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Publications (216)
Wisdom is the hallmark of social judgment, but how people across cultures recognize wisdom remains unclear—distinct philosophical traditions suggest different views of wisdom’s cardinal features. We explore perception of wise minds across 16 socio-economically and culturally diverse convenience samples from 12 countries. Participants assessed wisdo...
Philosophers have argued that stakes affect knowledge: a given amount of evidence may suffice for knowledge if the stakes are low, but not if the stakes are high. By contrast, empirical work on the influence of stakes on ordinary knowledge ascriptions has been divided along methodological lines: “evidence‐fixed” prompts rarely find stakes effects,...
Many studies have found correlations between reflective thinking and disbelief in God or lower levels of religiosity — so-called analytic atheism. Some data even detect analytic atheism in highly reflective people like philosophers. However, there is growing evidence that the most widely used tests of reflection confound reflection with ancillary a...
We investigated the universality versus cultural specificity of preferences for internal decision-making strategies (intuition or deliberation) over external strategies (advice from friends or crowds). Participants from diverse samples spanning five continents (N=3,517), including Indigenous communities, were presented with scenarios involving choo...
Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. More...
This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psycho...
The concept of wisdom has captivated scholars throughout history, yet disagreements remain over its cultural variability. Here, we investigated wisdom perception in self and others across 16 samples from eight cultural regions on five continents. Participants assessed wisdom exemplars, non-exemplar targets, and themselves on 19 socio-cognitive char...
In a recent paper, Joshua Knobe (2019) offers a startling account of the metaphilosophical implications of findings in experimental philosophy. We argue that Knobe’s account is seriously mistaken, and that it is based on a radically misleading portrait of recent work in experimental philosophy and cultural psychology.
Phillips and colleagues claim that the capacity to ascribe knowledge is a “basic” capacity, but most studies reporting linguistic data reviewed by Phillips et al. were conducted in English with American participants – one of more than 6,500 languages currently spoken. We highlight the importance of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research when...
What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first p...
Philosophers have argued that some philosophical concepts are universal, but it is increasingly clear that the question of philosophical universals is far from settled, and that far more cross-cultural research is necessary. In this chapter, we illustrate the relevance of investigating philosophical concepts and describe results from recent cross-c...
Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a mo...
The question of whether religion played a role in the evolution of morality can be interpreted in different ways. I consider three. On the first interpretation, “morality” is understood as an evolved faculty for making moral judgments, where moral judgments are a special category of normative judgments. For seventy years, philosophers and psycholog...
What is the relationship between religious affiliation and conceptions of the moral domain? Putting aside the question of whether people from different religions agree about how to answer moral questions, here we investigate a more fundamental question: How much disagreement is there across religions about which issues count as moral in the first p...
Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ord...
Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all s...
Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. More...
Stanford's goal is to explain the uniquely human tendency to externalize or objectify “distinctively moral” demands, norms, and obligations. I maintain that there is no clear phenomenon to explain. Stanford's account of which norms are distinctively moral relies on Turiel's problematic work. Stanford's justification of the claim that we “objectify”...
The question that is center stage in this chapter is: Do intuitions about knowledge vary across cultures? The chapter begins by explaining what intuitions are, how they are used in philosophy, and why the presence or absence of cultural variation in philosophical intuitions is important for both philosophy and cognitive science. The remainder of th...
Appeal to intuition has played an important role in philosophical debates. Recent research in experimental philosophy empirically investigates philosophical intuitions, the factors that affect them, and the psychological and neurological mechanisms that underlie them. We distinguish between two common ways in which intuitions are used as philosophi...
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 w...
Many experimental philosophers are philosophers by training and professional affiliation, but some best work in experimental philosophy has been done by people who do not have advanced degrees in philosophy and do not teach in philosophy departments. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is the empirical investigation of philosophi...
Significance
It is widely considered a universal feature of human moral psychology that reasons for actions are taken into account in most moral judgments. However, most evidence for this moral intent hypothesis comes from large-scale industrialized societies. We used a standardized methodology to test the moral intent hypothesis across eight tradi...
Our paper [1] compared two competing hypotheses. The hypothesis that we label universalistic moral evaluation holds that a definitional feature of reasoning about moral rules is that, ceteris paribus, judgements of violations of rules concerning harm, rights or justice will be insensitive to spatial or temporal distance or the opinions of authority...
