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48Conditionals, inference, and evidentialityProceedings of the Logic and Cognition Workshop at ESSLLI 2012; Opole, Poland, 13-17 August, 2012 - Vol. 883 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 2012.At least many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to revive an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on two Dutch linguistic markers.
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437Delving deeper into color spaceI-Perception 9 (4): 1-27. 2018.So far, color-naming studies have relied on a rather limited set of color stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli have been largely limited to highly saturated colors. Because of this, little is known about how people categorize less saturated colors and, more generally, about the structure of color categories as they extend across all dimensions of color space. This article presents the results from a large Internet-based color-naming study that involved color stimuli ranging across all available ch…Read more
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10Truly Empiricist SemanticsDialectica 52 (2): 127-150. 1998.In van Fraassen's The Scientific Image we are told that the scientific anti‐realist need not appeal to some special semantics for scientific language. He can allegedly hold – just like his direct opponents typically do – that truth‐conditional semantics is appropriate both for claims about the observable and claims about the unobservable. However, I shall point out that this kind of semantics goes badly with the anti‐realist's epistemic attitude vis‐his the unobservable. In this paper an alterna…Read more
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114Verities, the sorites, and Theseus’ shipSynthese 194 (10): 3867-3878. 2017.Edgington has proposed a degree-theoretic account of vagueness that yields a highly elegant solution to the sorites paradox. This paper applies her account to the paradox of Theseus’ ship, which is generally classified among the paradoxes of material constitution and not as a sorites paradox
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53Theoretical terms and the principle of the benefit of doubtInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (2). 2000.The Principle of the Benefit of Doubt dictates that, whenever reasonably possible, we interpret earlier-day scientists as referring to entities posited by current science. Putnam has presented the principle as supplementary to his Causal Theory of Reference in order to make this theory generally applicable to theoretical terms. The present paper argues that the principle is of doubtful standing. In particular, it will be argued that the principle lacks a justification and, indeed, is unjustifiab…Read more
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11How group members contribute to group performance: Evidence from agent-based simulationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 39. 2016.
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77Constraints on Colour Category FormationInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 26 (2): 171-196. 2012.This article addresses two questions related to colour categorization, to wit, the question what a colour category is, and the question how we identify colour categories. We reject both the relativist and universalist answers to these questions. Instead, we suggest that colour categories can be identified with the help of the criterion of psychological saliency, which can be operationalized by means of consistency and consensus measures. We further argue that colour categories can be defined as …Read more
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114Nozick’s experience machine: An empirical studyPhilosophical Psychology 31 (2): 278-298. 2018.Many philosophers deny that happiness can be equated with pleasurable experiences. Nozick introduced an experience machine thought experiment to support the idea that happiness requires pleasurable experiences that are “in contact with reality.” In this thought experiment, people can choose to plug into a machine that induces exclusively pleasurable experiences. We test Nozick’s hypothesis that people will reject this offer. We also contrast Nozick’s experience machine scenario with scenarios th…Read more
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161Unger's argument for skepticism revisitedTheoria 74 (3): 239-250. 2008.Unger (1974/2000) presents an argument for skepticism that significantly differs from the more traditional arguments for skepticism. The argument is based on two premises, to wit, that knowledge would entitle the knower to absolute certainty, and that an attitude of absolute certainty is always inadmissible from an epistemic viewpoint. The present paper scrutinizes the arguments that Unger provides in support of these premises and shows that none of them is tenable. It thus concludes that Unger'…Read more
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1Conditionals and inferential connections: A hypothetical inferential theoryCognitive Psychology 101 50-81. 2018.
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86The Lottery Paradox and the Pragmatics of BeliefDialectica 66 (3): 351-373. 2012.The thesis that high probability suffices for rational belief, while initially plausible, is known to face the Lottery Paradox. The present paper proposes an amended version of that thesis which escapes the Lottery Paradox. The amendment is argued to be plausible on independent grounds
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160Probability of inconsistencies in theory revisionEuropean Physical Journal B 85 (1). 2012.We present a model for studying communities of epistemically interacting agents who update their belief states by averaging the belief states of other agents in the community. The agents in our model have a rich belief state, involving multiple independent issues which are interrelated in such a way that they form a theory of the world. Our main goal is to calculate the probability for an agent to end up in an inconsistent belief state due to updating. To that end, an analytical expression is gi…Read more
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47The ecological rationality of explanatory reasoningStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 79 1-14. 2020.
