Searching for Evidence-Based Reassurance Where None Could Be Found

“ Top - down ” effects where none should be found :

120 words) A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action-capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect what we see. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploit an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the socalled...

"Top-down" effects where none should be found: the El Greco fallacy in perception research.

A tidal wave of recent research purports to have discovered that higher-level states such as moods, action capabilities, and categorical knowledge can literally and directly affect how things look. Are these truly effects on perception, or might some instead reflect influences on judgment, memory, or response bias? Here, we exploited an infamous art-historical reasoning error (the so-called "El...

On Where Things Could Be

Some philosophers have replied to Leibniz’s “shift” argument against the reality of absolute space by appealing to anti-haecceitist doctrines about possible worlds, influenced especially by David Lewis’s counterpart theory. But separated from Lewis’s distinctive views about what possible worlds are, it is difficult to understand what those doctrines really amount to, and why they are relevant t...

Suicide: where can help be found?

Evidence - based CAM: Where does it stand?

In the past 10 years evidence - based medicine (EBM) has developed well in all aspects of allopathic medicine giving a new dimension to patient care including cost reduction and attention to medical ethics. With the public and medical community return to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the last two decades there has been a call for evidence - based CAM … in the same way that all...