For a period of several weeks in 2008, Mind Australia, a large government-funded, community-managed mental health organization, displayed massive banners and billboards, saturating the advertising spaces of Southern Cross Station, the main interstate and regional train and bus interchange in Melbourne. During this period, I passed through Southern Cross Station a number of times on my way to visit a friend in the country; whether I wanted to engage with these texts or not, I was unable to avoid them.On the (...) left-hand side of one of these billboards is an image of a confident, carefree woman shopping for fruit and vegetables; she is slim and neatly dressed, wearing tight blue jeans with a bright orange top and jacket... (shrink)

Before engaging with the content of the responses from Carroll and Francis, I want to acknowledge what a pleasure it is to be in dialogue with others who are engaged both politically and intellectually in this domain. I understand robust dialogue to be part of what is needed to humanize our collective responses to emotional distress, beyond benevolent othering. Dialogic spaces—in which dialogue is generated and encouraged, and otherness is respected, without conditions —offer an alternative beyond benevolent othering. Examples of (...) such spaces include the international Hearing Voices Movement, Open Dialogue (Seikkula &... (shrink)

Flick Grey discusses three main processes of benevolent othering: Claims to ownership of territory, claims to superiority, and claims to authorship. The claim to ownership of territory is explored partly through the concept of ‘domestication’ within co-production and a benevolence contingent upon the harmlessness and usefulness of the other. This claim supports the claim to superiority, the ‘giving being’ who is in a position to ‘give’ opportunities for ‘rehabilitative identities’ within a stigmaphobic, normative world view claiming others as (...) external and inferior. Grey explores the ventriloquism, essentialism and decontextualization of people who are labeled as mentally ill as part... (shrink)

Flick Grey interrogates the mental health discourse around anti-stigma, recovery, consumer participation, and co-production in relation to a larger discursive context around othering and seeks to question how much they challenge existing power relations. Grey approaches this question through an analysis of a billboard campaign that was mounted in 2008 by Mind in Australia, and asks us to look beyond the apparently positive representations of mental health service users and modes of involving them and to situate such (...) strategies within a discourse of ‘benevolent othering.’ Rather than challenge or change established modes of representation and involvement, these ostensibly positive images and modes of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:After the War DAVID GOMES CÁSSERES invocation: athena for PLP Grey-eyed Athena had no childhood. She stepped out of the old god’s terrible skull a grown young goddess and began her apprenticeship: running sex-driven cults among the hunters and gatherers, collecting snakes and owls, her aegis looming behind the altars, over her priestesses, prophetic crones and breathless temple prostitutes, sacrificed animals bleeding and burnt ears of grain She (...) gained a reputation: she liked clever men, not that way, no, but she did them favors, paid attention to their deeds and needs and risks and wounds and wants. Her admiration was something a clever man could count on; she would give protection, opportunities, good luck. There was a catch, of course: you had to be clever again, you had to keep impressing the grey-eyed one, and so men lasted a while but couldn’t keep it up, and fell, and well, she forgot them. She was busy. But Odysseus: He was another kind. One stratagem after another, he built up so much credit that she saved him even when he disgraced himself one time or another. (Olympus might have disapproved if they’d noticed, but she had walked far away from that rabble of archetypes, totems, fertilities, boogeymen and witch-mothers, nightwalkers, netherdwellers, sexpots and satyrs. She owned her firmament.) Odysseus was something new to her in his little flick of mortality. So when she stood alone in Penelope’s bedchamber watching the reunion, the circling dance of man and woman arion 27.2 fall 2019 step by step negotiating what they knew after so many years their carefulness like oil on water, leveling out the fresh reek of murder from the great hall below them the suitors’ teeth driven into the earthen floor Odysseus striped with their blood Penelope before her loom, many-stringed weapon of her own warfare weaving each other in that long rite of recognition: Her grey eyes saw words forming and fading unsaid As they circled in the salt red sunset Ionian air. And saw the end of her story with Odysseus; goddess and all, it took away her breath. In the end she had this much to show for her years with this clever man: He came home from the war alive, with all his teeth. 2 after the war First published as “Athena,” in Arion 21.3, Winter 2014 telemachus 1. It’s like this. I come to manhood at fourteen and my life’s just misery and shame. There’s no King in Ithaka and my mother, the Queen, is like a prisoner. All our warriors are scattered in the sea somewhere by Athena’s great storm. Our home, the palace of godlike Odysseus, is full of parasites and pirates, We live there paralyzed, taunted by those swarming men and the people who cling to them, even some of my mother’s maids, girls my age or a little older— nasty girls who know all the ways to mock and mortify a boy squirming into manhood without a father. Of course I run away, of course I go looking for wily Odysseus, the King, my father. I never find him, it’s for him to find me, later. But I did learn to tie seamen’s knots, and I have a traveler’s tale: One night I was at the house of Menelaus and Helen, drinking good wine late into the night. They sent the servants to bed, and the three of us sat in the red light of the dying fire. Menelaus, still handsome with some grey in his red hair, spoke of my father Odysseus: “Do you know what he said? He said to me, we are better than the gods; we are kings. And kings must die, as the gods cannot. He said it to me when we were striding with our swords in hand through the broken gates of Troy, and as calmly as he might say it to you.” As he spoke, Menelaus of the great war-cry was fondling the arm of his wife, Helen, for whose beauty all that blood was shed. I was sitting with the people the poets sing... (shrink)

or Browse over 3500 reviews in " by Valerie Hardcastle, Ph.D. " _Metapsychology_.

The uncanny valley—the unnerving nature of humanlike robots—is an intriguing idea, but both its existence and its underlying cause are debated. We propose that humanlike robots are not only unnerving, but are so because their appearance prompts attributions of mind. In particular, we suggest that machines become unnerving when people ascribe to them experience, rather than agency. Experiment 1 examined whether a machine’s humanlike appearance prompts both ascriptions of experience and feelings of unease. Experiment 2 tested whether a machine capable (...) of experience remains unnerving, even without a humanlike appearance. Experiment 3 investigated whether the perceived lack of experience can also help explain the creepiness of unfeeling humans and philosophical zombies. These experiments demonstrate that feelings of uncanniness are tied to perceptions of experience, and also suggest that experience—but not agency—is seen as fundamental to humans, and fundamentally lacking in machines. (shrink)

There has recently been emphasis put on providing two-factor accounts of monothematic delusions. Such accounts would explain (1) whether a delusional hypothesis (e.g. someone else is inserting thoughts into my mind) can be understood as a prima facie reasonable response to an experience and (2) why such a delusional hypothesis is believed and maintained given its implausibility and evidence against it. I argue that if we are to avoid obfuscating the cognitive mechanisms involved in monothematic delusion formation we should split (...) the first factor (1 above) into two factors: how abnormal experience can give rise to a delusional ‘proto-hypothesis’ and how a ‘proto-hypothesis’ in consort with normal experiences and background information, can be developed into a delusional hypothesis. In particular I will argue that a schizophrenic is faced with the unusual requirement of having to identify an introspectively accessible thought as one's own, and that this requirement of identification is the central experiential abnormality of thought insertion, auditory verbal hallucination, and alien control (i.e. passivity symptoms). Additionally, I will consider non-experiential factors which are required for the formation of a delusional hypothesis. (shrink)

