Stephen P. Stich

Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions

In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizable group of epistemological projects-a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition-would be seliously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empilical 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 hue. Much of this evidence delives 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 undernune their projects, or to say why, in light of the evidence we will present, they nonetheless assume that the hypotheses are

Beliefs and Subdoxastic States

It is argued that the intuitively sanctioned distinction between beliefs and non-belief states that play a role in the proximate causal history of beliefs is a distinction worth preserving in cognitive psychology. The intuitive distinction is argued to rest on a pair of features exhibited by beliefs but not by subdoxastic states. These are access to consciousness and inferential integration. Harmans view, which denies the distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states, is discussed and criticized.

The Cognitive Basis of Science

1. Introduction: what makes science possible? Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich and Michael Siegal Part I. Science and Innateness: 2. Human evolution and the cognitive basis of science Steven Mithen 3. Modular and cultural factors in biological understanding: an experimental approach to the cognitive basis of science Scott Atran 4. The roots of scientific reasoning: infancy, modularity, and the art of tracking Peter Carruthers Part II. Science and Cognition: 5. Science without grammar: scientific reasoning in severe a-grammatic aphasia Rosemary Varley 6. Causal maps and Bayes nets: a cognitive and computational account of theory-formation Alison Gopnik and Clark Glymour 7. The cognitive basis of model based reasoning in science Nancy Nersessian 8. Understanding the role of cognition in science: the Science as Category framework Kevin Dunbar 9. Theorizing is important, and collateral information constrains how well it is done Barbara Koslowski and Stephanie Thompson 10. The influence of prior belief on scientific thinking Jonathan St B. T. Evans 11. Thinking about causality: pragmatic, social and scientific rationality Denis Hilton Part III. Science and Motivation: 12. The passionate scientist: emotion in scientific cognition Paul Thagard 13. Emotions and epistemic evaluations Christopher Hookway 14. Social psychology and the theory of science Philip Kitcher Part IV. Science and the Social: 15. Scientific cognition as distributed cognition Ronald Giere 16. The science of childhood Michael Siegal 17. What do children learn from testimony? Paul Harris 18. The baby in the lab-coat: why child development is an inadequate model for understanding the development of science Luc Faucher, Ron Mallon, Daniel Nazer, Shaun Nichols, Aaron Ruby, Stephen Stich and Jonathan Weinberg.

The fragmentation of reason : preface to a pragmatic theory of cognitive evaluation

From Descartes to Popper, philosophers have criticized and tried to improve the strategies of reasoning invoked in science and in everyday life. In recent years leading cognitive psychologists have painted a detailed, controversial, and highly critical portrait of common sense reasoning. Stephen Stich begins with a spirited defense of this work and a critique of those writers who argue that widespread irrationality is a biological or conceptual impossibility.Stich then explores the nature of rationality and irrationality: What is it that distinguishes good reasoning from bad? He rejects the most widely accepted approaches to this question approaches which unpack rationality by appeal to truth, to reflective equilibrium or conceptual analysis. The alternative he defends grows out of the pragmatic tradition in which reasoning is viewed as a cognitive tool. Stichs version of pragmatism leads to a radical epistemic relativism and he argues that the widespread abhorrence of relativism is ill founded.Stephen Stich is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and author of From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science.

Connectionism, Eliminativism, and the Future of Folk Psychology

In the years since the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the term ‘scientific revolution’ has been used with increasing frequency in discussions of scientific change, and the magnitude required of an innovation before someone or other is tempted to call it a revolution has diminished alarmingly. Our thesis in this paper is that if a certain family of connectionist hypotheses turn out to be right, they will surely count as revolutionary, even on stringent pre-Kuhnian standards. There is no question that connectionism has already brought about major changes in the way many cognitive scientists conceive of cognition. However, as we see it, what makes certain kinds of connectionist models genuinely revolutionary is the support they lend to a thoroughgoing eliminativism about some of the central posits of common sense (or ‘folk’) psychology. Our focus in this paper will be on beliefs or propositional memories, though the argument generalizes straightforwardly to all the other propositional attitudes. If we are right, the consequences of this kind of connectionism extend well beyond the confines of cognitive science, since these models, if successful, will require a radical reorientation in the way we think about ourselves.

