Switch to: Citations

Add references

You must login to add references.
  1. The Selfish Gene. [REVIEW]Gunther S. Stent & Richard Dawkins - 1977 - Hastings Center Report 7 (6):33.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1758 citations  
  • Resolving the Debate on Innate Ideas.H. Clark Barrett & John Tooby - 2005 - In Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents. New York, US: Oxford University Press on Demand.
    This chapter addresses the question of why many cognitive and behavioural scientists still fail to recognize the truth of nativism despite the power of poverty of stimulus arguments. It argues that this is primarily because the domains in which these arguments have hitherto been applied, for example, language or naive physics, are all ones in which the knowledge that children acquire is objectively present in their environment. Thus, the possibility always remains open that children could somehow be acquiring this knowledge (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Sexual Strategies Theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating.David M. Buss & David P. Schmitt - 1993 - Psychological Review 100 (2):204-232.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   157 citations  
  • Origins of knowledge.Elizabeth S. Spelke, Karen Breinlinger, Janet Macomber & Kristen Jacobson - 1992 - Psychological Review 99 (4):605-632.
    Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   179 citations  
  • At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-organization and Complexity.Stuart Kauffman & Stuart A. Kauffman - 1995 - Oxford University Press USA.
    At Home in the Universe presents and extends the intellectual core ofKauffman's earlier book The Origins of Order (OUP 1993) for any intelligentgeneral reader can understand and appreciate. The reader is very effectivelyinvited into Kauffman's vision and thought processes, in one of the moreexhilarating and important books of popular science.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   190 citations  
  • Natural selection and natural language.Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):707-784.
    Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   416 citations  
  • Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans.R. I. M. Dunbar - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4):681-694.
    Group size is a function of relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates. Extrapolation from this regression equation yields a predicted group size for modern humans very similar to that of certain hunter-gatherer and traditional horticulturalist societies. Groups of similar size are also found in other large-scale forms of contemporary and historical society. Among primates, the cohesion of groups is maintained by social grooming; the time devoted to social grooming is linearly related to group size among the Old World monkeys and (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   215 citations  
  • The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language.Steven Pinker - 1994/2007 - Harper Perennial.
    In this classic, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   525 citations  
  • Evolutionary psychology and the massive modularity hypothesis.Richard Samuels - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (4):575-602.
    In recent years evolutionary psychologists have developed and defended the Massive Modularity Hypothesis, which maintains that our cognitive architecture—including the part that subserves ‘central processing’ —is largely or perhaps even entirely composed of innate, domain-specific computational mechanisms or ‘modules’. In this paper I argue for two claims. First, I show that the two main arguments that evolutionary psychologists have offered for this general architectural thesis fail to provide us with any reason to prefer it to a competing picture of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   102 citations  
  • Enzymatic computation and cognitive modularity.H. Clark Barrett - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (3):259-87.
    Currently, there is widespread skepticism that higher cognitive processes, given their apparent flexibility and globality, could be carried out by specialized computational devices, or modules. This skepticism is largely due to Fodor’s influential definition of modularity. From the rather flexible catalogue of possible modular features that Fodor originally proposed has emerged a widely held notion of modules as rigid, informationally encapsulated devices that accept highly local inputs and whose opera- tions are insensitive to context. It is a mistake, however, to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   62 citations  
  • Natural language and natural selection.Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):707-27.
    Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   604 citations  
  • (1 other version)Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature.David J. Buller - 2005 - MIT Press.
    In the carefully argued central chapters of Adapting Minds, Buller scrutinizes several of evolutionary psychology's most highly publicized "...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   162 citations  
  • From evolution to behavior: Evolutionary psychology as the missing link.Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - 1987 - In John Dupré (ed.), The Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality : Conference on Evolution and Information : Papers. MIT Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   319 citations  
  • The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - 1992 - Oxford University Press. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby.
    Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   770 citations  
  • The Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology.Jerry A. Fodor - 1983 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in ...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   483 citations  
  • The Mind Doesn’T Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology.Jerry A. Fodor - 2000 - MIT Press.