The existence of psychological altruism is hotly debated in the psychological and philosophical literature. In this paper I argue that even if psychological altruism does exist in some (or all) human groups, there may be no purely evolutionary explanation for existence of psychological altruism.
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 pa...
In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages (Brazil, India, Japan, and the USA) there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an und...
In a number of publications, Alan Leslie and colleagues have developed a theory of the psychological mechanisms underlying pretense. This theory maintains that pretense is an early manifestation of "theory of mind" or "mindreading" - the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. Nichols and Stich proposed an alternative theory of p...
Over the past four decades, human reason and rationality has been among the most intensely investigated topics in psychology, cognitive science, and economics. At the heart of this debate is a view of human rationality, often associated with the Heuristics and Biases tradition, on which much of our reasoning and decision making is normatively probl...
Document Type: Research Article Affiliations: Email: kevin.tobia@gmail.com Publication date: January 1, 2013 $(document).ready(function() { var shortdescription = $(".originaldescription").text().replace(/\\&/g, '&').replace(/\\, '<').replace(/\\>/g, '>').replace(/\\t/g, ' ').replace(/\\n/g, ''); if (shortdescription.length > 350){ shortdescription...
Baumard and colleagues put forward a new hypothesis about the nature and evolution of fairness. In this commentary, we discuss the relation between morality and their views about fairness.
In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether non-philosophers share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than...
In this paper we compare two theories about the cognitive architecture underlying morality. One theory, proposed by Sripada and Stich (forthcoming), posits an interlocking set of innate mechanisms that internalize moral norms from the surrounding community and generate intrinsic motivation to comply with these norms and to punish violators. The oth...
Let me begin with a bit of autobiography. I am, by profession, a teacher of philosophy. Year in and year out, for the last 15 or 20 years, I have taught a large undergraduate course on contemporary moral issues—issues such as abortion, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, genetic engineering, and animal rights. Over the years, I have written a handf...
This volume collects the best and most influential work on knowledge, rationality, and morality that Stephen Stich has published in the last forty years. All of the chapters here are concerned, in one way or another, with the ways in which findings and theories in the cognitive sciences can contribute to, and sometimes reshape traditional philosoph...
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...
We have recently presented evidence for cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions and explored the implications of such variation for philosophical arguments that appeal to some theory of reference as a premise. Devitt (2011) and Ichikawa and colleagues (forthcoming) offer critical discussions of the experiment and the conclusions that can be...
This article seeks to convince the reader that the empirical literature is often deeply relevant to important debates, and it is therefore intellectually irresponsible to ignore them. Sometimes empirical findings seem to contradict what particular disputing parties assert or presuppose, while in other cases, they appear to reconfigure the philosoph...
There is a venerable philosophical tradition that views human beings as intrinsically rational. But studies have shown that even under ordinary circumstances where fatigue, drugs, and strong emotions are not factors, people reason and make judgments in ways that systematically violate familiar canons of rationality on a wide array of problems. Thes...
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. 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, an...
This article focuses on different concepts of cognitive science. One of the concepts of cognitive science involves the explanation of cognitive capacities. Philosophers of cognitive science seek an understanding of how the science ought to be carried out. One class of questions that has figured prominently in the philosophy of cognitive science con...
Recent research across the disciplines of cognitive science has exerted a profound influence on how many philosophers approach problems about the nature of mind. These philosophers, while attentive to traditional philosophical concerns, are increasingly drawing both theory and evidence from empirical disciplines - both the framing of the questions...
Though empirical claims have always played a prominent role in theories advanced by moral philosophers, until recently, findings in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology have made very little impact on moral theory. Over the last decade, however, that situation has changed dramatically as a new generation of scientifically informed phi...
A critique of inferences from "is" to "ought" plays a central role in Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) defense of descriptivism. However, the reflective equilibrium strategy described by Goodman and embraced by Rawls, Cohen, and many others poses an important challenge to that critique. Dual-system theories may help respond to that challenge.
This chapter explores the intuitive distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states. It makes a plausible case for the claim that the intuitive distinction between beliefs and subdoxastic states marks a real and psychologically interesting boundary. Moreover, it is a boundary that has been largely overlooked by contemporary work in cognitive sim...
This chapter attempts to untangle the debate surrounding innate ideas and innate knowledge. The controversy is as follows: Some philosophers, as well as linguists, psychologists, and others, allege that human beings have innate knowledge or innate ideas. Others deny it. Advocates of the doctrines of innate ideas and innate knowledge commonly take t...
