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289On the Myth of PsychotherapyPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology. forthcoming.Thomas Szasz famously argued that mental illness is a myth. Less famously, Szasz argued that since mental illness is a myth, so too is psychotherapy. Szasz’ claim that mental illness is a myth has been much discussed, but much less attention has been paid to his claim that psychotherapy is a myth. In the first part of this essay, I critically examine Szasz’ discussion of psychotherapy in order to uncover the strongest version of his case for thinking that it is a myth. As we’ll see, this involve…Read more
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357Object Seeing and Spatial PerceptionIn Fiona Macpherson & Fabian Dorsch (eds.), Phenomenal Presence, Oxford University Press. pp. 134-162. 2018.
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278Naïve Realism, the Slightest Philosophy, and the Slightest Science (2nd ed.)In Jonathan Cohen & Brian McLaughlin (eds.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 363-383. 2023.
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10Naive Realist Perspectives on Seeing BlurrilyIn James Stazicker (ed.), The Structure of Perceptual Experience, Wiley. 2015.Naive realists hold that experience is to be understood in terms of an intimate perceptual relation between a subject and aspects of the world, relative to a certain standpoint. Those aspects of the world themselves shape the contours of consciousness. But blurriness is an aspect of some of our experiences that does not seem to come from the world. I argue that this constitutes a significant challenge to some forms of naive realism. But I also argue that there is a robust form of naive realism w…Read more
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274A Change of Perspective: Naïve Realism and Normal VariationIn Ori Beck & Farid Masrour (eds.), The Relational View of Perception: New Essays, Routledge. forthcoming.
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335The Problem of PerceptionStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.The Problem of Perception is a pervasive and traditional problem about our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. The problem is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perceptual experience be what we ordinarily understand it to be: something that enables direct perception of the world? These possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience; the major theories …Read more
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111Naive realism, representationalism, and the rationalizing role of visual perceptionPhilosophical Issues 30 (1): 102-119. 2020.Philosophical Issues, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 102-119, October 2020.
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604Austerity and IllusionPhilosophers' Imprint 20 (15): 1-19. 2020.Many contemporary theorists charge that naïve realists are incapable of accounting for illusions. Various sophisticated proposals have been ventured to meet this charge. Here, we take a different approach and dispute whether the naïve realist owes any distinctive account of illusion. To this end, we begin with a simple, naïve account of veridical perception. We then examine the case that this account cannot be extended to illusions. By reconstructing an explicit version of this argument, we show…Read more
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268The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence, by Susanna Schellenberg (review)Mind 129 (513): 339-349. 2020.The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence, by SchellenbergSusanna. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 272.
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990How Naïve Realism can Explain Both the Particularity and the Generality of ExperiencePhilosophical Quarterly 69 (274): 41-63. 2019.Visual experiences seem to exhibit phenomenological particularity: when you look at some object, it – that particular object – looks some way to you. But experiences exhibit generality too: when you look at a distinct but qualitatively identical object, things seem the same to you as they did in seeing the first object. Naïve realist accounts of visual experience have often been thought to have a problem with each of these observations. It has been claimed that naïve realist views cannot account…Read more
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866VII—Naive Realism and DiaphaneityProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118 (2): 149-175. 2018.Naïve Realists think that the ordinary mind-independent objects that we perceive are constitutive of the character of experience. Some understand this in terms of the idea that experience is diaphanous: that the conscious character of a perceptual experience is entirely constituted by its objects. My main goal here is to argue that Naïve Realists should reject this, but I’ll also highlight some suggestions as to how Naïve Realism might be developed in a non-diaphanous direction.
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655Epistemological Disjunctivism and its Representational CommitmentsIn Casey Doyle, Joe Milburn & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism, Routledge. 2019.Orthodox epistemological disjunctivism involves the idea that paradigm cases of visual perceptual knowledge are based on visual perceptual states which are propositional, and hence representational. Given this, the orthodox version of epistemological disjunctivism takes on controversial representational commitments in the philosophy of perception. Must epistemological disjunctivism involve these commitments? I don’t think so. Here I argue that we can take epistemological disjunctivism in a new d…Read more
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794Bálint’s syndrome, Object Seeing, and Spatial PerceptionMind and Language 33 (3): 221-241. 2018.Ordinary cases of object seeing involve the visual perception of space and spatial location. But does seeing an object require such spatial perception? An empirical challenge to the idea that it does comes from reflection upon Bálint's syndrome, for some suppose that in Bálint's syndrome subjects can see objects without seeing space or spatial location. In this article, I question whether the empirical evidence available to us adequately supports this understanding of Bálint's syndrome, and expl…Read more
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290The Formulation of Epistemological DisjunctivismPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (1): 86-104. 2016.I argue that we should question the orthodox way of thinking about epistemological disjunctivism. I suggest that we can formulate epistemological disjunctivism in terms of states of seeing things as opposed to states of seeing that p. Not only does this alternative formulation capture the core aspects of epistemological disjunctivism as standardly formulated, it has two salient advantages. First, it avoids a crucial problem that arises for a standard formulation of epistemological disjunctivism—…Read more
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373This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: What is perceptual learning?
