-
227Inference to the best explanation made coherentPhilosophy of Science 66 (Supplement). 1999.Van Fraassen (1989) argues that Inference to the Best Explanation is incoherent in the sense that adopting it as a rule for belief change will make one susceptible to a dynamic Dutch book. The present paper argues against this. A strategy is described that allows us to infer to the best explanation free of charge
-
95Simulating peer disagreementsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (2): 148-157. 2010.It has been claimed that epistemic peers, upon discovering that they disagree on some issue, should give up their opposing views and ‘split the difference’. The present paper challenges this claim by showing, with the help of computer simulations, that what the rational response to the discovery of peer disagreement is—whether it is sticking to one’s belief or splitting the difference—depends on factors that are contingent and highly context-sensitive.Keywords: Peer disagreement; Computer simula…Read more
-
294Review: Bradley Monton: Images of Empiricism: Essays on Science and Stances, with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen (review)Mind 118 (470): 504-507. 1999.
-
114Probabilist antirealismPacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (1): 38-63. 2010.Until now, antirealists have offered sketches of a theory of truth, at best. In this paper, we present a probabilist account of antirealist truth in some formal detail, and we assess its ability to deal with the problems that are standardly taken to beset antirealism.
-
187Measuring coherenceSynthese 156 (3). 2007.This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the notion of coherence by explicating in probabilistic terms, step by step, what seem to be our most basic intuitions about that notion, to wit, that coherence is a matter of hanging or fitting together, and that coherence is a matter of degree. A qualitative theory of coherence will serve as a stepping stone to formulate a set of quantitative measures of coherence, each of which seems to capture well the aforementioned intuitions. Subsequen…Read more
-
26The epistemology of 'de se'beliefsIn Neil Feit & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Attitudes De Se: Linguistics, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Csli Publications. 2013.
-
105Inference to the Best Explanation, Dutch Books, and Inaccuracy MinimisationPhilosophical Quarterly 63 (252): 428-444. 2013.Bayesians have traditionally taken a dim view of the Inference to the Best Explanation, arguing that, if IBE is at variance with Bayes ' rule, then it runs afoul of the dynamic Dutch book argument. More recently, Bayes ' rule has been claimed to be superior on grounds of conduciveness to our epistemic goal. The present paper aims to show that neither of these arguments succeeds in undermining IBE
-
Intern realisme en incommensurabiliteitAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 87 (3): 142-164. 1995.
-
16On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionalsErkenntnis 67 (1): 111-118. 2007.Bradley has argued that a truth-conditional semantics for conditionals is incompatible with an allegedly very weak and intuitively compelling constraint on the interpretation of conditionals. I argue that the example Bradley offers to motivate this constraint can be explained along pragmatic lines that are compatible with the correctness of at least one popular truth-conditional semantics for conditionals.
-
54Can the World Help Us in Fixing the Reference of Natural Kind Terms?Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 29 (1). 1998.According to Putnam the reference of natural kind terms is fixed by the world, at least partly; whether two things belong to the same kind depends on whether they obey the same objective laws. We show that Putnam's criterion of substance identity only "works" if we read "objective laws" as "OBJECTIVE LAWS". Moreover, at least some of the laws of some of the special sciences have to be included. But what we consider to be good special sciences and what not depends upon our values. Hence, "objecti…Read more
-
23Basic Beliefs, Coherence, and Bootstrap ConfirmationIn René van Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge: Papers in Epistemology, Ontos-verlag. pp. 4--57. 2005.
-
18A Paradox for EmpiricismPhilosophy of Science 63 (5). 1996.According to van Fraassen, constructive empiricism yields a better account of science than does scientific realism. One particularly important advantage van Fraassen claims his position to have over scientific realism is that the former can make sense of science without invoking pre-Kantian metaphysics. In the present paper the consistency of van Fraassen's position is put in doubt. Specifically, it will be argued that van Fraassen faces the paradox that he cannot do with nor without the pre-Kan…Read more
-
14Empirische toetsing Van inductieve logica'sTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (4). 2000.Inductive logics purport to specify, for any given hypothesis and any given evidence statement, whether and, if so, to what extent the evidence statement should bear on our confidence that the hypothesis is true. If we agree that there can only be one true answer to questions of this sort, then the project of inductive logic faces a serious difficulty, namely that the many different systems that have been proposed in the literature rarely reach an unanimous verdict. In this paper I investigate t…Read more
-
18Two accounts of similarity comparedIn Alexander Hieke & Hannes Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos. pp. 387--389. 2009.
-
311Empirical equivalence, explanatory force, and the inference to the best theoryPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1): 281-309. 2005.In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.
-
Conceptuele schema's en convergentie: Putnams intern realismeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 86 (2): 111-127. 1994.
-
36A role for normativismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 252-253. 2011.Elqayam & Evans (E&E) argue against prescriptive normativism and in favor of descriptivism. I challenge the assumption, implicit in their article, that there is a choice to be made between the two approaches. While descriptivism may be the right approach for some questions, others call for a normativist approach. To illustrate the point, I briefly discuss two questions of the latter sort
-
83How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionalsSynthese 194 (5). 2017.Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts
-
158A Puzzle About Stalnaker’s HypothesisTopoi 30 (1): 31-37. 2011.According to Stalnaker’s Hypothesis, the probability of an indicative conditional, $\Pr(\varphi \rightarrow \psi),$ equals the probability of the consequent conditional on its antecedent, $\Pr(\psi | \varphi)$ . While the hypothesis is generally taken to have been conclusively refuted by Lewis’ and others’ triviality arguments, its descriptive adequacy has been confirmed in many experimental studies. In this paper, we consider some possible ways of resolving the apparent tension between the anal…Read more
-
180Earman on underdetermination and empirical indistinguishabilityErkenntnis 49 (3): 303-320. 1998.Earman (1993) distinguishes three notions of empirical indistinguishability and offers a rigorous framework to investigate how each of these notions relates to the problem of underdetermination of theory choice. He uses some of the results obtained in this framework to argue for a version of scientific anti- realism. In the present paper we first criticize Earman's arguments for that position. Secondly, we propose and motivate a modification of Earman's framework and establish several results co…Read more
-
272Similarity After GoodmanReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1): 61-75. 2011.In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of sim…Read more
-
35Evidence, Explanation, and the Empirical Status of Scientific RealismErkenntnis 63 (2): 253-291. 2005.There is good reason to believe that, if it can be decided at all, the realism debate must be decided on a posteriori grounds. But at least prima facie the prospects for an a posteriori resolution of the debate seem bleak, given that realists and antirealists disagree over two of the most fundamental questions pertaining to any kind of empirical research, to wit, what the range of accessible evidence is and what the methodological status of explanatory considerations is. The present paper aims t…Read more
-
132A paradox for empiricism (?)Philosophy of Science 63 (3): 297. 1996.According to van Fraassen, constructive empiricism yields a better account of science than does scientific realism. One particularly important advantage van Fraassen claims his position to have over scientific realism is that the former can make sense of science without invoking (what he calls) pre-Kantian metaphysics. In the present paper the consistency of van Fraassen's position is put in doubt. Specifically, it will be argued that van Fraassen faces the paradox that he cannot do with nor wit…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Other Academic Areas |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |