The Teleological Theory of Representation

Book chapter (revised

How to Overcome Antirealists’ Objections to Scientific Realism

Van Fraassen contends that there is no argument that rationally compels us to disbelieve a successful theory, T. I object that this contention places upon him the burden of showing that scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments, such as the pessimistic induction, do not rationally compel us to disbelieve T. Van Fraassen uses the English view of rationality to rationally disbelieve T. I argue that realists can use it to rationally believe T, despite scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments against T

Moving Beyond the Client Role: Helping Human Service Organizations Identify Program Participant’s Assets

Human service agencies have traditionally provided services to a population considered in need of those services. Program participants are often seen solely as passive recipients of food, housing, health care, case management, etc. However, community developers, program evaluators, human service/development staff and administrators, as well as researchers are finding that involving program participants in the planning and administration of programs and research results in better programs, program utilization, and empowerment of program participants (Nichols 2002; Papineau and Kiely 1996)

Integrating Ethics with Psychiatry. The case of Antoni Kępiński

This paper argues that in the case of mental illnesses whose somatic bases are not known or do not exist, a promising route to understand mental illness is to see it as the lack of a patient’s engagement with some moral values that are necessary for a good human life. The paper explains how the first-person perspective, which is constitutive for mental illnesses, makes it impossible to provide an adequate, third-person explanation of the pathological. Because of its irreducible first-personal nature, mental illness must be understood (also) in terms of a moral harm to the patient, and so an integration of ethics and psychiatry (at least at the level of practice) is required. This view is further illustrated with A. Kępiński’s idea of psychiatry as therapy with moral values