Anger, disgust, elevation, sympathy, relief. If the subjective experience of each of these emotions is the same whether elicited by moral or nonmoral events, then what makes moral emotions unique? We suggest that the configuration of moral emotions is special—a configuration given by the underlying structure of morality. Research suggests that people divide the moral world along the two dimensions of valence (help/harm) and moral type (agent/patient). The intersection of these two dimensions gives four moral exemplars—heroes, villains, victims and beneficiaries—each (...) of which elicits unique emotions. For example, victims (harm/patient) elicit sympathy and sadness. Dividing moral emotions into these four quadrants provides predictions about which emotions reinforce, oppose and complement each other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.4 (2003) 353-355 [Access article in PDF] Emotions and Narrative Selves Valerie Gray Hardcastle In their commentaries, both Phillips (2003) and Woody (2003) agree that the affective side of personhood needs to be better addressed in narrative views of self. In their arguments, they focus mainly on how a patient or a subject is here and now. In contrast, Kennett and Matthews (2003) take a (...) longer view and argue for the importance of a diachronic unity for selfhood. This commentary seeks to integrate these views by discussing how emotions are central to building our personal sense of unified agency. 1Phillips and Woody are right: most philosophical discussions of the narrative view of self are overly cognitive and focus too much attention on our linguistic story-telling abilities and not enough on what it is like to be a person experiencing the world. This is too bad, for it is our affective reactions that drive our personal life narratives. Consider: of all the experiences in the world, we only chose a small subset to become or represent who we are. I regularly eat cold cereal for breakfast before heading off to work, but if you ask me to describe myself, I describe my work or my children, not my breakfast-eating habits. Why is this? I identify with my work, my family life, or my play, but not with my sleeping patterns, the trajectories I chose when I drive, or how I brush my teeth. How is it that I have selected the former activities to highlight in my self-stories, but not the latter?I maintain that I choose the former because I have strong affective ties to them, ties that I do not have to driving routes or personal hygiene. And these ties are what determine what gets into our narratives of self. Actually, my claim is stronger than that. I believe that our emotions not only color what we do but they also allow us to act in the first place (this discussion is greatly expanded in my forthcoming book).Humans delight in pretending that our most prized and most humanly attribute is our forebrain, which houses, we also pretend, our capacity for rational thought. Since Plato at least we have held that subduing our passions to the iron rule of reason is our supreme aspiration; it is the ideal for human cognition. Ironically, we think that the more we are like Star Trek's alien Mr. Spock, the more human we really are.But what would life really be like with an overdeveloped forebrain and without emotion? Let us consider more carefully what it is we really prize about being human. We can rationalize well, it is true, but we do so in the service of personal goals. As Aristotle reminds us, we have practical rationality; we have means-ends reasoning with a point. This is just another way of saying that it is imperative that we identify what is important to us prior to cognizing.Obviously, one might scoff, we need an end to engage in means-ends reasoning. But often, I think, what having an end entails is not well appreciated. These days it is fashionable to believe that our fundamental ends—survival and reproduction—are set by our biology and that all [End Page 353] other ends (or most other ends) derive from them in some fashion. Maybe this story is true, but it obscures how ends—whether they be hardwired in or they come later—function in the human psyche.At a bare minimum, that we have particular ends tells us that we have to tag our abstractions, interpretations, and matched patterns with valances—some things are good, some things are bad, and some are indifferent. Tagging our experiences thus is just what it means to have emotions; we are reacting affectively to our world around us. And it is these reactions that determine which inputs we respond to and which we ignore. We literally cannot move about in our world without emotion. I think, perhaps, that this fact is what Phillips and Woody are... (shrink)

What is required to be an interdisciplinary theory in cognitive science is for it to span more than one traditional domain. Generally speaking, as I discuss ...

Given what we know about the segregated nature of the brain and the relative absence of multi-modal association areas in the cortex, how percepts become unified is not clear. However, if we could work out how and where the brain joins together segregated outputs, we would have a start in localizing the neuronal processes that correlate with conscious perceptual experiences. In this essay, I critically examine data relevant for understanding the neurophysiological underpinnings of perception. In particular, I examine the possibility (...) that 40 Hz. oscillatory firing patterns in cortex are important lower-level neuronal events related to perceptual experiences. I suggest that `binding' - understood as a process of hooking together disparate psychological units - reduces to a property inherent in the structure of our brain's firing patterns. However, this reduction may not reflect the firing rates of individual cells, but instead a `higher level' order superimposed on individual cells' activity. (shrink)

In their recent bookUnfit for the Future, Persson and Savulescu make a heartfelt plea for the increasing necessity of “moral enhancement”, interventions that improve human capacities for moral behaviour.3They argue that, with all the technological advances of the 20thand 21stcenturies, the sheer scope of horror that humans can now potentially wreak on their neighbours or the world is staggering. Hence, we are morally obliged to use interventions at our disposal to prevent such atrocities. However, as we learn more about human (...) behaviour and decision-making, the argument that we are morally obligated to morally enhance our friends, neighbours, or countrymen starts to fall apart. For us to be more moral requires more than sharpening our reasoning capacities so that we can more effectively recognise what is better or increasing personal motivation so that we are more likely to do what is good. It requires that we all agree on what the good is and how to achieve it, and that there are no social, cultural, physical, or psychological impediments that prevent us from recognising the good or acting on it. To illustrate my position, I use the phenomenon of self-radicalised terrorists as a case study. In particular, I focus on how historians, psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and political scientists understand the process of self-radicalisation, who self-radicalises, and why, and what all this tells us about it should be “treated”. Part of my purpose in working my way through this case study is to demonstrate that many philosophers misunderstand or over-simplify the science behind so-called immoral actions; consequently, their discussions of whether to enhance someone's morality miss their mark. (shrink)

In trying to characterize the relationship between psychology and neuroscience, the trend has been to argue that reductionism does not work without suggesting a suitable substitute. I offer explanatory extension as a good model for elucidating the complex relationship among disciplines which are obviously connected but which do not share pragmatic explanatory features. Explanatory extension rests on the idea that one field can "illuminate" issues that were incompletely treated in another. In this paper, I explain how this "illumination" would work (...) between psychology and neuroscience. (shrink)

Why games? How could anyone consider action games an experimental paradigm for Cognitive Science? In 1973, as one of three strategies he proposed for advancing Cognitive Science, Allen Newell exhorted us to “accept a single complex task and do all of it.” More specifically, he told us that rather than taking an “experimental psychology as usual approach,” we should “focus on a series of experimental and theoretical studies around a single complex task” so as to demonstrate that our theories of (...) human cognition were powerful enough to explain “a genuine slab of human behavior” with the studies fitting into a detailed theoretical picture. Action games represent the type of experimental paradigm that Newell was advocating and the current state of programming expertise and laboratory equipment, along with the emergence of Big Data and naturally occurring datasets, provide the technologies and data needed to realize his vision. Action games enable us to escape from our field's regrettable focus on novice performance to develop theories that account for the full range of expertise through a twin focus on expertise sampling and longitudinal studies of simple and complex tasks. (shrink)

There is a difference between someone breaking a glass by accidentally brushing up against it and smashing a glass in a fit of anger. In the first case, the person's cognitive state has little to do with the event, but in the second, the mental state qua anger is quite relevant. How are we to understand this difference? What is the proper way to understand the relation between the mind, the brain, and the resultant behavior? This paper explores the popular (...) "middle ground" reply in which mental phenomena are claimed to be "as real as" other higher level properties. It argues that this solution fails to answer epistemological difficulties surrounding how to chose the appropriate factors in an explanation. A more sophisticated understanding of scientific theorizing and of the relation between ontology and explanation give us a framework in which we can determine when we should refer to mental states as being the causally efficacious agents for some behavior. (shrink)

In this chapter I shall examine some of Johann Georg Hamann’s claims about how philosophers misuse, misunderstand, and are misled by language. I will then examine how he anticipates things that Friedrich Nietzsche and Ludwig Wittgenstein say on this topic.

