Stephen Laurence
PhD (Rutgers University)
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Professor of Philosophy
Director of PG Recruitment, Admissions and PG Funding
Director of the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies
s.laurence@sheffield.ac.uk
45 Victoria Street
Full contact details
Stephen Laurence
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
45 Victoria Street
Sheffield
S3 7QB
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
45 Victoria Street
Sheffield
S3 7QB
- Profile
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Stephen came to Sheffield in February 2000. He has also taught at the University of Manchester, Hampshire College, London School of Economics, and the University of Hull. Stephen's main research interests are in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, and cognitive science. Some of the issues that interest him in these areas are: the nature of concepts, the nativism/empiricism debate, and philosophical methodology.
- Publications
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Books
- The Building Blocks of Thought. Oxford University PressOxford.
- The Innate Mind: Volume 3: Foundations and the Future.
- The Innate Mind, Volume 3.
- Creations of the mind. Oxford University Press, USA.
- The Innate Mind: Volume 2: Culture and Cognition. Oxford University Press.
- Introduction. Oxford University Press.
- Introduction. Oxford University PressNew York.
Edited books
- The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts. MIT Press.
- The Innate Mind: Foundations and the Future. OUP.
- Creations of the Mind: Essays on Artifacts and Their Representation. OUP.
- The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition. OUP.
- The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents..
- In Search of a Theory of Concepts. JSTOR.
- Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics. Blackwell.
Journal articles
- Concepts, core knowledge, and the rationalism–empiricism debate. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 47.
- Making sense of domain specificity. Cognition, 240, 105583-105583.
- Intuitive Dualism and Afterlife Beliefs: A Cross‐Cultural Study. Cognitive Science, 45(6).
- Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies. Evolution and Human Behavior.
- Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(17), 4688-4693. View this article in WRRO
- Moral parochialism misunderstood: a reply to Piazza and Sousa. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 283(1823), 20152628-20152628. View this article in WRRO
- Moral parochialism and contextual contingency across seven societies. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 282(1813), 20150907-20150907. View this article in WRRO
- Ontogeny of prosocial behavior across diverse societies.. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A, 110(36), 14586-14591.
- In defense of nativism. Philosophical Studies, 165.2, 693-718.
- Early false-belief understanding in traditional non-Western societies.. Proc Biol Sci, 280(1755), 20122654.
- Should the study of Homo sapiens be part of cognitive science?. Top Cogn Sci, 4(3), 379-386.
- Abstraction and the Origin of General Ideas. Philosophers' Imprint, 12.19, 1-22.
- Beyond the building blocks model. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(3), 139-140.
- Learning Matters: The Role of Learning in Concept Acquisition. Mind and Language, 26(5), 507-539.
- Concepts and theoretical unification.. Behav Brain Sci, 33(2-3), 219-220.
- How to learn the natural numbers: inductive inference and the acquisition of number concepts.. Cognition, 106(2), 924-939.
- Artifacts and original intent: A cross-cultural perspective on the design stance. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8(1-2), 1-22.
- The ontology of concepts - Abstract objects or mental representations?. Nous, 41(4), 561-593.
- XIV-Should We Trust Our Intuitions? Deflationary Accounts of the Analytic Data. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 103(1), 299-323.
- Concepts and Conceptual Analysis. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67(2), 253-282.
- Should we trust our intuitions? Deflationary accounts of the analytic data. Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society, 103(1), 299-323.
- Radical concept nativism.. Cognition, 86(1), 25-55.
- Lewis' Strawman. Philosophical Quarterly, 52(206), 55-65.
- Boghossian on analyticity. Analysis, 61(272), 293-302.
- The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 52, 217-276.
- Boghossian on analyticity. Analysis, 61(272), 293-302.
- Boghossian on analyticity. ANALYSIS, 61(4), 293-302.
- Where the regress argument still goes wrong: reply to Knowles. Analysis, 59(264), 321-327.
- Moral Realism and Twin Earth. Facta Philosophica, 1(1), 135-165.
- Where the regress argument still goes wrong: Reply to Knowles. Analysis, 59(264), 321-327.
- Where the regress argument still goes wrong: Reply to Knowles. ANALYSIS, 59(4), 321-327.
- Multiple Meanings and the Stability of Content. The Journal of Philosophy, 95(5), 255-255.
- Multiple Meanings and the Stability of Content. Journal of Philology, 95(5), 255-263.
- Regress Arguments Against the Language of Thought. Analysis, 57(1), 60-66.
- A Chomskian Alternative to Convention Based Semantics. Mind: a quarterly review of philosophy, 105, 269-301.
Chapters
- Introduction, The Innate Mind: Volume 3: Foundations and the Future (pp. 1-14).
- Linguistic Determinism and the Innate Basis of Number, The Innate Mind: Volume 3: Foundations and the Future (pp. 139-169).
- Concept Nativism and Neural Plasticity In Margolis E & Laurence S (Ed.), The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts
- The Scope of the Conceptual In Margolis E, Samuels R & Stich S (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science (pp. 291-317). New York: Oxford University Press.
- Intentionality and Naturalism, Collected Papers, Volume 1 (pp. 191-213). Oxford University Press
- 1 Introduction, The Innate Mind, Volume 3 (pp. 3-14).
- Linguistic Determinism and the Innate Basis of Number In Carruthers P, Laurence S & Stich SP (Ed.), The Innate Mind, Volume 3: Foundations and the Future: v. 3 (pp. 139-169). Oxford University Press, USA
- Number and Natural Language In Carruthers P, Laurence S & Stich S (Ed.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Content (pp. 216-235). Oxford University Press
- Concepts In Stich SP & Warfield TA (Ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind (pp. 190-213). Wiley-Blackwell
- Is Linguistics a Branch of Psychology? In Barber A (Ed.), Epistemology of Language (pp. 69-106). Clarendon Press
- Concepts and Cognitive Science In Margolis E & Laurence S (Ed.), Concepts: Core Readings (pp. 3-81). The MIT Press
- Convention-Based Semantics and the Development of Language In Carruthers P & Boucher J (Ed.), Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes (pp. 201-217). Cambridge Univ Press
- Intentionality and Naturalism In French PA, Uehling TE & Wettstein HK (Ed.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, v 19: Philosophical naturalism (pp. 159-182). University of Notre Dame Press
Dictionary/encyclopaedia entries
- Innate Ideas. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics Elsevier.
- Concepts. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics Elsevier.
- The Building Blocks of Thought. Oxford University PressOxford.
- Professional activities and memberships
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He is Director of the interdisciplinary Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies. He also directed the AHRC Culture and the Mind Project and the AHRC Innateness and the Structure of the Mind Project.