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Diagnostic Prediction and PrognosisIn K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard Gipps, George Graham, John Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini & Tim Thornton (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and psychiatry, Oxford University Press. 2013.Psychiatric diagnosis and prognosis is fraught with important philosophical and conceptual problems. This chapter focuses on some epistemological issues and moral issues that arise in contemporary psychiatric practice. It examines various clinical and actuarial techniques for psychiatric diagnosis, ordered very loosely in terms of how "structured" or "automated" they are. The chapter makes the case for assessing psychiatric treatments with controlled experiments, raises several epistemological d…Read more
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Introduction (review)In Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics, Wiley-blackwell. 2009.
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85Stich and His Critics (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2009.Through a collection of original essays from leading philosophical scholars, _Stich and His Critics_ provides a thorough assessment of the key themes in the career of philosopher Stephen Stich. Provides a collection of original essays from some of the world's most distinguished philosophers Explores some of philosophy's most hotly-debated contemporary topics, including mental representation, theory of mind, nativism, moral philosophy, and naturalized epistemology
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9Epistemology for (Real) PeopleIn Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee & David Coady (eds.), A Companion to Applied Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.A person making normative judgments can do so from the perspective of a Judge or a Coach. If you're a Judge, you seek to assign responsibility. If you're a Coach, you seek to improve an agent's performance. While there is a place for being sometimes a Judge and sometimes a Coach, no one should always be a Judge. It is a small and mean person who only wags a finger and never lends a hand. The same is true for a normative discipline like epistemology. A good coach gives useful advice. Advice is us…Read more
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6Reflections on Cognitive and Epistemic Diversity: Can a Stich in Time Save Quine?In Dominic Murphy & Michael Bishop (eds.), Stich, Wiley‐blackwell. 2009-03-20.This chapter contains sections titled: Stich's Epistemology A Brief Digression: The Role of Intuitions in Epistemology A Critique: The Pragmatic Virtues of Reliabilism Conclusion References.
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38Reconstructing Reason and Representation (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 492-495. 2007.
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22Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure, by Michael Strevens: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. xiv + 265, US$39.95 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92 (4): 808-811. 2014.
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126Diagnostic Prediction and Prognosis: Getting from Symptom to TreatmentIn K. W. M. Fulford, Martin Davies, Richard Gipps, George Graham, John Sadler, Giovanni Stanghellini & Tim Thornton (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy and psychiatry, Oxford University Press. pp. 1023-1046. 2013.This paper reviews the recent (post-DSM) history of subjective and semi-structured methods of psychiatric diagnosis, as well as evidence for the superiority of structured and computer-aided diagnostic techniques. While there is evidence that certain forms of therapy are effective for alleviating the psychiatric suffering, distress, and dysfunction associated with certain psychiatric disorders, this paper addresses some of the difficult methodological and ethical challenges of evaluating the effe…Read more
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56Science and philosophy study well-being with different but complementary methods. Marry these methods and a new picture emerges: To have well-being is to be "stuck" in a positive cycle of emotions, attitudes, traits and success. This book unites the scientific and philosophical worldviews into a powerful new theory of well-being.
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33Review of Rethinking Objectivity by Allan Megill (review)Philosophy of Science 63 (1): 145-146. 1996.
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16Commentary on The Possibility of an Evolutionary Semantics : The Nature and Evolution of Human Language (review)Between the Species 8 (2): 10. 1992.
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386The Autonomy of Social EpistemologyEpisteme 2 (1): 65-78. 2005.Social epistemology is autonomous: When applied to the same evidential situations, the principles of social rationality and the principles of individual rationality sometimes recommend inconsistent beliefs. If we stipulate that reasoning rationally from justified beliefs to a true belief is normally sufficient for knowledge, the autonomy thesis implies that some knowledge is essentially social. When the principles of social and individual rationality are applied to justified evidence and recomme…Read more
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21Elmer Daniel Klemke, 1926-2000 (review)Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 74 (5). 2001.
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26Which Rights Should Be Universal? (review)Review of Metaphysics 59 (3): 683-685. 2006.Basic human rights are “necessary for a government to be relied upon to make itself more just over time”. Ultimately, Talbott grounds basic human rights in our “capacity for autonomy”. While he is prepared to grant that autonomy may be intrinsically valuable, his primary focus is showing how societies that protect autonomy by respecting basic human rights better promote their citizens’ well-being.