In this article, I argue that as we learn more about how we might intervene in the brain in ways that impact human behavior, the scope of what counts as “moral behavior” becomes smaller and smaller because things we successfully manipulate using evidence-based science are often things that fall outside the sphere of morality. Consequently, the argument that we are morally obligated to morally enhance our neighbors starts to fall apart, not because humans should be free to make terrible choices, (...) but because morality is not something subject to such manipulation. To illustrate my argument, I shall use the rise of veteran diversion courts in the United States as a putative instance of an intervention designed to change human behavior for the better. Part of my purpose in working my way through this case study is to demonstrate that many philosophers have the psychology of immoral action wrong. (shrink)

I examine what happens in the brain when patients experience chronic pain and when subjects are addicted to alcohol. We can find important parallels between these two cases, and these parallels can perhaps point us toward new ways of treating (or at least understanding) both issues. Interestingly, we can understand both cases as our pleasure system gone awry. In brief, I argue that chronic pain and alcohol addiction both stem from a dysregulation in our brain’s reward structure. This dysregulation in (...) what should be our pleasure circuitry pushes individuals to behave in ways counterproductive to their needs and to feel unpleasant things. In other words, there is likely both something quite right and perhaps quite wrong about how some philosophers are thinking about pain as an evaluative state. I shall be arguing that pain is both hedonic and evaluative, though perhaps not in the ways they are imagining. (shrink)

Previous research in North America has supported the view that male involvement in committed, romantic relationships is associated with lower testosterone (T) levels. Here, we test the prediction that undergraduate men involved in committed, romantic relationships (paired) will have lower T levels than men not involved in such relationships (unpaired). Further, we also test whether these differences are more apparent in samples collected later, rather than earlier, in the day. For this study, 107 undergraduate men filled out a questionnaire and (...) collected one saliva sample (from which a subject’s T level was measured) at various times across the day. As in previous studies, men involved in committed, romantic relationships had lower salivary T levels, though only during later times of the day. Furthermore, additional analysis of the variation among unpaired subjects indicated that men without prior relationship experience had lower T levels than experienced men. Finally, while paired men as a group had lower T levels than unpaired men, those men at the earliest stage (less than six months) of a current relationship had higher T levels than unpaired men as well as men in longer-term relationships. These results suggest that variation in male testosterone levels may reflect differential behavioral allocation to mating effort. (shrink)

What counts as a computation and how it relates to cognitive function are important questions for scientists interested in understanding how the mind thinks. This paper argues that pragmatic aspects of explanation ultimately determine how we answer those questions by examining what is needed to make rigorous the notion of computation used in the (cognitive) sciences. It (1) outlines the connection between the Church-Turing Thesis and computational theories of physical systems, (2) differentiates merely satisfying a computational function from true computation, (...) and finally (3) relates how we determine a true computation to the functional methodology in cognitive science. All of the discussion will be directed toward showing that the only way to connect formal notions of computation to empirical theory will be in virtue of the pragmatic aspects of explanation. (shrink)

The sensation of will is not the same thing as the will itself any more than the sensation of hunger is the same thing as being devoid of nutrients. This is not a really surprising claim, but it is the only claim to which Wegner is entitled in his book.

This essay addresses the question: What is the probative value of including neuroscience data in court cases where the defendant might have had a traumatic brain injury? That is, this essay attempts to articulate how well we can connect scientific data and clinical test results to the demands of the Daubert standard in the United States’ court system, and, given the fact that neuroimaging is already being used in our courts, what, if anything, we should do about this fact. Ultimately, (...) I am not sure that there are completely satisfactory answers to this query at this particular time in our legal history. I briefly rehearse the recent use of brain research in our legal system, summarize how neuroscience data regarding TBI and its relation to poor behavioral outcomes are currently used in the courtroom, review challenges with using these data, and highlight fundamental tensions between how the legal system views the causes of behavior and how medicine, neuroscience, and psychology do. Until these tensions are resolved, it is unclear the place neuroscience data should have in courts. (shrink)

