Medical educators invoke professionalism as a core competency in curricula. This paper criticizes classic definitions. It also identifies some negative traits of medicine as a profession. The call to professionalism is naive nostalgia. Straightforward didactics in professionalism cannot do the desired work in medical education. The most we can say is that students should adopt the good aspects of professionalism and the profession should stop being some of what it has been. This is a platitude. If the notion is to (...) be more than shallow, each student and practitioner will have to engage in much dialogue, reflection and refinement over many years. (shrink)

Can the phenomenal character of perceptual experience be altered by the states of one's cognitive system, for example, one's thoughts or beliefs? If one thinks that this can happen then one thinks that there can be cognitive penetration of perceptual experience; otherwise, one thinks that perceptual experience is cognitively impenetrable. I claim that there is one alleged case of cognitive penetration that cannot be explained away by the standard strategies one can typically use to explain away alleged cases. The case (...) is one in which it seems subjects' beliefs about the typical colour of objects affects their colour experience. I propose a two-step mechanism of indirect cognitive penetration that explains how cognitive penetration may occur. I show that there is independent evidence that each step in this process can occur. I suspect that people who are opposed to the idea that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable will be less opposed to the idea when they come to consider this indirect mechanism and that those who are generally sympathetic to the idea of cognitive penetrability will welcome the elucidation of this plausible mechanism. (shrink)

Daniel Wegner argues that conscious will is an illusion. I examine the adequacy of his theory of apparent mental causation and whether, if accurate, it suggests that our experience of agency and authorship should be considered illusory. I examine various interpretations of this claim and raise problems for each interpretation. I also distinguish between the experiences of agency and authorship.

(2013). Will it be me? Identity, concern and perspective. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 206-226.

Claude Romano and Andrea Staiti have recently discussed Husserl’s account of perception in relation to debates in current analytic philosophy between so-called “conjunctivists” and “disjunctivists”. Romano and Staiti offer strikingly different accounts of the nature of illusion and hallucination, and opposing readings of Husserl. Romano thinks hallucinations and illusions are fleeting, fragile phenomena, while Staiti claims they are inherently retrospective phenomena. Romano reads Husserl as being committed to a form of conjunctivism that Romano rejects in favour of a version of (...) disjunctivism. Staiti, by contrast, claims that, from a Husserlian viewpoint, conjunctivism and disjunctivism are equally untenable. I suggest that both Romano and Staiti offer implausible accounts of illusions and hallucinations, and deliver premature verdicts on Husserl in relation to the analytic debates on perception. (shrink)

In this article, I oppose the view that knowledge is a species of belief, and argue that belief should be defined in terms of knowledge, instead of the other way round. However, I reject the idea that the concept of knowledge has a primary or basic role or position in our system of mental and logical concepts, because I reject the hierarchical conception of philosophical analysis implicit in this idea. I approach the topic of knowledge and belief from a discussion (...) of Richard Holton’s views about facts and factive verbs. (shrink)

Theories of philosophy of perception are too simplifying. Direct realism and representationalism, for example, are philosophical theories of perception about the nature of the perceived object and its location. It is common sense to say that we directly perceive, through our senses, physical objects together with their properties. However, if perceptual experience is representational, it only appears that we directly perceive the represented physical objects. Despite psychological studies concerning the role of memory in perception, what these two philosophical theories do (...) not explicate are the continuity of the external describable object and the role of memory in perceiving the continuity, difference, break or ending. Using empirical evidence of particular cases and the hypothetico-deductive model, this research article analyses how one is able to perceive the continuity of same things. The early stages of perceptual process are not sufficient for the perception of continuity. Empirical evidence of memory disorders shows that persons with a memory disorder do not perceive the same thing or the familiar place they previously saw and now experience or remember what they are thinking about, even if the object, the place or the person has remained the same. I will argue that the perception of continuity requires memory. In fact, observation indicates how the memory runs at the same time, when the object is seen over time. This fact implies the memory system’s essential role for perceiving the continuity of the same things. (shrink)

This paper resurrects two discredited ideas in the philosophy of mind. The first: the idea that perceptual illusion might have something metaphysically significant to tell us about the nature of phenomenal consciousness. The second: that the colours and other qualities that ‘fill’ our sensory fields are occurrent properties (rather than representations of properties) that are, nevertheless, to be distinguished from the ‘objective’ properties of things in the external world. Theories of consciousness must recognize the existence of what Daniel Dennett mockingly (...) labels ‘figment,’ but this result—though metaphysically and epistemologically significant—is not incompatible with either physicalism or naturalized semantics. (shrink)

This paper is an introduction to a virtual special issue of AI and Law exploring the legacy of the influential HYPO system of Rissland and Ashley. The papers included are: Arguments and cases: An inevitable intertwining, BankXX: Supporting legal arguments through heuristic retrieval, Modelling reasoning with precedents in a formal dialogue Game, A note on dimensions and factors, An empirical investigation of reasoning with legal cases through theory construction and application, Automatically classifying case texts and predicting outcomes, A factor-based definition (...) of precedential constraint and An improved factor based approach to precedential constraint. After describing HYPO, in this introduction to the special issue I look at various aspects of its influence on AI and Law: the developments led by Rissland at Amherst; the developments led by Ashley in Pittsburgh; the expression of these ideas in terms of rule based systems, and their subsequent formalisation; value based theories, which were inspired by a critique of HYPO; and contemporary approaches which revive the idea of dimensions. (shrink)

On the most common interpretation of occasion-sensitivity what varies cross-contextually is the truth-conditional content of representations. Jerry Fodor argues that when extended to mental representation this view has some problematic consequences. In this paper I outline an approach to occasion-sensitivity which circumvents Fodor’s objections but still maintains that the aspect of thought that guides deliberation and action is occasion-sensitive. On the proposed view, what varies cross-contextually are not truth conditions but rather the conditions for accepting a representation as true relative (...) to a practical goal that is pursued on an occasion. I show that although the proposal entails an error theory this theory is not problematic since it is meant to compensate for the over-generating nature of semantic competence, namely, the fact that not all of the representation’s truth-makers are conducive to a given contextually salient goal. (shrink)