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879In Praise of Epistemic Irresponsibility: How Lazy and Ignorant Can You Be?Synthese 122 (1-2). 2000.Epistemic responsibility involves at least two central ideas. (V) To be epistemically responsible is to display the virtue(s) epistemic internalists take to be central to justification (e.g., coherence, having good reasons, fitting the evidence). (C) In normal (non-skeptical)circumstances and in thelong run, epistemic responsibility is strongly positively correlated with reliability. Sections 1 and 2 review evidence showing that for a wide range of real-world problems, the most reliable, tractab…Read more
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596Argumente für die naturaliste ErkenntnistheorieIn Stefan Tolksdorf & Dirk Koppleberg (eds.), Erkenntnistheorie: Wie und Wozu?, Mentis Publishers. pp. 245-274. 2015.
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408The Network Theory of Well-Being: An IntroductionThe Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 7. 2012.In this paper, I propose a novel approach to investigating the nature of well-being and a new theory about wellbeing. The approach is integrative and naturalistic. It holds that a theory of well-being should account for two different classes of evidence—our commonsense judgments about well-being and the science of well-being (i.e., positive psychology). The network theory holds that a person is in the state of well-being if she instantiates a homeostatically clustered network of feelings, emotio…Read more
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65150 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should Be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of SciencePhilosophy of Science 69 (S3). 2002.Our aim in this paper is to bring the woefully neglected literature on predictive modeling to bear on some central questions in the philosophy of science. The lesson of this literature is straightforward: For a very wide range of prediction problems, statistical prediction rules (SPRs), often rules that are very easy to implement, make predictions than are as reliable as, and typically more reliable than, human experts. We will argue that the success of SPRs forces us to reconsider our views abo…Read more
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541The proper role of intuitions in epistemologyIn M. Milkowski & K. Talmont-Kaminski (eds.), Beyond Description: Normativity in Naturalized Philosophy., College Publication. 2010.Intuitions play an important role in contemporary philosophy. It is common for theories in epistemology, morality, semantics and metaphysics to be rejected because they are inconsistent with a widely and firmly held intuition. Our goal in this paper is to explore the role of epistemic intuitions in epistemology from a naturalistic perspective. Here is the question we take to be central: (Q) Ought we to trust our epistemic intuitions as evidence in support of our epistemological theories? We will…Read more
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22Notice critique : Reconstructing Reason and Representation — Murray Clarke (review)Philosophiques 34 (2): 367-374. 2007.
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449Why the Semantic Incommensurability Thesis is Self-DefeatingPhilosophical Studies 63 (3). 1991.What factors are involved in the resolution of scientific disputes? What factors make the resolution of such disputes rational? The traditional view confers an important role on observation statements that are shared by proponents of competing theories. Rival theories make incompatible (sometimes contradictory) observational predictions about a particular situation, and the prediction made by one theory is borne out while the prediction made by the other is not. Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn, and…Read more
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508Theory-Ladenness of Perception ArgumentsPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992. 1992.The theory-ladenness of perception argument is not an argument at all. It is two clusters of arguments. The first cluster is empirical. These arguments typically begin with a discussion of one or more of the following psychological phenomena: (a) the conceptual penetrability of the visual system, (b) voluntary perceptual reversal of ambiguous figures, (c) adaptation to distorting lenses, or (d) expectation effects. From this evidence, proponents of theory-ladenness typically conclude that percep…Read more
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269The Possibility of Conceptual Clarity in PhilosophyAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 29 (3). 1992.
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435An Epistemological Role for Thought ExperimentsPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 63 19-34. 1998.Why should a thought experiment, an experiment that only exists in people's minds, alter our fundamental beliefs about reality? After all, isn't reasoning from the imaginary to the real a sign of psychosis? A historical survey of how thought experiments have shaped our physical laws might lead one to believe that it's not the case that the laws of physics lie - it's that they don't even pretend to tell the truth. My aim in this paper is to defend an account of thought experiments that fits smoot…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Value Theory |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |