Stephen Stich | |
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Born | 1943 (age 79–80) |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic |
Main interests | Philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology |
Notable ideas | Experimental philosophy |
Influences | |
Influenced |
Stephen P. Stich (born May 9, 1943) is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology. His 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in later years, as indicated in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind.
Stich was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania from 1960–1964 where he was a member of the Philomathean Society. He received his BA in 1964 (Summa Cum Laude with distinction in Philosophy). He did graduate work at Princeton University from 1964–1968, receiving his PhD in 1968 under the direction of Paul Benacerraf and Gilbert Harman. [1]
Stich was the Visiting Senior Lecturer at University of Sydney (1984-1985) and was the Clark-Way-Harrison Distinguished Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis (2007). [2]
He has held full-time teaching positions at University of Michigan (1968-1978), University of Maryland, College Park (1978-1986), University of California, San Diego (1986-1989), and, since 1989, at Rutgers University. [2]
Stich joined the University of Sheffield as an honorary professor in their philosophy department in February 2005. He remains primarily at Rutgers, but visits Sheffield periodically, where he teaches and works at the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies. [3]
In 2007 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and gave a series of lectures in Paris titled Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science: How the Cognitive Science Can Transform Traditional Debates. [4]
In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [5]
In 2020, he became a visiting professor at Princeton University through the University Center for Human Values. [6]
Stich is primarily known in philosophy for his work in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, epistemology, and moral psychology. In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, Stich (1983) has argued for a form of eliminative materialism —the view that talk of the mental should be replaced with talk of its physical substrate. Since then, however, he has changed some of his views on the mind. See Deconstructing the Mind (1996) for his more recent views. In epistemology, he has explored (with several of his colleagues) the nature of intuitions using the techniques of experimental philosophy, especially epistemic intuitions that vary among cultures—see Stich (1988) and Stich, et al. (2001). This work reflects a general skepticism about conceptual analysis and the traditional methods of analytic philosophy. In The Fragmentation of Reason he briefly sketched a form of epistemic relativism "in the spirit of pragmatism." [7]
He and Shaun Nichols are responsible for a theory of how humans understand the mental states of ourselves and others, or mindreading, which they present in Nichols and Stich (2003). Their theory is a hybrid, containing elements of both the simulation theory and theory theory, and also aims to explain the mental architecture that enables pretence.
Internalism and externalism are two opposite ways of integration of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning, and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings. Internal–external distinction is a distinction used in philosophy to divide an ontology into two parts: an internal part concerning observation related to philosophy, and an external part concerning question related to philosophy.
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge, without recourse to conscious reasoning or needing an explanation. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; gut feelings; inner sensing; inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition; and the ability to understand something instinctively, without any need for conscious reasoning. Intuitive knowledge tends to be approximate.
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.
Constructivism is a view in the philosophy of science that maintains that scientific knowledge is constructed by the scientific community, which seeks to measure and construct models of the natural world. According to the constructivist, natural science, therefore, consists of mental constructs that aim to explain sensory experience and measurements.
Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of many crucial works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His writings in these fields laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, and he is recognized as having had "an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960." At the time of his death in 2017, he held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University, and had taught previously at the City University of New York Graduate Center and MIT.
Peter David Klein is an American philosopher specializing in issues in epistemology who spent most of his career at Rutgers University.
Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from many traditional philosophical questions. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology. Replacement naturalism maintains that traditional epistemology should be abandoned and replaced with the methodologies of the natural sciences. The general thesis of cooperative naturalism is that traditional epistemology can benefit in its inquiry by using the knowledge we have gained from the cognitive sciences. Substantive naturalism focuses on an asserted equality of facts of knowledge and natural facts.
Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, ethics, moral psychology, epistemology, statistical learning theory, and metaphysics. He and George Miller co-directed the Princeton University Cognitive Science Laboratory. Harman has taught or co-taught courses in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology, Philosophy, and Linguistics.
Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy, by experimental philosophers. Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference. However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.
Gregory Paul Currie FAHA is a British philosopher and academic, known for his work on philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Executive Editor of Mind & Language.
Alvin Ira Goldman is an American philosopher who is Emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.
The Institut Jean Nicod (IJN) is an interdisciplinary research center based in Paris, France. Its current director is the philosopher Roberto Casati (2017-), preceded by famous philosopher François Recanati (2010-2017) and Pierre Jacob (2002-2010). Created in 2002, its name commemorates the French philosopher, epistemologist and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1924). The IJN is jointly run by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), École normale supérieure (ENS) and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), three French research and higher education institutions. Since 2007, the ENS hosts the IJN where it is affiliated with both the Département d'Etudes Cognitives (DEC), of which it is a founding member, and the Department of Philosophy.
Tyler Burge is an American philosopher who is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Burge has made contributions to many areas of philosophy, including the philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy.
Zenon Walter Pylyshyn was a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was a Canada Council Senior Fellow from 1963 to 1964.
Peter Carruthers is a British-American philosopher and cognitive scientist working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind, though he has also made contributions to philosophy of language and ethics. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, an associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, and a member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.
Shaun Nichols is an American professor of philosophy at Cornell University specializing in the philosophy of cognitive sciences, moral psychology and philosophy of mind.
Frances Egan is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. She has authored a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and perception.
The New York University Department of Philosophy is ranked 1st in the US and 1st in the English-speaking world as of the most recent edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report from 2021. It is also ranked 1st in the world by the 2023 QS World University Rankings, and is internationally renowned. It has particular strengths in epistemology, history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of mind. The department offers B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in philosophy, as well as a minor in philosophy and a joint major in language and mind with the NYU Departments of Linguistics and Psychology. It is home to the New York Institute of Philosophy, a research center that supports multi-year projects, public lectures, conferences, and workshops in the field, as well as outreach programs to teach New York City high school students interested in philosophy.
Jennifer Nagel is a Canadian philosopher at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metacognition. She has also written on 17th century (Western) philosophy, especially John Locke and René Descartes.
Robert D. Rupert is an American philosopher. His primary academic appointment is at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), where he is Professor of Philosophy, a fellow of UCB's Institute of Cognitive Science, and a member of UCB's Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science. He is Regular Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre and is the co-editor in chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.