•  55
    Introduction: Faith and the Real
    Paragraph 24 (2): 5-22. 2001.
  •  13
    Are you prepared, either as an atheist or a religious believer, to have your ideas of God, the self, other people, the body, the soul, spirituality, and faith challenged in an unexpected and original way? Here is a book that moves out from under and away from the received notions of those ponderous topics, whether or not you believe in the divine. The author is a confessed atheist but one who rejects the approach of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray and the rest when they depa…Read more
  •  81
    In trust we reason
    The Philosophers' Magazine 37 (37): 31-34. 2007.
  • Arbitrariness and Motivation: A New Theory
    Foundations of Language 14 (4): 505-523. 1976.
  •  48
    A New Critical Realism: An Examination of Roy Wood Sellars' Epistemology
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (3). 1994.
  •  57
    Wilcox and Katz on indirect realism
    Philosophy of the Social Sciences 16 (1): 107-113. 1986.
  •  67
    Recent work in perception
    American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1): 17-30. 1984.
    This is a survey of the development of the philosophy of perception over the past twelve years. There are four sections. Part I deals largely with arguments for the propositionalizing of perception and for those types of externally founded realism that eschew inner representation. Part ii is devoted to three books that put the case for sense-Data (pennycuick, Jackson, Ginet) and some of the arguments against (pitcher). Part iii outlines james j gibson's psychological theory. Part iv takes up the…Read more
  •  66
    A sensory receptor, in any organism anywhere, is sensitive through time to some distribution - energy, motion, molecular shape - indeed, anything that can produce an effect. The sensitivity is rarely direct: for example, it may track changes in relative variation rather than the absolute change of state (as when the skin responds to colder and hotter instead of to cold and hot as such); it may track differing variations under different conditions (the eyes' dark-adaptation; adaptation to sound f…Read more
  •  61
    If a sensory field exists as a pure natural sign open to all kinds of interpretation as _evidence_ (see 'Sensing as non-epistemic'), what is it that does the interpreting? Borrowing from the old Gestalt psychologists, I have proposed a gestalt module that picks out wholes from the turmoil, it being the process of _noticing_ or _attending to_ , but the important difference from Koffka and Khler (Koffka, 1935; Khler, 1940), the originators of the term 'gestalt' in the psychology of perception ( is…Read more
  •  103
    New representationalism
    Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20 (1): 65-92. 1990.
  •  167
    Gestalt Switching: Hanson, Aronson, and Harre
    Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 480-86. 1992.
    This discussion takes up an attack by Jerrold Aronson (seconded by Rom Harre) on the use made by Norwood R. Hanson of the Gestalt-Switch Analogy in the philosophy of science. Aronson's understanding of what is implied in a gestalt switch is shown to be flawed. In his endeavor to detach conceptual understanding from perceptual identification he cites several examples, without realizing the degree to which such gestalt switches can affect conceptualizing or how conceptualizing can affect gestalts.…Read more
  •  62
    A visual registration can be coloured without being a picture
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2): 214-214. 2002.
    Zenon Pylyshyn here repeats the same error as in his original article (1973) in starting with the premiss that all cognition is a matter of perceiving entities already given in their singularity. He therefore fails to acknowledge the force of the evolutionary argument that perceiving is a motivated process working upon a non-epistemic sensory registration internal to the brain.
  •  40
    The question of the assumed givenness of the singularity of the target
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4): 514-514. 2005.
    Interesting as the experiments are, their relevance to the real-life situation is rendered questionable by the unthinking use of given singularities as target objects. The evolutionary process does not respect what one agent takes to be a singular referent. A “singling” from the continuum is rather a varying feature of the necessity to track what is rewarding in it.
  •  81
    Percepts are selected from nonconceptual sensory fields
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (4): 429-430. 2003.
    Steven Lehar allows too much to his direct realist opponent in using the word “subjective” of the sensory field per se. The latter retains its nonconceptual, nonmental nature even when explored by perceptual judgement. He also needs to stress the evolutionary value of perceptual differences between person and person, a move that enables one to undermine the direct realist's superstitious certainty about the singular object.
  •  86
    Isomorphism: Philosophical implications
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (6): 975-976. 1999.
    The originator of the notion of structural isomorphism was the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars. Many modern philosophers are unaware how this notion vitiates their attacks on the concept of an internal sensory presentation. His view that this allowed for corrective feedback undercuts Palmer's belief that there is a mapping of objects. The privacy of subjective experience is also shown not to be inviolable.
  •  121
    Dennett as illusionist
    Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 23 (2): 157-167. 2003.
    Mark Crooks's article correctly draws attention to the ambiguous use of the notion of 'illusion' by Daniel Dennett in its arguments against theories that postulate the existence of qualia. The present comment extends that criticism by showing how Dennett's strictures reveal a failure to perceive an illusion in Dennett's own arguments. First, the inadequacy of his dismissal of inner registration is shown to be based in a prejudicial interpretation of the case for qualia. Second, his resistance to…Read more
  •  66
    A non-epistemic, non-pictorial, internal, material visual field
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (5): 1010-1011. 2001.
    The authors O'Regan & Noë (O&N) have ignored the case for the visual field as being non-epistemic evidence internal to the brain, having no pictorial similarity to the external input, and being material in ontological status. They are also not aware of the case for the evolutionary advantage of learning as the perceptual refashioning of such non-epistemic sensory evidence via motivated feedback in sensorimotor activity.
  •  64
    In view of the excellent arguments that have been put forth recently in favour of qualia, internal sensory presentations, it would strike an impartial observer - one could imagine a future historian of philosophy - as extremely odd why so many philosophers who are opposed to qualia, that is, sensory experiences internal to the brain, have largely ignored those arguments in their own. There has been a fashionable assumption that any theory of perception which espouses qualia has long since been o…Read more
  •  27
    These essays in the philosophy of perception cover a variety of topics, among which are included science, souls and sense-data, perception and scepticism, the causal representation theory of perception, semantic presence, the impact of contemporary neuroscience and hypothesis and illusion.
  •  78
    Illusion and truth
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 39 (3): 402-432. 1979.
  •  350
    Ben-Zeev on the non-epistemic
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 37 (3): 351-359. 1986.
  •  108
    Words and Intentions
    Philosophy 52 (199). 1977.
    The relationship of word-meaning to speaker's-meaning has not been examined thoroughly enough. Some philosophical problems are solved and others made plainer if the full consequences of a proper relationship between these two is worked out.
  •  24
    The title of this paper is 'The Story of the Story'. If its argument is valid, I cannot be speaking to you now, trying to change your view of something without telling a story myself, even about the Story. Over the last two decades there has been an increasing number of people in a variety of disciplines telling us that the story, narrative, is an inescapable feature of human communication. Listen to a few representative voices. from psychology - Theodore Sarbin: 'Human beings think, perceive, i…Read more