Newly developed Bayesian perspectives on schizophrenia hold out the promise that a common underlying mechanism can account for many, if not all, of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. If this is the case, then understanding how schizophrenic minds go awry could shine light on how healthy minds maintain a sense of self. This article investigates this Bayesian promise by examining whether the approach can indeed account for the difficulties with self-awareness experienced in schizophrenia. While I conclude that it cannot, I (...) nonetheless maintain that understanding how the self breaks down in schizophrenia tells us much about how and why the self functions in normal human circumstances. I proceed first by recounting in some detail a Bayesian interpretation of perception, schizophrenia, and self-awareness, as well as some of the empirical data supporting this interpretation, then by exploring aspects of schizophrenia that this approach leaves out. I conclude by discussing what the “left out” aspects tell us about self-awareness, thereby convincing the reader that studying patients with schizophrenia is indeed a useful avenue for understanding awareness of self. (shrink)

Information processing theories in psychology give rise to executive theories of consciousness. Roughly speaking, these theories maintain that consciousness is a centralized processor that we use when processing novel or complex stimuli. The computational assumptions driving the executive theories are closely tied to the computer metaphor. However, those who take the metaphor serious — as I believe psychologists who advocate the executive theories do — end up accepting too particular a notion of a computing device. In this essay, I examine (...) the arguments from theoretical computational considerations that cognitive psychologists use to support their general approach in order to show that they make unwarranted assumptions about the processing attributes of consciousness. I then go on to examine the assumptions behind executive theories which grow out of the computer metaphor of cognitive psychology and conclude that we may not be the sort of computational machine cognitive psychology assumes and that cognitive psychology''s approach in itself does not buy us anything in developing theories of consciousness. Hence, the state space in which we may locate consciousness is vast, even within an information processing framework. (shrink)

I examine the branch of evolutionary epistemology which tries to account for the character of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans by extending the biological theory of evolution to the neurophysiological substrates of cognition. Like Plotkin, I construe this branch as a struggling science, and attempt to characterize the sort of theory one might expect to find this truly interdisciplinary endeavor, an endeavor which encompasses not only evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and developmental neuroscience, but also and especially, the computational modeling (...) of artificial life programming; I suggest that extending Schaffner''s notion of interlevel theories to include both horizontal and vertical levels of abstraction best fits the theories currently being developed in cognitive science. Finally, I support this claim with examples drawn from computational modeling data using the genetic algorithm. (shrink)

This article examines how scientists move from physical measurementsto actual observation of single-cell recordings in the brain. We highlight how easy it is to change the fundamental nature of ourobservations using accepted methodological techniques for manipulatingraw data. Collecting single-cell data is thoroughly pragmatic. Weconclude that there is no deep or interesting difference betweenaccounting for observations by measurements and accounting forobservations by theories.

Fred Suppe claims that the refereed journal article is an appropriate unit of scientific debate for philosophical analysis. He also claims that when we regiment scientific papers correctly, we can see that the hypothetico-deductive method, Baysian induction, and inference to the best explanation fail to capture the structure of scientific articles adequately. In what follows I demonstrate that the coding scheme Suppe used for uncovering the structure of a scientific paper is not appropriate under all circumstances, illustrate alternative structures found (...) in various scientific articles, and show that the hypothetico-deductive method can accommodate the alternative structures I find. My conclusions are that the article that Suppe analyzed is not paradigmatic of published scientific articles, that different papers have different structures, that the structure depends upon the rhetorical goals of the article, and that, because of the different structures and different goals, no one philosophical account of testing is going to suffice. (shrink)

I have two goals in this paper. First, I want to show by example that inferences about theoretical entities are relatively contingent affairs. Previously accepted conceptual metaphors in science set both the general form of new theories and our acceptance of the theories as plausible. In addition, they determine how we define the relevant parameters in investigating phenomena in the first place. These items then determine how we conceptualize things in the world. Second, and maybe more importantly, I want to (...) solve a puzzle that falls out of our current explication of attention, namely why we have it. Given the now widely accepted view that our brains are massively parallel, it is difficult to see why we should have evolved attentional mechanisms at all. Why gate when we can already process what we transduce in parallel? Here I answer that puzzle and suggest a perspective on attention that makes it a bit easier to understand, although this perspective also entails that we have to revise how we individuate experimental protocols and relevant data. (shrink)

