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43Knowledge by ignoringBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (5): 781-781. 1999.Some cases of implicit knowledge involve representations of (implicitly) known propositions, but this is not the only important type of implicit knowledge. Chomskian linguistics suggests another model of how humans can know more than is accessible to consciousness. Innate capacities to focus on a small range of possibilities, thereby ignoring many others, need not be grounded by inner representations of any possibilities ignored. This model may apply to many domains where human cognition “fills …Read more
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95Believing in languagePhilosophy of Science 63 (3): 338-373. 1996.We propose that the generalizations of linguistic theory serve to ascribe beliefs to humans. Ordinary speakers would explicitly (and sincerely) deny having these rather esoteric beliefs about language--e.g., the belief that an anaphor must be bound in its governing category. Such ascriptions can also seem problematic in light of certain theoretical considerations having to do with concept possession, revisability, and so on. Nonetheless, we argue that ordinary speakers believe the propositions e…Read more
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44CensorshipIn Paisley Livingston & Carl R. Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Routledge. 2008.For individuals at all points on the political spectrum, and especially for those engaged in any form of expressive enterprise – from comic book illustrators, to film directors, to performance artists – censorship typically carries very negative connotations. Indeed, for many, censorship is the very antithesis of freedom and creativity. However, we can and should conceive of censorship more neutrally – simply as the imposition of constraints. On such a construal, censorship is not obviously alwa…Read more
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39Who's Afraid of Feminism? (review)Dialogue 35 (2): 327-342. 1996.Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers's target inWho Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Womenis “gender feminism.” Her aim is to convince us that gender feminists are anti-intellectual opportunists who deliberately spread lies about the incidence of date rape (chap. 10), domestic battery (Preface, chap. 9) and about the general state of male-female relations in America (chaps. 1, 9 and 11), thereby generating fear and resentment of men (chap. 2), all so that they may secure vast amounts of gov…Read more
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Robert V. Hannaford, Moral Anatomy and Moral Reasoning (review)Philosophy in Review 15 246-249. 1995.
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Robert V. Hannaford, Moral Anatomy and Moral Reasoning Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (4): 246-249. 1995.
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1Gerald Dworkin, ed., Morality, Harm and the Law Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 15 (1): 29-32. 1995.
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37Does Moral Philosophy have a Future? Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture, and Philosophy, Michele M. Moody-Adams , 270 pp., $35.00 cloth (review)Ethics and International Affairs 13 269-271. 1999.
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7Moral competenceIn Kumiko Murasugi & Robert Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and linguistics, Westview Press. pp. 169--190. 1999.
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Learning from experience: moral phenomenology and politicsIn Ann Ferguson (ed.), Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics, Routledge. pp. 28--44. 1998.
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1So far as we know, we are the only species capable of introspection, and thus, sometimes, of insight into our own individual and collective nature. Arguably, the entire discipline of philosophy and, much more recently, of psychology, is premised on this simply stated but complicated fact. We are also a social species, each of us desiring – perhaps, even needing – to live as one among others. Taken together, these perfectly trite observations invite a number of questions regarding the nature of t…Read more
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80Dupoux and Jacob's moral instincts: throwing out the baby, the bathwater and the bathtubTrends in Cognitive Sciences 12 (1): 1-2. 2008.
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68Reconciliation for realistsEthics and International Affairs 13. 1999.The rhetoric of reconciliation is common in situations where traditional judicial responses to past wrongdoing are unavailable because of corruption, large numbers of offenders, or anxiety about the political consequences. But what constitutes reconciliation?
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16The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience Thomas Szasz Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, x + 182 pp., $19.95 (review)Dialogue 38 (2): 420-. 1999.
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13Morality is so steeped in the quotidian details of praise and blame, of do’s and don’t’s, and of questions about the justifiability of certain practices it is no wonder that philosophers and psychologists have devoted relatively little effort to investigating what makes moral life possible in the first place. In making this claim, I neither ignore Kant and his intellectual descendants, nor the large literature in developmental moral psychology from Piaget on. My charge has to do with this fact: …Read more
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Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (review)Philosophy in Review 14 155-157. 1994.
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3Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 20 (6): 410-413. 2000.
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209How good is the linguistic analogy?In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 145--167. 2005.A nativist moral psychology, modeled on the successes of theoretical linguistics, provides the best framework for explaining the acquisition of moral capacities and the diversity of moral judgment across the species. After a brief presentation of a poverty of the moral stimulus argument, this chapter sketches a view according to which a so-called Universal Moral Grammar provides a set of parameterizable principles whose specific values are set by the child's environment, resulting in the acquisi…Read more
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11The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and NeuroscienceThomas Szasz Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996, x + 182 pp., $19.95 (review)Dialogue 38 (2): 420-421. 1999.In this book, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz returns to familiar subjects—the collusion between state and medical authorities, the social construction of mental disease—linking them with some other recent topics: so-called False Memory Syndrome and the modern erosion of individual responsibility. Szasz’s central and unifying thesis is that there is no such thing as the mind; he recommends, rather, that we focus on the concept of minding, where this encompasses a host of cognitive operations, includin…Read more
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98PornographyIn Paisley Livingston & Carl R. Plantinga (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, Routledge. 2008.Pornography has attracted a good deal of academic and political attention, primarily from feminists of various persuasions, moral philosophers, and legal scholars. Surprisingly less work has been forthcoming from film theorists, given how much pornography has been produced on video and DVD and is now available through live streaming video over the Internet. Indeed, it is not until 1989, with the publication of Linda Williams’ groundbreaking Hard Core, that pornography is distinguished, in terms …Read more
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47Moral competence is cognitive but (perhaps) nonmodularBehavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (1): 128-129. 1996.Barresi & Moore's account has at least two implications for moral psychology. First, it appears to provide support for cognitive theories of moral competence. Second, their claim that the development of social understanding depends upondomain-generalchanges in cognitive ability appears to oppose the idea that moral competence is under-pinned by a moral module.
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268The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and SpeculationsTopics in Cognitive Science 2 (3): 486-510. 2010.Inspired by the success of generative linguistics and transformational grammar, proponents of the linguistic analogy (LA) in moral psychology hypothesize that careful attention to folk-moral judgments is likely to reveal a small set of implicit rules and structures responsible for the ubiquitous and apparently unbounded capacity for making moral judgments. As a theoretical hypothesis, LA thus requires a rich description of the computational structures that underlie mature moral judgments, an acc…Read more
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Making "Implicit" Explicit: Toward an Account of Implicit Linguistic KnowledgeDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1991.In chapter one I consider two arguments for the claim that we ought to attribute linguistic knowledge to speakers of a natural language. The a priori argument has it that a theory of understanding reveals what it is that speakers of a language know about their language. The second argument takes the form of an inference to the best explanation, emphasising the idea that speaking and understanding a language is a rational activity carried on by agents with intention and purpose. Linguistic knowle…Read more
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79We must admire the ambition of Prinz’s title question. But does he provide a convincing answer to it? Prinz’s own view of morality as “a byproduct – accidental or invented – of faculties that evolved for different purposes (1),” which appears to express a negative reply, does not receive much direct argument here. Rather, Prinz’s main aim is to try to show that the considerations he believes are typically presented by moral nativists are insufficient or inadequate to establish that morality is i…Read more
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