    Jerry Fodor argues against the widely held view that mental processes are largely computations, that the architecture of cognition is massively modular, and...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   324 citations  
  • Cognitive wheels: The frame problem of AI.Daniel Dennett - 1984 - In Christopher Hookway (ed.), Minds, Machines And Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   147 citations  
  • On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition.Steven Pinker & Alan Prince - 1988 - Cognition 28 (1-2):73-193.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   378 citations  
  • (1 other version)Is vision continuous with cognition?: The case for cognitive impenetrability of visual perception.Zenon Pylyshyn - 1999 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (3):341-365.
    Although the study of visual perception has made more progress in the past 40 years than any other area of cognitive science, there remain major disagreements as to how closely vision is tied to general cognition. This paper sets out some of the arguments for both sides and defends the position that an important part of visual perception, which may be called early vision or just vision, is prohibited from accessing relevant expectations, knowledge and utilities - in other words it (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   391 citations  
  • (1 other version)Deconstructing the mind.Stephen P. Stich - 1996 - In Deconstructing the mind. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 479-482.
    Over the last two decades, debates over the viability of commonsense psychology have been center stage in both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Eliminativists have argued that advances in cognitive science and neuroscience will ultimately justify a rejection of our "folk" theory of the mind, and of its ontology. In the first half of this book Stich, who was at one time a leading advocate of eliminativism, maintains that even if the sciences develop in the ways that eliminativists (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   131 citations  
  • Verbal behavior.Noam Chomsky & B. F. Skinner - 1959 - Language 35 (1):26.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   636 citations  
  • (1 other version)The Modularity of Mind.Robert Cummins & Jerry Fodor - 1983 - Philosophical Review 94 (1):101.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2083 citations  
  • The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task.Leda Cosmides - 1989 - Cognition 31 (3):187-276.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   508 citations  
  • How the Mind Works.Steven Pinker - 1997 - Norton.
    A provocative assessment of human thought and behavior, reissued with a new afterword, explores a range of conundrums from the ability of the mind to perceive three dimensions to the nature of consciousness, in an account that draws on ...
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   603 citations  
  • The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism.Steven W. Gangestad & Jeffry A. Simpson - 2000 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (4):573-587.
    During human evolutionary history, there were “trade-offs” between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. Many short-term matings might be successful for some men; others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing their effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signaling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   70 citations  
  • Evolutionizing the cognitive sciences: A reply to Shapiro and Epstein.John Tooby & Leda Cosmides - 1998 - Mind and Language 13 (2):195-204.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange.Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - 1998 - In David M. Buss (ed.), Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Wiley. pp. 584-627.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   35 citations  
  • The grain of domains: The evolutionary-psychological case against domain-general cognition.Anthony P. Atkinson & Michael Wheeler - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (2):147-76.
    Prominent evolutionary psychologists have argued that our innate psychological endowment consists of numerous domainspecific cognitive resources, rather than a few domaingeneral ones. In the light of some conceptual clarification, we examine the central inprinciple arguments that evolutionary psychologists mount against domaingeneral cognition. We conclude (a) that the fundamental logic of Darwinism, as advanced within evolutionary psychology, does not entail that the innate mind consists exclusively, or even massively, of domainspecific features, and (b) that a mixed innate cognitive economy of domainspecific (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   15 citations  
  • The Mind Doesn't Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology.Jerry Fodor - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (205):549-552.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   234 citations  
  • Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate.H. Clark Barrett & Robert Kurzban - 2006 - Psychological Review 113 (3):628-647.
    Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, genetics, and evolution. The authors propose that modularity, cleanly defined, provides a useful framework for directing (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   163 citations  
  • Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck.Arthur P. Wolf - 1995
    In 1891, the anthropologist Edward Westermarck proposed that early childhood association inhibits sexual attraction and that this aversion was manifested in custom and law as the basis of the universal incest taboo. Then, in 1910, in the essays later published as Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud challenged the "Westermarck hypothesis" on the ground that "the earliest sexual excitations of youthful human beings are invariably of an incestuous character." The incest taboo only existed, Freud argued, because of this natural propensity. Freud's (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  • Biological thinking in evolutionary psychology: Rockbottom or quicksand?H. Looren De Jong & W. J. Van Der Steen - 1998 - Philosophical Psychology 11 (2):183 – 205.