In this essay, I home in on the difficulties with group-to-individual (G2i) inferences in neuroscience and how they impact the legal system. I briefly outline how cognitive shortcutting can distort legal decisions, and then turn my attention to G2i inferences, with a special focus on issues of intellectual disability and brain damage. I argue that judges and juries are not situated to appreciate the nuances in brain data and that they are required to make clinical decisions without clinical training. As (...) a result, they effectively ignore those responsibilities and simply decide cases in virtue of what they already believe to be true. How judges actually make decisions in highstakes criminal cases is troubling, but they are also hamstrung in a variety of ways. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper examines ideas of individual freedom in the Hellenistic city-states. It concentrates on the civic ideas expressed in the laws and decrees of Hellenistic cities, inscribed on stone, comparing them with Hellenistic historical and philosophical works. It places different Hellenistic approaches alongside modern liberal, neo-Roman republican and civic humanist theories of individual liberty, finding some overlaps with each of those modern approaches. The argument is that the Hellenistic Greeks developed innovative ways of combining demanding ideals of civic virtue and (...) the common good with equally robust ideals of individual freedom and ethical choice. They did so not least by adapting and developing traditional Greek approaches close to modern civic humanism, in ways very relevant to modern debates about how to reconcile civic duty, the common good and pluralism. (shrink)

The debate around the ethics of homeopathy in recent issues of the journal has been approached as a binary question; is homeopathy ethical or not? This paper suggests that this is an unhelpful question and instead discusses a framework to establish the extent to which the dominant culture should tolerate non-dominant health practices such as homeopathy. This requires a sophisticated understanding of the placebo effect, a critical evaluation of what evidence is available, a consideration of the harm that the non-dominant (...) practice might cause, and a consideration of how this might be affected by the culture of the patient. This is presented as a matter of cultural competence. At a clinical level clinicians need to respect the values and beliefs of their patients and communicate with all the practitioners involved in a patient’s care. At a societal level there are a number of factors to be considered when a community decides which practices to tolerate and to what extent. (shrink)

Our brains process visual data in segregated, specialized cortical areas. As is commonly remarked, the brain processes the what and the where of its environment in separate, distal locations. Indeed, regarding the what information that the brain computes, it responds to edges, colors, and movements using different neuronal pathways. Moreover, so far as we can tell, there are no true association areas in our cortices. There are no convergence zones where information is pooled and united; there are no central neural (...) areas dedicated to information exchange. Still, the visual features that we extract separately have to come together in some way, since our experiences are of these features united together into a single unit. The binding problem is explaining how our brains do that, given the serial, distributed nature of our visual processing. How do our minds know to join the perception of a shape with the perception of its color to give us the single, unified experience of a colored object? (shrink)

In this paper we suggest an alternative approach to ethics in social work: virtue ethics. We argue that Habermas's theory of communicative action and discourse ethics needs to be supplemented with virtue ethics to provide an account useful to social work. In these times, sensitivity to others is needed for social work to succeed as a profession interested in combating the complacency, self-interest and lack of compassion evident in cutbacks to social welfare programmes and the resultant concerns with outcomes and (...) efficiencies that have all but obliterated care and compassion. We see in Habermas a furthering of Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy, most importantly with respect to his focus on emancipatory knowing?the critically reflective knower who knows self as the person doing the knowing. Habermas's distinction between values (objective), ethics (social) and morals (subjective) makes the province of emancipatory knowing (his epistemological theory) consistent with his moral theory?morality is personal. (shrink)

O'Regan & Noë mistakenly identify visual processing with visual experience. I outline some reasons why this is a mistake, taking my data and arguments mainly from the literature on subliminal processing.