Could man be an irrational animal

Aristotle thought man was a rational animal. From his time to ours, however, there has been a steady stream of writers who have dissented from this sanguine assessment. For Bacon, Hume, Freud, or D. H. Lawrence, rationality is at best a sometimes thing. On their view, episodes of rational inference and action are scattered beacons on the irrational coastline of human history. During the last decade or so, these impressionistic chroniclers of mans cognitive foibles have been joined by a growing group of experimental psychologists who are subjecting human reasoning to careful empirical scrutiny. Much of what they have found would appall Aristotle. Human subjects, it would appear, regularly and systematically invoke inferential and judgmental strate gies ranging from the merely invalid to the genuinely bizarre. Recently, however, there have been rumblings of a reaction brewing a resurgence of Aristotelian optimism. Those defending the sullied name of human reason have been philosophers, and their weapons have been conceptual analysis and epistemological argument. The central thrust of their defense is the claim that empirical evidence could not possibly support the conclusion that people are systematically irra tional. And thus the experiments which allegedly show that they are must be either flawed or misinterpreted. In this paper I propose to take a critical look at these philosophical defenses of rationality. My sympathies, I should note straightaway, are squarely with the psychologists. My central thesis is that the philoso phical arguments aimed at showing irrationality cannot be experiment ally demonstrated are mistaken. Before considering these arguments, however, we would do well to set out a few illustrations of the sort of empirical studies which allegedly show that people depart from nor mative standards of rationality in systematic ways. This is the chore that will occupy us in the following section.

Reason and rationality

Over the past few decades, reasoning and rationality have been the focus of enormous interdisciplinary attention, attracting interest from philosophers, psychologists, economists, statisticians and anthropologists, among others. The widespread interest in the topic reflects the central status of reasoning in human affairs. But it also suggests that there are many different though related projects and tasks which need to be addressed if we are to attain a comprehensive understanding of reasoning.

DARWIN IN THE MADHOUSE: EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF MENTAL DISORDERS

Recent years have witnessed a ground swell of interest in the application of evolutionary theory to issues in psychopathology (Nesse & Williams 1995, Stevens & Price 1996, McGuire & Troisi 1998). Much of this work has been aimed at finding adaptationist explanations for a variety of mental disorders ranging from phobias to depression to schizophrenia. There has, however, been relatively little discussion of the implications that the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists might have for the classification of mental disorders. This is the theme we propose to explore. We’ll begin, in Section 1, by providing a brief overview of the account of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists. In Section 2 we’ll explain why issues of taxonomy are important and why the dominant approach to the classification of mental disorders is radically and alarmingly unsatisfactory. We will also indicate why we think an alternative approach, based on theories in evolutionary psychology, is particularly promising. In Section 3 we’ll try to illustrate some of the virtues of the evolutionary psychological approach to classification. The discussion in Section 3 will highlight a quite fundamental distinction between those disorders that arise from the malfunction of a component of the mind and those that can be traced to the fact that our minds must now function in environments that are very different from the environments in which they evolved. This mis-match between the current and ancestral environments can, we maintain, give rise to serious mental disorders despite the fact that, in one important sense, there is nothing at all wrong with the people suffering the disorder. Their minds are functioning exactly as Mother Nature intended them to. In Section 4, we’ll give a brief overview of some of the ways in which the sorts of malfunctions catalogued in Section 3 might arise, and sketch two rather different strategies for incorporating this etiologically information in a system for classifying mental disorders. Finally, in Section 5, we will explain why an evolutionary approach may lead to a quite radical revision in the classification of certain

Varieties of off-line simulation

A method and apparatus for scrubbing particles of sand used in foundry molding is disclosed. The device utilizes a rotating impellor surrounded by a stationary control cage having at least one upwardly positioned opening therein to project sand against a target. The sand rebounds from the target and is continually intercepted and impacted by subsequent grains of sand hurled by the impellor through the control cage opening. The device produces a scrubbing action on the particles by the repeated and continual contact with each to reduce binder buildup from the molding process. A first stage scrubbing of the particles is obtained by causing the particles to be compacted between the rotating impellor and the control cage prior to their being thrown against the target. The sand particles may be recycled through the device any number of times in order to increase the scrubbing effect and further reduce binder buildup.

Moral Intuitions: Are Philosophers Experts?

Recently psychologists and experimental philosophers have reported findings showing that in some cases ordinary people’s moral intuitions are affected by factors of dubious relevance to the truth of the content of the intuition. Some defend the use of intuition as evidence in ethics by arguing that philosophers are the experts in this area, and philosophers’ moral intuitions are both different from those of ordinary people and more reliable. We conducted two experiments indicating that philosophers and non-philosophers do indeed sometimes have different moral intuitions, but challenging the notion that philosophers have better or more reliable intuitions.