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415This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: How should we model the unity of consciousness?
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1058On the Particularity of ExperiencePhilosophical Studies 173 (2): 451-460. 2016.Phenomenal particularism is the view that particular external objects are sometimes part of the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. It is a central part of naïve realist or relational views of perception. We consider a series of recent objections to phenomenal particularism and argue that naïve realism has the resources to block them. In particular, we show that these objections rest on assumptions about the nature of phenomenal character that the naïve realist will reject, and that t…Read more
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249Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology By Fiona Macpherson and Dimitris Platchias (review)Analysis 75 (3): 528-530. 2015.
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419This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter perceptual phenomenology?
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997The Invalidity of the Argument from IllusionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 55 (4): 357-364. 2018.The argument from illusion attempts to establish the bold claim that we are never perceptually aware of ordinary material objects. The argument has rightly received a great deal critical of scrutiny. But here we develop a criticism that, to our knowledge, has not hitherto been explored. We consider the canonical form of the argument as it is captured in contemporary expositions. There are two stages to our criticism. First, we show that the argument is invalid. Second, we identify premises that …Read more
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210Knowledge and Ways of KnowingProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (3pt3): 353-364. 2014.Quassim Cassam offers a conception of ways of knowing which he argues is preferable to rival accounts such as the account we find in Williamson. The correct way to think about ways of knowing matters for philosophers, such as Cassam and Williamson, who want to understand knowledge itself in terms of ways of knowing. So is Cassam right that his conception of ways of knowing is preferable to Williamson's? The discussion to follow is irenic in spirit: I will argue that in fact Cassam and Williamson…Read more
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478This report highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York on March 19th and 20th, 2012: 1. What is perceptual learning? 2. Can perceptual experience be modified by reason? 3. How does perceptual learning alter perceptual phenomenology? 4. How does perceptual learning alter the contents of perception? 5. How is perceptual learning coordinated with action?
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577This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions which arose from The Unity of Consciousness and Sensory Integration conference at Brown University in November of 2011. This portion of the report explores the question: Is the mechanism of sensory integration spatio-temporal?
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62Pathology Based Philosophy of MindIcog. 2015.In this post the author defends a pathology based approach to the philosophy of mind.
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552Idiosyncratic PerceptionPhilosophical Quarterly 66 (263): 391-399. 2016.Some have argued that we can put pressure on a relational view of experience with reference to the fact that the idiosyncrasies of perceivers can affect the qualitative characters of their experiences. Quassim Cassam calls this the problem of idiosyncratic perception. I defend the relational view in response to this problem.
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412This is an excerpt of a report that highlights and explores five questions that arose from the Network for Sensory Research workshop on perceptual learning and perceptual recognition at the University of York in March, 2012. This portion of the report explores the question: How does perceptual learning alter the contents of perception?
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120Visual Perception as a Means of KnowingDissertation, UCL. 2012.This thesis falls into two parts, a characterizing part, and an explanatory part. In the first part, I outline some of the core aspects of our ordinary understanding of visual perception, and how we regard it as a means of knowing. What explains the fact that I know that the lemon before me is yellow is my visual perception: I know that the lemon is yellow because I can see it. Some explanations of how one knows specify that in virtue of which one genuinely knows, as opposed to merely believes, …Read more
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305Naive Realist Perspectives on Seeing BlurrilyRatio 27 (4): 393-413. 2014.Naive realists hold that experience is to be understood in terms of an intimate perceptual relation between a subject and aspects of the world, relative to a certain standpoint. Those aspects of the world themselves shape the contours of consciousness. But blurriness is an aspect of some of our experiences that does not seem to come from the world. I argue that this constitutes a significant challenge to some forms of naive realism. But I also argue that there is a robust form of naive realism w…Read more
Nottingham, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Mind |