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94Inferential Conditionals and EvidentialityJournal of Logic, Language and Information 22 (3): 315-334. 2013.Many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to argue for an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on the evidential meaning of certain English and Dutch modal expressions
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2048What are natural concepts? A design perspectiveMind and Language (3): 313-334. 2019.Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive psychology. The core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be represented as regions in similarity spaces. While it is generally acknowledged that not every region in such a space represents a natural concept, it is still an open question what distinguishes those regions that represent natural concepts from those that do not. The central claim of this paper is that natural concepts are represen…Read more
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469Returning the Gift of LifeArs Disputandi 4. 2004.The gift of life argument, the claim that suicide is immoral because our lives are not ours to dispose of as we are their guardians or stewards, is a persistent theme in debates about the morality of suicide, assisted-suicide, and euthanasia. I argue that this argument suffers from a fatal internal incoherence. The gift can either be interpreted literally or analogically. If it is interpreted literally there are serious problems in understanding who receives the gift. If it is understood analogi…Read more
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242Identity and similarityPhilosophical Studies 151 (1): 59-78. 2010.The standard approach to the so-called paradoxes of identity has been to argue that these paradoxes do not essentially concern the notion of identity but rather betray misconceptions on our part regarding other metaphysical notions, like that of an object or a property. This paper proposes a different approach by pointing to an ambiguity in the identity predicate and arguing that the concept of identity that figures in many ordinary identity claims, including those that appear in the paradoxes, …Read more
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139Quantum probabilities and the conjunction principleSynthese 184 (1): 109-114. 2012.A recent argument by Hawthorne and Lasonen-Aarnio purports to show that we can uphold the principle that competently forming conjunctions is a knowledge-preserving operation only at the cost of a rampant skepticism about the future. A key premise of their argument is that, in light of quantum-mechanical considerations, future contingents never quite have chance 1 of being true. We argue, by drawing attention to the order of magnitude of the relevant quantum probabilities, that the skeptical thre…Read more
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Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Rationality: A revoew of Alfred R. Mele and Piers Rawling (eds) The Oxford Handbook of RationalityJournal of Economic Methodology 12 (4): 618. 2005.
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19Truly empiricist semanticsDialectica 52 (2). 1998.In van Fraassen's The Scientific Image we are told that the scientific anti‐realist need not appeal to some special semantics for scientific language. He can allegedly hold – just like his direct opponents typically do – that truth‐conditional semantics is appropriate both for claims about the observable and claims about the unobservable. However, I shall point out that this kind of semantics goes badly with the anti‐realist's epistemic attitude vis‐his the unobservable. In this paper an alterna…Read more
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108Nelkin on the lottery paradoxPhilosophical Review 112 (3): 395-404. 2003.As part of an exceptionally lucid analysis of the Lottery Paradox, Dana Nelkin castigates the solutions to that paradox put forward by Laurence Bonjour and Sharon Ryan. According to her, these are “so finely tailored to lottery-like cases that they are limited in their ability to explain [what seem the intuitively right responses to such cases]”. She then offers a solution to the Lottery Paradox that allegedly has the virtue of being independently motivated by our intuitions regarding certain no…Read more
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121Kaufmann on the Probabilities of ConditionalsJournal of Philosophical Logic 37 (3): 259-266. 2008.Kaufmann has recently argued that the thesis according to which the probability of an indicative conditional equals the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent under certain specifiable circumstances deviates from intuition. He presents a method for calculating the probability of a conditional that does seem to give the intuitively correct result under those circumstances. However, the present paper shows that Kaufmann’s method is inconsistent in that it may lead one to as…Read more
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104Truth Approximation, Social Epistemology, and Opinion DynamicsErkenntnis (2): 271-283This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists ex…Read more
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39In Defense of the Rational Credibility Account: A Reply to CasalegnoDialectica 66 (2): 289-297. 2012.
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