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  1. Sharing our normative worlds: A theory of normative thinking.Ivan Gonzalez-Cabrera - 2017 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. More precisely, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the developmental (...)
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  • Rule-Following and Rule-Breaking: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.Daniel Watts - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy (4):1159-1185.
    My aim in this paper is twofold: to establish that Kierkegaard's so‐called theory of the leap strongly anticipates a line of argument that is central to Wittgenstein's so‐called rule‐following considerations; and to begin to show how Kierkegaard's work has fruitful contributions of its own to make to on‐going discussions about rules and rule‐following. The paper focuses throughout on the question of how, if at all, human rule‐following can be distinguished from behaviour that is merely mechanical or instinctual. I identify a (...)
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  • Innateness as a natural cognitive kind.Muhammad Ali Khalidi - 2016 - Philosophical Psychology 29 (3):319-333.
    Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innateness cluster together in reliable ways, at least in the context (...)
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  • Nativism, Empiricism, and Ockham’s Razor.Simon Fitzpatrick - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (5):895-922.
    This paper discusses the role that appeals to theoretical simplicity have played in the debate between nativists and empiricists in cognitive science. Both sides have been keen to make use of such appeals in defence of their respective positions about the structure and ontogeny of the human mind. Focusing on the standard simplicity argument employed by empiricist-minded philosophers and cognitive scientists—what I call “the argument for minimal innateness”—I identify various problems with such arguments—in particular, the apparent arbitrariness of the relevant (...)
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  • In defense of nativism.Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence - 2013 - Philosophical Studies 165 (2):693-718.
    This paper takes a fresh look at the nativism–empiricism debate, presenting and defending a nativist perspective on the mind. Empiricism is often taken to be the default view both in philosophy and in cognitive science. This paper argues, on the contrary, that there should be no presumption in favor of empiricism (or nativism), but that the existing evidence suggests that nativism is the most promising framework for the scientific study of the mind. Our case on behalf of nativism has four (...)
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  • The Exemplification of Rules: An Appraisal of Pettit’s Approach to the Problem of Rule-following.Daniel Watts - 2012 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1):69-90.
    Abstract This paper offers an appraisal of Phillip Pettit's approach to the problem how a merely finite set of examples can serve to represent a determinate rule, given that indefinitely many rules can be extrapolated from any such set. I argue that Pettit's so-called ethnocentric theory of rule-following fails to deliver the solution to this problem he sets out to provide. More constructively, I consider what further provisions are needed in order to advance Pettit's general approach to the problem. I (...)
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  • Poverty of the Stimulus Revisited.Robert C. Berwick, Paul Pietroski, Beracah Yankama & Noam Chomsky - 2011 - Cognitive Science 35 (7):1207-1242.
    A central goal of modern generative grammar has been to discover invariant properties of human languages that reflect “the innate schematism of mind that is applied to the data of experience” and that “might reasonably be attributed to the organism itself as its contribution to the task of the acquisition of knowledge” (Chomsky, 1971). Candidates for such invariances include the structure dependence of grammatical rules, and in particular, certain constraints on question formation. Various “poverty of stimulus” (POS) arguments suggest that (...)
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  • Moral dumbfounding and the linguistic analogy: Methodological implications for the study of moral judgment.Susan Dwyer - 2009 - Mind and Language 24 (3):274-296.
    The manifest dissociation between our capacity to make moral judgments and our ability to provide justifications for them, a phenomenon labeled Moral Dumbfounding, has important implications for the theory and practice of moral psychology. I articulate and develop the Linguistic Analogy as a robust alternative to existing sentimentalist models of moral judgment inspired by this phenomenon. The Linguistic Analogy motivates a crucial distinction between moral acceptability and moral permissibility judgments, and thereby calls into question prevailing methods used in the study (...)
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  • (1 other version)Contemporary debates in philosophy of science.Christopher Hitchcock (ed.) - 2004 - Malden, MA: Blackwell.
    Showcasing original arguments for well-defined positions, as well as clear and concise statements of sophisticated philosophical views, this volume is an ...
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  • Innateness, canalization, and 'biologicizing the mind'.Paul E. Griffiths & Edouard Machery - 2008 - Philosophical Psychology 21 (3):397 – 414.
    This article examines and rejects the claim that 'innateness is canalization'. Waddington's concept of canalization is distinguished from the narrower concept of environmental canalization with which it is often confused. Evidence is presented that the concept of environmental canalization is not an accurate analysis of the existing concept of innateness. The strategy of 'biologicizing the mind' by treating psychological or behavioral traits as if they were environmentally canalized physiological traits is criticized using data from developmental psychobiology. It is concluded that (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Moderately massive modularity.Peter Carruthers - 2003 - In Anthony O'Hear (ed.), Minds and Persons. Cambridge University Press. pp. 67-89.
    This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind’s structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
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  • Innate cognitive capacities.Muhammad ali KhAlidi - 2007 - Mind and Language 22 (1):92-115.
    This paper attempts to articulate a dispositional account of innateness that applies to cognitive capacities. After criticizing an alternative account of innateness proposed by Cowie (1999) and Samuels (2002), the dispositional account of innateness is explicated and defended against a number of objections. The dispositional account states that an innate cognitive capacity (output) is one that has a tendency to be triggered as a result of impoverished environmental conditions (input). Hence, the challenge is to demonstrate how the input can be (...)
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  • Concept nativism and the rule following considerations.M. J. Cain - 2006 - Acta Analytica 21 (38):77-101.
    In this paper I argue that the most prominent and familiar features of Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations generate a powerful argument for the thesis that most of our concepts are innate, an argument that echoes a Chomskyan poverty of the stimulus argument. This argument has a significance over and above what it tells us about Wittgenstein’s implicit commitments. For, it puts considerable pressure on widely held contemporary views of concept learning, such as the view that we learn concepts by constructing (...)
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  • Metaphysics of concepts: In defense of the abilitist approach.Ilya Bulov - 2023 - Theoria 89 (5):625-639.
    Abilitism is an approach to the metaphysics of concepts according to which each concept consists of a managing cognitive ability coordinating other abilities (cognitive and non-cognitive) and a set of subordinate abilities associated with this managing ability. As I argue here, if we accept the abilitist approach, we can efficiently solve such puzzles in the metaphysics of concepts as the partial possession problem, the concept pluralism problem, etc. However, there are some possible objections to abilitism, concerning the abilitist explanation of (...)
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  • Character and Culture in Social Cognition.James Lloyd - 2022 - Dissertation, The University of Manchester
    We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology? For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection (...)
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  • What’s wrong with the minimal conception of innateness in cognitive science?J. Brendan Ritchie - 2020 - Synthese 199 (Suppl 1):159-176.
    One of the classic debates in cognitive science is between nativism and empiricism about the development of psychological capacities. In principle, the debate is empirical. However, in practice nativist hypotheses have also been challenged for relying on an ill-defined, or even unscientific, notion of innateness as that which is “not learned”. Here this minimal conception of innateness is defended on four fronts. First, it is argued that the minimal conception is crucial to understanding the nativism-empiricism debate, when properly construed; Second, (...)
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  • Contemporary Concept Nativism: Some Methodological Remarks.Ilya Y. Bulov - 2019 - Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences 62 (7):96-109.
    The innate knowledge problem is a classical problem in philosophy, which has been known since the classical antiquity. Plato in his dialogues Meno and Phaedo formulated the doctrine of innate ideas and proposed an early version of the poverty of the stimulus argument, which is the most frequently used argument in innate knowledge debates. In the history of philosophy there was also an opposite view. This approach is often associated with J. Locke’s philosophy. Locke thought that all our knowledge about (...)
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  • Kant on the spontaneous power of the mind.John J. Callanan - 2017 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (3):565-588.
    It is well known that at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity. It is also sometimes maintained that Kant’s appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgement. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant’s epistemology. A different conception of the (...)
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  • The Cultural Origins of Cognitive Adaptations.David Papineau - 2005 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 56:24-25.
    According to an influential view in contemporary cognitive science, many human cognitive capacities are innate. The primary support for this view comes from ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments. In general outline, such arguments contrast the meagre informational input to cognitive development with its rich informational output. Consider the ease with which humans acquire languages, become facile at attributing psychological states (‘folk psychology’), gain knowledge of biological kinds (‘folk biology’), or come to understand basic physical processes (‘folk physics’). In all these cases, (...)
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  • The Linguistic Analogy: Motivations, Results, and Speculations.Susan Dwyer, Bryce Huebner & Marc D. Hauser - 2010 - Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (3):486-510.
    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 account of the acquisition and development of these structures, and an (...)
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  • Language Acquisition Meets Language Evolution.Nick Chater & Morten H. Christiansen - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (7):1131-1157.
    Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the (...)
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  • How to do things without words.D. Spurrett & S. J. Cowley - 2004 - Language Sciences 26 (5):443-466.
    Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of (...)
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  • Idiolects.Alex Barber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An idiolect, if there is such a thing, is a language that can be characterised exhaustively in terms of intrinsic properties of some single person at a time, a person whose idiolect it is at that time. The force of ‘intrinsic’ is that the characterisation ought not to turn on features of the person's wider linguistic community. Some think that this notion of an idiolect is unstable, and instead use ‘idiolect’ to describe a person's incomplete or erroneous grasp of their (...)
