This volume collects the best and most influential essays that Stephen Stich has published in the last 40 years on topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. They discuss a wide range of topics including grammar, innateness, reference, folk psychology, eliminativism, connectionism, evolutionary psychology, simulation theory, social construction, and psychopathology. However, they are unified by two central concerns. The first is the viability of the commonsense conception of the mind in the face of challenges posed by both philosophical arguments and empirical findings. The second is the philosophical implications of research in the cognitive sciences which, in the last half century, has transformed both our understanding of the mind and the ways in which the mind is studied. The volume includes a new introductory essay that elaborates on these themes and offers an overview of the papers that follow.

ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1: Grammar, Psychology, and Interdeterminancy2: The Idea of Innateness3: Beliefs and Subdoxastic States4: Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis5: Dennett on International Systems6: Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology, William Ramsey, Stephen Stich, and Joseph Garon7: Connectionism and Three Levels of Nativism, William Ramsey and Stephen Stich8: Narrow Content Meets Fat Syntax9: Folk Psychology: Simulation vs. Tacit Theory?, Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols10: Intentionality and Naturalism, Stephen Stich and Stephen Laurence11: What Is Folk Psychology?, Stephen Stich and Ian Ravenscroft12: The Flight to Reference, or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science, Michael A. Bishop and Stephen Stich13: The Odd Couple: The Compatibility of Social Construction and Evolutionary Psychology, Ron Mallon and Stephen Stich14: Darwin in the Madhouse: Evolutionary Psychology and the Classification of Mental Disorders, Dominic Murphy and Stephen Stich15: Folk Psychology, Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols16: Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich17: Against Arguments from Reference, Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich