed to capture. Various accounts of what a theory of reference is supposed to do are considered, but none of them, it is argued, will help determine whether the eliminativist conclusion follows from the premises. Other ways of filling the gap are also considered and rejected; the most promising of these invokes the normative naturalism strategy.

In the last few years, off-line simulation has become an increasingly important alternative to standard explanations in cognitive science. The contemporary debate began with Gordon (1986) and Goldman's (1989) off-line simulation account of our capacity to predict behavior. On their view, in predicting people's behavior we take our own decision making system `off line' and supply it with the `pretend' beliefs and desires of the person whose behavior we are trying to predict; we then let the decision maker reach a decision on the basis of these pretend inputs. Figure 1 offers a `boxological' version of the off-line simulation theory of behavior prediction.(1)

The topic of self-awareness has an impressive philosophical pedigree, and sustained discussion of the topic goes back at least to Descartes. More recently, selfawareness has become a lively issue in the cognitive sciences, thanks largely to the emerging body of work on “mindreading”, the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last 15 years, the processes underlying mindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states to other people. However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states to oneself. This process of reading one’s own mind or becoming self- aware will be our primary concern in this paper.

In recent years, there has been much concern expressed about the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to a cluster of phenomena that may be contributing to this gender gap. The findings we review indicate that when women and men with little or no philosophical training are presented with standard philosophical thought experiments, in many cases their intuitions about these cases are significantly different. In section 1 we review some of the data on the under-representation of women in academic philosophy. In section 2 we explain how we use the term 'intuition,' and offer a brief account of how intuitions are invoked in philosophical argument and philosophical theory building. In the third section we set out the evidence for gender differences in philosophical intuition and mention some evidence about gender differences in decisions and behaviors that are (or should be) of considerable interest to philosophers. In the fourth section, our focus changes from facts to hypotheses. In that section we explain how differences in philosophical intuition might be an important part of the explanation for the gender gap in philosophy. The fifth section is a brief conclusion.

For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. Doing that will require a quick look at a bit of the history of philosophical discussions about the mind. We’ll then turn our attention to the lively contemporary discussions aimed at clarifying the philosophical role that folk psychology is expected to play and at using findings in the cognitive sciences to get a clearer understanding of the exact nature of folk psychology.

For about 2500 years, from Plato’s time until the closing decades of the 20^th century, the dominant view was that the emotions are quite distinct from the processes of rational thinking and decision making, and are often a major impediment to those processes. But in recent years this orthodoxy has been challenged in a number of ways. Damasio (1994) has made a forceful case that the traditional view, which he has dubbed _Descartes’ Error_, is quite wrong, because emotions play a fundamental role in rational decision making. When the systems underlying the emotions don’t function properly, Damasio maintains, rational decision-making breaks down. Other theorists, most notably Robert Frank (1988), have argued that if we view the emotions through the longer lens of evolutionary theory, we can see that much of what looked to be irrational in the emotions is actually part of an effective strategy for achieving agents’ goals and maximizing their reproductive success. In the wake of this and other recent work, the pendulum of received opinion has swung in the other direction. The emotions are now increasingly regarded as inherently rational, as Frank maintains, and as important components of other rational processes

Frank Jackson has given us an elegant and important book. It is, by a long shot, the most sophisticated defense of the use of conceptual analysis in philosophy that has ever been offered. But we also we find it a rather perplexing book, for we can’t quite figure out what Jackson thinks a conceptual analysis is. And until we get clearer on that, we’re not at all sure that conceptual analysis, as Jackson envisions it, is possible. The main reason for our perplexity is that Jackson seems to be making some empirical assumptions about people’s intuitions and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to them, though it is far from clear exactly what these empirical assumptions are. Moreover, on what is perhaps the most natural reading, he is making at least one assumption about which many cognitive scientists who study concepts have serious doubts. In the first of our two sections, we will elaborate this theme. Our goal, in that section, is not so much to criticize as to seek clarification. It is a great virtue of this journal’s multiple review format that critics can pose questions to authors, and the authors get to reply. So we hope that in his reply Jackson will help us understand his defense of conceptual analysis by explaining more clearly what his empirical assumptions are; and if he is indeed making an assumption that many cognitive scientists would challenge, we hope he will tell us why he thinks that challenge is misguided. In the second section, our stance will be more critical. There is one empirical assumption about which Jackson is admirably clear and explicit. However, we think there is now good reason to think that this assumption is false.