    Evolutionary psychology is put forward by its defenders as an extension of evolutionary biology, bringing psychology within the integrated causal chain of the hard sciences. It is extolled as a new paradigm for integrating psychology with the rest of science. We argue that such claims misrepresent the methods and explanations of evolutionary biology, and present a distorted view of the consequences that might be drawn from evolutionary biology for views of human nature. General theses about adaptation in biology are empty (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Evolutionary theory meets cognitive psychology: A more selective perspective.Lawrence Shapiro & William Epstein - 1998 - Mind and Language 13 (2):171-94.
    Quite unexpectedly, cognitive psychologists find their field intimately connected to a whole new intellectual landscape that had previously seemed remote, unfamiliar, and all but irrelevant. Yet the proliferating connections tying together the cognitive and evolutionary communities promise to transform both fields, with each supplying necessary principles, methods, and a species of rigor that the other lacks. (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994, p. 85).
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.David M. Buss - 1999 - Allyn & Bacon.
    This text addresses the profound human questions of love and work. Beginning with a historical introduction, the author progresses through adaptive problems that humans face, and concludes by showing how evolutionary psychology encompasses all branches of psychology.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   164 citations  
  • Modules and mindreaders.Matteo Mameli - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (3):377-93.
    There are many interesting empirical and theoretical issues concerning the evolution of cognition. Despite this, recent books on the topic concentrate on two problems. One is mental modularity. The other is what distinguishes human from non-human minds. While it is easy to understand why people are interested in human uniqueness, it is not clear why modularity is the centre of attention. Fodor (2000) has a nice argument for why people _should_ be interested in modularity.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • On the input problem for massive modularity.John M. Collins - 2004 - Minds and Machines 15 (1):1-22.
    Jerry Fodor argues that the massive modularity thesis – the claim that (human) cognition is wholly served by domain specific, autonomous computational devices, i.e., modules – is a priori incoherent, self-defeating. The thesis suffers from what Fodor dubs the input problem: the function of a given module (proprietarily understood) in a wholly modular system presupposes non-modular processes. It will be argued that massive modularity suffers from no such a priori problem. Fodor, however, also offers what he describes as a really (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Debunking Adapting Minds[REVIEW]Edouard Machery & H. Clark Barrett - 2006 - Philosophy of Science 73 (2):232-246.
    David Buller’s recent book, _Adapting Minds_, is a philosophical critique of the field of evolutionary psychology. Buller argues that evolutionary psychology is utterly bankrupt from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Although _Adapting Minds _has been well received in both the academic press and the popular media, we argue that Buller’s critique of evolutionary psychology fails.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • Introduction: Evolutionary psychology and conceptual integration.Leda Cosmides, John Tooby & Jerome H. Barkow - 1992 - In Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford University Press. pp. 3--15.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   204 citations  
  • Fodor on cognition, modularity, and adaptationism.Samir Okasha - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (1):68-88.
    This paper critically examines Jerry Fodor's latest attacks on evolutionary psychology. Contra Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Fodor argues (i) there is no reason to think that human cognition is a Darwinian adaptation in the first place, and (ii) there is no valid inference from adaptationism about the mind to massive modularity. However, Fodor maintains (iii) that there is a valid inference in the converse direction, from modularity to adaptationism, but (iv) that the language module is an exception to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • A critical review of Jerry A. Fodor's the mind doesn't work that way. [REVIEW]Daniel A. Weiskopf - 2002 - Philosophical Psychology 15 (4):551 – 562.