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  • Two accounts of moral diversity: The cognitive science of pluralism and absolutism.John Bolender - 2004 - [Journal (on-Line/Unpaginated)] 3.
    Advances in cognitive science are relevant to the debate between moral pluralism and absolutism. Parametric structure, which plausibly underlies syntax, gives some idea of how pluralism might be true. The cognitive mechanisms underlying mathematical intelligence give some idea of how far absolutism is right. Advances in cognitive science should help us better understand the extent to which we are divided and how far we are potentially harmonious in our values.
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  • Privileged standpoints/reliable processes.Kourken Michaelian - 2008 - Hypatia 23 (1):65-98.
    : This article attempts to reconcile Sandra Harding's postmodernist standpoint theory with process reliabilism in first-order epistemology and naturalism in metaepistemology. Postmodernist standpoint theory is best understood as consisting of an applied epistemological component and a metaepistemological component. Naturalist metaepistemology and the metaepistemological component of postmodernist standpoint theory have produced complementary views of knowledge as a socially and naturally located phenomenon and have converged on a common concept of objectivity. The applied epistemological claims of postmodernist standpoint theory usefully can be (...)
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  • The cognitive functions of language.Peter Carruthers - 2002 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6):657-674.
    This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Moderately Massive Modularity.Peter Carruthers - 2003 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53:67-89.
    This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind's structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.
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  • The case for moral empiricism.Shaun Nichols - 2021 - Analysis 81 (3):549-567.
    It is an old and venerable idea in philosophy that morality is built into us, and this nativist view has seen a resurgence of late. Indeed, the prevailing systematic account of how we acquire complex moral representations is a nativist view inspired by arguments in Chomskyan linguistics. In this article, I review the leading argument for moral nativism – the poverty of the moral stimulus. I defend a systematic empiricist alternative that draws on the resources of statistical learning. Such an (...)
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  • 「生得的な心」の可能性:刺激の貧困論証は生得性についてなにを語るのか(あるいはなにを語らないのか).Naoki Usui - 2015 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 48 (2):2-65.
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  • Meaningful questions: The acquisition of auxiliary inversion in a connectionist model of sentence production.Hartmut Fitz & Franklin Chang - 2017 - Cognition 166 (C):225-250.
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  • When Meaning Is Not Enough: Distributional and Semantic Cues to Word Categorization in Child Directed Speech.Feijoo Sara, Muñoz Carmen, Amadó Anna & Serrat Elisabet - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8.
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  • Uncovering the Richness of the Stimulus: Structure Dependence and Indirect Statistical Evidence.Florencia Reali & Morten H. Christiansen - 2005 - Cognitive Science 29 (6):1007-1028.
    The poverty of stimulus argument is one of the most controversial arguments in the study of language acquisition. Here we follow previous approaches challenging the assumption of impoverished primary linguistic data, focusing on the specific problem of auxiliary (AUX) fronting in complex polar interrogatives. We develop a series of corpus analyses of child‐directed speech showing that there is indirect statistical information useful for correct auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives and that such information is sufficient for distinguishing between grammatical and ungrammatical (...)
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  • Chapter 1: Introduction.Alex Barber - unknown
    Introductory chapter of book - no abstract available.
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  • The learnability of abstract syntactic principles.Amy Perfors, Joshua B. Tenenbaum & Terry Regier - 2011 - Cognition 118 (3):306-338.
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  • Ability, Breadth, and Parsimony in Computational Models of Higher‐Order Cognition.Nicholas L. Cassimatis, Paul Bello & Pat Langley - 2008 - Cognitive Science 32 (8):1304-1322.
    Computational models will play an important role in our understanding of human higher‐order cognition. How can a model's contribution to this goal be evaluated? This article argues that three important aspects of a model of higher‐order cognition to evaluate are (a) its ability to reason, solve problems, converse, and learn as well as people do; (b) the breadth of situations in which it can do so; and (c) the parsimony of the mechanisms it posits. This article argues that fits of (...)
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  • Acquiring a language vs. inducing a grammar.Gabe Dupre - 2024 - Cognition 247 (C):105771.
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  • 文法能力の生得主義.Shun Tsugita - 2017 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 50:107-127.
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  • The Confluence of Perceiving and Thinking in Consciousness Phenomenology.Johannes Wagemann - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 8:315098.
    The processual relation of thinking and perceiving shall be examined from a historical perspective as well as on the basis of methodically conducted first-person observation. Historically, these two psychological aspects of human knowledge and corresponding philosophical positions have predominant alternating phases. At certain historical points, thinking and perceiving tend to converge, while in the interim phases they seem to diverge with an emphasis on one of them. While at the birth of modern science, for instance, these two forms of mental (...)
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  • Innatismo y control genético.Sergio Daniel Barberis - 2013 - Manuscrito 36 (2):263-310.
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