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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 one is theorizing about fundamental human representational capacities.
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” moral demands ignores recent studies indicating that often we do not.
Public officials in John Rawls's well-ordered society face an assurance problem. They prefer to act in accordance with the political conception of justice, but only if they are assured that others will. On Paul Weithman's influential interpretation, Rawls attempts to solve this problem by claiming that public reason is an assurance mechanism. There are several problems with Rawls's solution: Public reason talk is too cheap to facilitate assurance, it is difficult to know when particular utterances express public reasons, and the requirements of public reason conflict with the fact of reasonable pluralism. We argue that convergence discourse—not public reason—solves the assurance problem by being a costly signal that indicates commitment to the political conception. This solution has none of Rawls's problems and has an interesting corollary: As diversity increases in society, so too does society's ability to solve the assurance problem. In short, the more diversity the better.
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 members of the general public share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
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 of evidence suggesting that they do.
Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by which appeal to psychological factors can help explain cultural phenomena.
We discuss the implications of the findings reported in the target article for moral theory, and argue that they represent a clear and genuine case of fundamental moral disagreement. As such, the findings support a moderate form of moral anti-realism – the position that, for some moral issues, there is no fact of the matter about what is right and wrong.
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 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.
By
Peter Carruthers, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland College Park,
Stephen Stich, Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Michael Siegal, Professor of Psychology, University of Sheffield
By
Peter Carruthers, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland College Park,
Stephen Stich, Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Michael Siegal, Professor of Psychology, University of Sheffield
By
Peter Carruthers, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland College Park,
Stephen Stich, Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Michael Siegal, Professor of Psychology, University of Sheffield
By
Peter Carruthers, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland College Park,
Stephen Stich, Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Michael Siegal, Professor of Psychology, University of Sheffield
In this brief opening chapter we briskly review some of the recent debates within philosophy and psychology which set the stage for the present collection of essays. We then introduce the essays themselves, stressing the inter-linking themes and cross-connections between them.
Introduction
The central position of science in our contemporary world needs no emphasis. Without science (broadly construed, to include all forms of technical innovation) we would still be roaming the savannahs of Africa like our Homo habilis ancestors, digging up tubers and scavenging scraps of meat. And without science (construed narrowly, as involving the application of an experimental method) we would have seen none of the advances in knowledge, technology and accumulation of wealth which have transformed the world and most of its people in just the last four centuries or so. Science now touches every aspect of our lives, from cradle (indeed, sometimes from conception) to grave. Given the manifest importance of science, the search for a scientific understanding of scientific thought and activity itself should need no further motivating. But in fact, the attempt to explain scientific cognition is not only extremely hard, but raises a whole host of fascinating and puzzling questions about the nature, development and operations of the human mind, and its interactions with culture.
This book is about the question: what makes science possible? Specifically, what features of the human mind, of human cognitive development and of human social arrangements permit and facilitate the conduct of science?
By
Peter Carruthers, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland College Park,
Stephen Stich, Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Michael Siegal, Professor of Psychology, University of Sheffield
By
Luc Faucher, Department of Philosophy, University of Quebec at Montreal,
Ron Mallon, Department of Philosophy, University of Utah,
Daniel Nazer, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University,
Shaun Nichols, Department of Philosophy, College of Charleston,
Aaron Ruby, Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University,
Stephen Stich, Board of Governors Professor, Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University,
Jonathan Weinberg, Department of Philosophy, Indiana University
Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have recently proposed a novel account of 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.
Introduction
In two recent books and a number of articles, Alison Gopnik and her collaborators have proposed a bold and intriguing hypothesis about the relationship between scientific cognition and cognitive development in early childhood. In this chapter we will argue that Gopnik's bold hypothesis is untenable. More specifically, we will argue that even if Gopnik and her collaborators are right about cognitive development in early childhood they are wrong about science. The minds of normal adults and of older children are more complex than the minds of young children, as Gopnik portrays them, and some of the mechanisms that play no role in Gopnik's account of cognitive development in early childhood play an essential role in scientific cognition.