Stephen Stich

Last updated
Stephen Stich
Stephen stich 2.png
Stich giving the Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy 2010 in Tartu, Estonia
Born1943 (age 80–81)
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Main interests
 Philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology
Notable ideas
 Experimental philosophy

Stephen P. Stich (born May 9, 1943) is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Emeritus 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.

Contents

Education and career

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]

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. [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). [1] 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. [2]

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. [3]

In 2009, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [4]

In 2020, he became a visiting professor at Princeton University through the University Center for Human Values. [5]

Philosophical work

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." [6]

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.

Selected publications

See also

Related Research Articles

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge. Also called theory of knowledge, it explores different types of knowledge, such as propositional knowledge about facts, practical knowledge in the form of skills, and knowledge by acquaintance as a familiarity through experience. Epistemologists study the concepts of belief, truth, and justification to understand the nature of knowledge. To discover how knowledge arises, they investigate sources of justification, such as perception, introspection, memory, reason, and testimony.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intuition</span> Ability to acquire knowledge without conscious reasoning

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Fodor</span> American philosopher (1935–2017)

Jerry Alan Fodor was an American philosopher and the author of 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.

Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views about the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts the focus of epistemology away from many traditional philosophical questions, and towards the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition. There are noteworthy distinctions within naturalized epistemology. Replacement naturalism maintains that we should abandon traditional epistemology and replace it 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 cognitive sciences. Substantive naturalism focuses on an asserted equality of facts of knowledge and natural facts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gilbert Harman</span> American philosopher (1938–2021)

Gilbert Harman was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He 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 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gregory Currie</span>

Gregory Paul Currie FAHA is a British philosopher and academic, known for his work on philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Currie is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Executive Editor of Mind & Language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alvin Goldman</span> American philosopher (1938–2024)

Alvin Ira Goldman was an American philosopher who was emeritus Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a leading figure in epistemology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred Dretske</span> American professor of Philosophy at Stanford University

Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

The Institut Jean Nicod (IJN) is an interdisciplinary research center based in Paris, France. Its current director is the philosopher Roberto Casati (2017-present), preceded by philosophers 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Carruthers (philosopher)</span> American philosopher

Peter Carruthers is a philosopher working primarily in the area of philosophy of mind. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, associate member of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program and member of the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shaun Nichols</span> American philosopher (born 1964)

Shaun Nichols is an American professor of philosophy at Cornell University specializing in the philosophy of cognitive sciences, moral psychology and philosophy of mind.

Formative epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. According to formative epistemology, knowledge is gained through the imputation of thoughts from one human being to another in the societal setting. Humans are born without intrinsic knowledge and through their evolutionary and developmental processes gain knowledge from other human beings. Thus, according to formative epistemology, all knowledge is completely subjective and truth does not exist.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New York University Department of Philosophy</span> Division of New York University

The New York University Department of Philosophy 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert D. Rupert</span> American philosopher (born 1964)

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.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Stephen P. Stich - Curriculum Vitae". Archived from the original on 2019-10-08.
  2. ↑ Information from Stich's profile at University of Sheffield Archived 2006-06-23 at the Wayback Machine .
  3. ↑ Archives Audiovisuelles de la Recherche, Stephen Stich, Moral Theory Meets Cognitive Science: How the Cognitive Science Can Transform Traditional Debates Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine (full video coverage)
  4. ↑ "Achievements". Archived from the original on 2017-02-24. Retrieved 2017-02-23.
  5. ↑ "Stephen Stich | University Center for Human Values". uchv.princeton.edu. Archived from the original on 2020-03-01. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
  6. ↑ Ch. 6 p.129 of The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.