Stephen Stich
Biographic Data
| ID | 1052792 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Stich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Stich |
| SIGNATURE | STICH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6038-7476 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 58 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1986 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A puzzle about knowledge ascriptions
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, while “evidence‐seeking” prompts consistently find them. We present a cross‐cultural study using bot…
Analytic atheism and analytic apostasy across cultures
Reflective thinking often predicts less belief in God or less religiosity – so-called analytic atheism. However, those correlations involve limitations: widely used tests of reflection confound reflection with ancillary abilities such as numeracy; some studies do not detect analytic atheism in every country; experimentally encouraging reflection makes some non-believers more open to believing in God; and one of the most common online research par…
Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies
Did religion play a role in the evolution of morality
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 psychologists have sought to characterize this special subset of normative judgments in a well-motivated way.…
Epistemology for the Rest of the World
Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word “know” and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Many contemporary epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists, are concerned with the truth-conditions of “S knows that p ,” or the proposition it expresses. However, there are over 6,000 languages in the world. Thus, it is not clear why we should think that subtle fac…
The Contribution of Confucius to Virtue Epistemology
Scholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This chapter seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The thir…
Philosophy
Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment
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 traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and t…
Why there might not be an evolutionary explanation for psychological altruism
Collected Papers, Volume 2
This volume collects the best and most influential essays on knowledge, rationality and morality that Stephen Stich has published in the last 40 years. The volume includes a new introductory essay that offers an overview of the papers and traces the history of how they emerged.
Stephen Stich Collected Papers, 1978-2010 Vol. 2
Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel 1
Against Arguments from Reference
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 reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture ( Machery et al. 2004 ). We …
The Innate Mind, Volume 3
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 the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how in…
Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality 1
Is Morality an Elegant Machine or a Kludge
In a passage in A Theory of Justice , which has become increasingly in uentialin recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral phi-losophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the rst stage ofmoral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attemptto describe our moral capacity Ð the capacity which underlies Othe poten-tially in nite number and variety of [moral] judgments we are preparedto make.O In order to de…
Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions
Jackson's Empirical Assumptions
Eliminating emotions
Connectionism, Eliminativism and The Future of Folk Psychology
William Ramsey, Stephen Stich, Joseph Garon, Connectionism, Eliminativism and The Future of Folk Psychology, Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (1990), pp. 499-533
Connectionism and three levels of nativism
Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversity
The Withering Away of the Cognitive State
Journal Article The Withering Away of the Cognitive State Get access Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. London: MIT Press, 1983. pp. xii + 266. Price £18.25 (pb £8.95) Flint Schier Flint Schier University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 143, April 1986, Pages 261–278, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219773 Published: 01 April 1986
Against Arguments from Reference
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 reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture ( Machery et al. 2004 ). We …
Jackson's Empirical Assumptions
Connectionism, Eliminativism and The Future of Folk Psychology
William Ramsey, Stephen Stich, Joseph Garon, Connectionism, Eliminativism and The Future of Folk Psychology, Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (1990), pp. 499-533
Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversity
Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel 1
Is Morality an Elegant Machine or a Kludge
In a passage in A Theory of Justice , which has become increasingly in uentialin recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral phi-losophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the rst stage ofmoral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attemptto describe our moral capacity Ð the capacity which underlies Othe poten-tially in nite number and variety of [moral] judgments we are preparedto make.O In order to de…
Why there might not be an evolutionary explanation for psychological altruism
Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality 1
Connectionism and three levels of nativism
The Withering Away of the Cognitive State
Journal Article The Withering Away of the Cognitive State Get access Stephen Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. London: MIT Press, 1983. pp. xii + 266. Price £18.25 (pb £8.95) Flint Schier Flint Schier University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 143, April 1986, Pages 261–278, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219773 Published: 01 April 1986
Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversity
Connectionism, Eliminativism and The Future of Folk Psychology
William Ramsey, Stephen Stich, Joseph Garon, Connectionism, Eliminativism and The Future of Folk Psychology, Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (1990), pp. 499-533
Connectionism and three levels of nativism
Eliminating emotions
Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions
Jackson's Empirical Assumptions
Is Morality an Elegant Machine or a Kludge
In a passage in A Theory of Justice , which has become increasingly in uentialin recent years, John Rawls (1971) noted an analogy between moral phi-losophy and grammar. Moral philosophy, or at least the rst stage ofmoral philosophy, Rawls maintained, can be thought of as the attemptto describe our moral capacity Ð the capacity which underlies Othe poten-tially in nite number and variety of [moral] judgments we are preparedto make.O In order to de…
The Innate Mind, Volume 3
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 the issues here are questions about what it is for something to be innate in the first place; how in…
Some Questions About The Evolution of Morality 1
Against Arguments from Reference
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 reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture ( Machery et al. 2004 ). We …
Collected Papers, Volume 2
This volume collects the best and most influential essays on knowledge, rationality and morality that Stephen Stich has published in the last 40 years. The volume includes a new introductory essay that offers an overview of the papers and traces the history of how they emerged.
Stephen Stich Collected Papers, 1978-2010 Vol. 2
Do Different Groups Have Different Epistemic Intuitions? A Reply to Jennifer Nagel 1
Why there might not be an evolutionary explanation for psychological altruism
Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment
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 traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and t…
Epistemology for the Rest of the World
Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word “know” and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Many contemporary epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists, are concerned with the truth-conditions of “S knows that p ,” or the proposition it expresses. However, there are over 6,000 languages in the world. Thus, it is not clear why we should think that subtle fac…
The Contribution of Confucius to Virtue Epistemology
Scholars have typically regarded Confucius as an ethical thinker broadly construed and not as an epistemological thinker. This chapter seeks to overturn that view and, in doing so, has three basic goals. The first goal is to make the case that Confucian thought is of epistemological significance. Goal two is to locate the significance of Confucian thought within epistemology while accounting for the past overlooking of this significance. The thir…
Philosophy
Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies
Did religion play a role in the evolution of morality
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 psychologists have sought to characterize this special subset of normative judgments in a well-motivated way.…
A puzzle about knowledge ascriptions
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, while “evidence‐seeking” prompts consistently find them. We present a cross‐cultural study using bot…
Analytic atheism and analytic apostasy across cultures
Reflective thinking often predicts less belief in God or less religiosity – so-called analytic atheism. However, those correlations involve limitations: widely used tests of reflection confound reflection with ancillary abilities such as numeracy; some studies do not detect analytic atheism in every country; experimentally encouraging reflection makes some non-believers more open to believing in God; and one of the most common online research par…
Philosophy (17 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (6 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (5 works) · Emotions and Moral Behavior (5 works)