This volume collects work published in the last forty years on topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. The chapters here discuss a wide range of topics including grammar, innateness, reference, folk psychology, eliminativism, connectionism, evolutionary psychology, simulation theory, social construction, and psychopathology...
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 phi...
Intuitions play an important role in contemporary epistemology. Over the last decade, however, experimental philosophers have published a number of studies suggesting that epistemic intuitions may vary in ways that challenge the widespread reliance on intuitions in epistemology. In a recent paper, Jennifer Nagel offers a pair of arguments aimed at...
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...
Knobe contends that in making judgments about a wide range of matters, moral considerations and scientific considerations are "jumbled together" and thus that "we are moralizing creatures through and through." We argue that his own account of the mechanism underlying these judgments does not support this radical conclusion.
This chapter focuses on an issue that has vexed philosophers since Plato: is genuinely altruistic behavior possible, or is all human behavior ultimately selfish? It begins in Section 2 with a brief sketch of a cluster of assumptions about human desires, beliefs, actions, and motivation that are widely shared by historical and contemporary authors o...
From Plato to the present, philosophers have relied on intuitive judgments as evidence for or against philosophical theories. Most philosophers are WEIRD, highly educated, and male. The literature reviewed in the target article suggests that such people might have intuitions that differ from those of people in other groups. There is a growing body...
The Oxford Handbook of Rationality is a reference to the current state of play in the vital and interdisciplinary area of the study of rationality. Rationality has long been a central topic in philosophy, crossing standard divisions and categories. It continues to attract much attention in published research and teaching by philosophers as well as...
It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about...
Reply to Devitt and JacksonReply to EganReply to CowieReply to GoldmanReply to SterelnyReply to PrinzReply to Godfrey-SmithReply to SosaReply to BishopReferences
Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. Departing from a long-standing tradition, experimental philosophers go out and conduct systematic experiments to reach a better understanding of people’s ordinary intuitions about philosophica...
Experimental philosophy is a new movement that seeks to return the discipline of philosophy to a focus on questions about how people actually think and feel. Departing from a long-standing tradition, experimental philosophers go out and conduct systematic experiments to reach a better understanding of people’s ordinary intuitions about philosophica...
Responds to G. J. O'Brien's (see record
1991-31940-001) criticism of W. Ramsey et al's (1990) article and argues that to challenge propositional modularity, O'Brien must show not merely that many beliefs are involved in any inference, but that all of them are involved. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A satisfactory account of what it is to "naturalize the intentional"-an account that makes sense of what Fodor sees as "the deepest motivation for intentional irrealism"-must satisfy two constraints. First, it will have to sustain an argument from the premise that intentional notions can't be naturalized to the conclusion that intentional irrealism...
This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among...
This book is the third of a three-volume set on the innate mind. It provides an assessment of nativist thought and definitive reference point for future inquiry. Nativists have long been interested in a variety of foundational topics relating to the study of cognitive development and the historical opposition between nativism and empiricism. Among...
This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psycho...
This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psycho...
This chapter first explains why folk psychology has played such an important role in recent philosophy of mind. It then distinguishes two different accounts of folk psychology, and argues that functionalists should prefer the mindreading account on which folk psychology is the rich body of information or theory that underlies people's skill in attr...
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'...
Robert Gordon and Alvin Goldman, along with other philosophers, have challenged the received view about the cognitive mechanisms underlying our ability to describe, predict, and explain people's behavior. They agree in denying that an internally represented folk-psychological theory plays a central role in the exercise of these abilities. They also...
Kühberger et al. show that producing the Langer effect is considerably more difficult than has been assumed. Although their results clearly demonstrate a need for further exploration of the Langer effect, none of their arguments undermines the evidence against simulation theory that we presented in Nichols et al. (1996). In our study the actor subj...
The moral/conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the defi cits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous studies have indicated that moral transgressions, particularly those in which a victim is harmed, evoke a signature pattern of responses in the moral/convent...
Sober and Wilson have propose a cluster of arguments for the conclusion that “natural selection is unlikely to have given
us purely egoistic motives” and thus that psychological altruism is true. I maintain that none of these arguments is convincing.
However, the most powerful of their arguments raises deep issues about what egoists and altruists a...
This chapter provides a brief history of some of the theoretical strands that form the backdrop to contemporary debates among nativists about the evolutionary and cognitive underpinnings of culture, and the ways that culture shapes the mind. Summaries of the contents of each of the chapters in the volume are also provided.