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1Hacker, P. M. S., "Appearance and Reality: A Philosophical Investigation into Perception and Perceptual Qualities" (review)Mind 98 (n/a): 165. 1989.
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13Avatar-Philosophy (and -Religion) or FaitheismImprint Academic. 2011.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
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48A New Critical Realism: An Examination of Roy Wood Sellars' EpistemologyTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30 (3). 1994.
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Habermas as lacking in faith?In Colin B. Grant (ed.), Beyond Universal Pragmatics: Studies in the Philosophy of Communication, Peter Lang. 2010.
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12The Joke, the" As If", and the Statement'In Michael Levine (ed.), Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Routledge. pp. 294--311. 1999.
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67Recent work in perceptionAmerican 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
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66A 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
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61If 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
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The irony of perceptionIn New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception, Ashgate. pp. 176--201. 1993.
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81A proper faith operates with the acknowledgement of risk, and, hence, a true religion with that of sacrificeBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6): 753-753. 2004.The authors are working with a limited notion of religion. They have confined themselves to a view of it as superstition, “counterintuitive,” as they put it. What they have not seen is that faith does in a real sense involve a paradox in that it projects an impossibility as a methodological device, a fictive ploy, which in the best interpretation necessarily involves a commitment to the likelihood of self-sacrifice.
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28Pre-phenomenal adjustments and Sanford's illusion objection against sense-dataPacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (July): 266-272. 1983.
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104Inspecting imagesPhilosophy 58 (January): 57-72. 1983.The inspectability of after-images has been denied. A typical claim is Ilham Dilman's: ‘I cannot say my apprehension of the after-image I see has changed but not the after-image itself’, for, he says, appearance and reality are one as regards the after-image. His reason is that this is a logical consequence of the fact that other people have no possible basis for correcting what I say about the after-image I see
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66What it isn't likeAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1): 23-42. 1996.From an Indirect Realist point of view, the Knowledge Argument in the philosophy of perception has been misdirected by its very title. If it can be argued that sense-fields are at their basis no more than evidence, indeed, a part of existence as brute as what is usually termed the 'external', then, if 'knowing' is not essential to sensing, that argument has to be radically reconstructed. Resistance to there being an non-epistemic or 'raw feel' basis for sensing is very fashionable at the momen…Read more
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8Faith as Ethically Basic to the Task of ConstructingConstructivist Foundations 7 (1): 31-33. 2011.Open peer commentary on the target article “From Objects to Processes: A Proposal to Rewrite Radical Constructivism” by Siegfried J. Schmidt. Upshot: The aim is to show that, although Schmidt’s thesis must in most respects be warmly welcomed, there is an unexpressed implication concerning the dialogic structure of language that, when drawn out plainly, reveals a further valuable move open to the theory. I offer it therefore as a clarification of his theory with which I hope Schmidt may agree. He…Read more
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74The Entity Fallacy in EpistemologyPhilosophy 67 (259). 1992.In order to entertain the argument to be presented here, you have to begin by casting away a presupposition. The ultimate aim will be to restore it again as a presupposition, but the immediate aim will be to test for and make clear its undoubted worth and usefulness by imagining what happens to our knowledge-system when we remove it
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86Two more proofs of present qualiaTheoria 56 (1-2): 3-22. 1990.Now in so far as it is recognized that the constituents of the environment are not present inside the body in the same way as they are present outside it, to that extent they are bound, the moment they are inside it, to become something essentially different from the environment.
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76Clamping and motivationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (5): 643-644. 2003.Arthur M. Glenberg omits discussion of motivation and this leads him to an underestimation of the part played by pleasure and pain and desire and fear in both the clamping and the updating of percepts. This commentary aims at rectifying this omission, showing that mutual correction plays an important role.