    The "New Synthesis" in cognitive science is committed to the computational theory of mind (CTM), massive modularity, nativism, and adaptationism. In The mind doesn't work that way , Jerry Fodor argues that CTM has problems explaining abductive or global inference, but that the New Synthesis offers no solution, since massive modularity is in fact incompatible with global cognitive processes. I argue that it is not clear how global human mentation is, so whether CTM is imperiled is an open question. Massive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Evolutionary psychology's grain problem and the cognitive neuroscience of reasoning.Anthony P. Atkinson & M. Wheeler - 2003 - In David E. Over (ed.), Evolution and the Psychology of Thinking: The Debate. Psychology Press. pp. 61--99.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Evolutionary psychology, meet developmental neurobiology: Against promiscuous modularity.David J. Buller & Valerie Gray Hardcastle - 2000 - Brain and Mind 1 (3):307-25.
    Evolutionary psychologists claim that the mind contains “hundreds or thousands” of “genetically specified” modules, which are evolutionary adaptations for their cognitive functions. We argue that, while the adult human mind/brain typically contains a degree of modularization, its “modules” are neither genetically specified nor evolutionary adaptations. Rather, they result from the brain’s developmental plasticity, which allows environmental task demands a large role in shaping the brain’s information-processing structures. The brain’s developmental plasticity is our fundamental psychological adaptation, and the “modules” that result (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  • The prospects for an evolutionary psychology: Human language and human reasoning. [REVIEW]Robert C. Richardson - 1996 - Minds and Machines 6 (4):541-557.
    Evolutionary psychology purports to explain human capacities as adaptations to an ancestral environment. A complete explanation of human language or human reasoning as adaptations depends on assessing an historical claim, that these capacities evolved under the pressure of natural selection and are prevalent because they provided systematic advantages to our ancestors. An outline of the character of the information needed in order to offer complete adaptation explanations is drawn from Robert Brandon (1990), and explanations offered for the evolution of language (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   19 citations  
  • The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.Steven Pinker - 2002 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 66 (4):765-767.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   323 citations  
  • The mind is a system of modules shaped by natural selection.Peter Carruthers - 2004 - In Christopher Hitchcock (ed.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of science. Malden, MA: Blackwell. pp. 293--311.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • How to pursue the adaptationist program in psychology.Russil Durrant & Brian D. Haig - 2001 - Philosophical Psychology 14 (4):357 – 380.
    In recent times evolutionary psychologists have offered adaptation explanations for a wide range of human psychological characteristics. Critics, however, have argued that such endeavors are problematic because the appropriate evidence required to demonstrate adaptation is unlikely to be forthcoming, therefore severely limiting the role of the adaptationist program in psychology. More specifically, doubts have been raised over both the methodology employed by evolutionary psychologists for studying adaptations and about the possibility of ever developing acceptably rigorous evolutionary explanations of human psychological (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • On Fodor's The Mind Doesn't Work That Way.Daniel A. Weiskopf - 2002 - Philosophical Psychology 15 (4):551-562.
    The "New Synthesis" in cognitive science is committed to the computational theory of mind (CTM), massive modularity, nativism, and adaptationism. In The mind doesn't work that way , Jerry Fodor argues that CTM has problems explaining abductive or global inference, but that the New Synthesis offers no solution, since massive modularity is in fact incompatible with global cognitive processes. I argue that it is not clear how global human mentation is, so whether CTM is imperiled is an open question. Massive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)Keywords and Concepts in Evolutionary Developmental Biology.Brian K. Hall & Wendy M. Olson - 2004 - Journal of the History of Biology 37 (2):406-408.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Discovering the functional mesh: On the methods of evolutionary psychology. [REVIEW]Paul Sheldon Davies - 1996 - Minds and Machines 6 (4):559-585.
    The aim of this paper is to clarify and critically assess the methods of evolutionary psychology, and offer a sketch of an alternative methodology. My thesis is threefold. (1) The methods of inquiry unique to evolutionary psychology rest upon the claim that the discovery of theadaptive functions of ancestral psychological capacities leads to the discovery of thepsychological functions of those ancestral capacities. (2) But this claim is false; in fact, just the opposite is true. We first must discover the psychological (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology. [REVIEW]Mohan Matthen - 2002 - Philosophical Books 43 (1):78-80.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   156 citations