The idea that we have special access to our own mental states has a distinguished philosophical history. Philosophers as different as Descartes and Locke agreed that we know our own minds in a way that is quite different from the way in which we know other minds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, this idea carne under serious attack, first from philosophy (Sellars 1956) and more recently from developmental psychology. The attack from developmental psychology arises from the growing body of work on “mindreading,” the process of attributing mental states to people (and other organisms). During the last fifteen years, the processes underlying rnindreading have been a major focus of attention in cognitive and developmental psychology. Most of this work has been concerned with the processes underlying the attribution of mental states toother people.However, a number of psychologists and philosophers have also proposed accounts of the mechanisms underlying the attribution of mental states tooneself.This process ofreading one's own mindorbecoming self-awarewill be our primary concern in this paper.

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is still out, there is now a substantial body of evidence suggesting that some of those empirical hypotheses are true. Much of this evidence derives from an ongoing series of experimental studies of epistemic intuitions that we have been conducting. A preliminary report on these studies will be presented in Section 3. In light of these studies, we think it is incumbent on those who pursue the epistemological projects in question to either explain why the truth of the hypotheses does not undermine their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are false. In Section 4, which is devoted to Objections and Replies, we’ll consider some of the ways in which defenders of the projects we are criticizing might reply to our challenge. Our goal, in all of this, is not to offer a conclusive argument demonstrating that the epistemological projects we will be criticizing are untenable. Rather, our aim is to shift the burden of argument

This chapter offers a high-level overview of the philosophy of cognitive science and an introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science. The philosophy of cognitive science emerged out of a set of common and overlapping interests among philosophers and scientists who study the mind. We identify five categories of issues that illustrate the best work in this broad field: (1) traditional philosophical issues about the mind that have been invigorated by research in cognitive science, (2) issues regarding the practice of cognitive science and its foundational assumptions, (3) issues regarding the explication and clarification of core concepts in cognitive science, (4) first-order empirical issues where philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary investigation of particular psychological phenomena, (5) traditional philosophical issues that aren’t about the mind but that can be informed by a better understanding of how the mind works.

Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, the descriptivist view of reference and the causal-historical view of reference, have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However, recent work in cultural psychology has shown systematic differences between East Asians and Westerners, and some work indicates that this extends to intuitions about philosophical cases. In light of these findings on cultural differences, two experiments were conducted which explored intuitions about reference in Westerners and East Asians. Both experiments indicate that, for certain central cases, Westerners are more likely than East Asians to report intuitions that are consistent with the causal-historical view. These results constitute prima facie evidence that semantic intuitions vary from culture to culture, and that paper argues that this fact raises questions about the nature of the philosophical enterprise of developing a theory of reference.

This chapter addresses the issue of the underrepresentation of women in philosophy by presenting an account regarding gender differences in philosophical institutions. It begins with an analysis of data on the gender gap in academic philosophy; followed by a discussion about the term “intuition,”as well as the tendency to appeal to intuitions during philosophical arguments. It then presents empirical data about gender differences derived from a series of experiments such as a Gettier-style case study of Christina Starmans and Ori Friedman, a philosophical thought experiment of Geoffrey Holtzman, and one of David Pizarro about moral responsibility and causal deviance, among others; one hypothesis derived from these studies pertains to the distinct differences between women and mens' intuitions regarding philosophy, with the instructors deciding that the mens' are more correct.

The essays in this volume make it abundantly clear that there is no shortage of disagreement about the plausibility of the simulation theory. As we see it, there are at least three factors contributing to this disagreement. In some instances the issues in dispute are broadly empirical. Different people have different views on which theory is favored by experiments reported in the literature, and different hunches about how future experiments are likely to turn out. In 3.1 and 3.3 we will consider two cases that fall under this heading. With a bit of luck these disputes will be resolved as more experiments are done and more data become available. Faulty arguments are a second source of disagreement. In 3.2 and 3.4 we will set out two dubious arguments advanced by our critics and try to explain exactly why we think they are mistaken. The third source of disagreement is terminological. Terms like "theory-theory," "simulation theory" and a number of others are often not clearly defined, and they are used in different ways by different authors. (Worse yet, we suspect they are sometimes used in different ways by a single author on different occasions). Thus it is sometimes the case that what appears to be a substantive disagreement turns out to be simply a verbal dispute. Moreover, since the labels "theory-theory" and "simulation theory" are each used to characterize a broad range of theories, it may well turn out that some of the theories falling under both headings are correct. In Sections 1 and 2, we will set out a variety of different views for which the labels "theory-theory" and "simulation theory" might be used. As we proceed we'll point out a number of places where disagreements diminish when distinctions among different versions of the theory-theory and the simulation theory are kept clearly in mind.

Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in childhood. According to this view, the processes underlying cognitive development in infants and children and the processes underlying scientific cognition are _identical_. We argue that Gopnik’s bold hypothesis is untenable because it, along with much of cognitive science, neglects the many important ways in which human minds are designed to operate within a social environment. This leads to a neglect of _norms_ and the processes of _social_ _transmission_ which have an important effect on scientific cognition and cognition more generally