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118Nozick’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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A Bayesian perspective on Likert scales and central tendencyPsychonomic Bulletin and Review 25 1202-1211. 2018.
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314The rationality of vaguenessIn Richard Dietz (ed.), Vagueness and rationality, Springer. forthcoming.
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164Unger'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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90The 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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126On the alleged impossibility of coherenceSynthese 157 (3). 2007.If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We p…Read more
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470Returning 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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Van Willigenburg on ‘P, but I Lack Sufficient Evidence for P’: A RejoinderArs Disputandi 4. 2004.In a review of Adler’s Belief’s Own Ethics , I had challenged the book’s main argument for the thesis that we cannot but believe in accordance with our evidence. Van Willigenburg replied to the review , defending Adler’s argument against my critique. In the present note, I briefly respond to van Willigenburg
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58Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semanticsThinking and Reasoning 26 (3): 311-351. 2020.In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor fals…Read more
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16Vagueness, graded membership, and conceptual spacesCognition 151 80-95. 2016.This paper is concerned with a version of Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership that relies on the conceptual spaces framework. Three studies are reported, one to construct a particular shape space, one to detect which shapes representable in that space are typical for certain sorts of objects, and one to elicit degrees of category membership for the various shapes from which the shape space was constructed. Taking Kamp and Partee's proposal as given, the first two studies allowed us to…Read more
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142The Pragmatics of BeliefJournal of Pragmatics 42 (1): 35-47. 2010.This paper argues that pragmatic considerations similar to the ones that Grice has shown pertain to assertability pertain to acceptability. It further shows how this should affect some widely held epistemic principles. The idea of a pragmatics of belief is defended against some seemingly obvious objections.
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105Introduction to the Special Issue: Probability, Confirmation and FallaciesSynthese 184 (1): 1-1. 2012.
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18WetenschapsfilosofieVan Gorcum. 2007.Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.
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88What Verities May BeMind 126 (502): 386-428. 2017.Edgington has proposed a solution to the sorites paradox in terms of ‘verities’, which she defines as degrees of closeness to clear truth. Central to her solution is the assumption that verities are formally probabilities. She is silent on what verities might derive from and on why they should be probabilities. This paper places Edgington’s solution in the framework of a spatial approach to conceptualization, arguing that verities may be conceived of as deriving from how our concepts relate to e…Read more
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599From probabilities to categorical beliefs: Going beyond toy modelsJournal of Logic and Computation 28 (6): 1099-1124. 2018.According to the Lockean thesis, a proposition is believed just in case it is highly probable. While this thesis enjoys strong intuitive support, it is known to conflict with seemingly plausible logical constraints on our beliefs. One way out of this conflict is to make probability 1 a requirement for belief, but most have rejected this option for entailing what they see as an untenable skepticism. Recently, two new solutions to the conflict have been proposed that are alleged to be non-skeptica…Read more
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17Reasoning in Non-probabilistic Uncertainty: Logic Programming and Neural-Symbolic Computing as ExamplesMinds and Machines 27 (1): 37-77. 2017.This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty ; and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter claim, two paradigmatic examples are presented: logic programming with Kleene semantics for modelling reasoning from information in a discourse, to an interpretation of the state of affairs of the intended model, and a neural-symbolic implementation of input/output logic for …Read more
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151Uniqueness revisitedAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 46 (4). 2009.Various authors have recently argued that you cannot rationally stick to your belief in the face of known disagreement with an epistemic peer, that is, a person you take to have the same evidence and judgmental skills as you do. For, they claim, because there is but one rational response to any body of evidence, a disagreement with an epistemic peer indicates that at least one of you is not responding rationally to the evidence. Given that you take your peer to have the same judgmental skills as…Read more
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291Scoring in contextSynthese 197 (4): 1565-1580. 2020.A number of authors have recently put forward arguments pro or contra various rules for scoring probability estimates. In doing so, they have skipped over a potentially important consideration in making such assessments, to wit, that the hypotheses whose probabilities are estimated can approximate the truth to different degrees. Once this is recognized, it becomes apparent that the question of how to assess probability estimates depends heavily on context.
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88The Lottery Paradox and Our Epistemic GoalPacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2): 204-225. 2008.Many have the intuition that the right response to the Lottery Paradox is to deny that one can justifiably believe of even a single lottery ticket that it will lose. The paper shows that from any theory of justification that solves the paradox in accordance with this intuition, a theory not of that kind can be derived that also solves the paradox but is more conducive to our epistemic goal than the former. It is argued that currently there is no valid reason not to give preference to the derived…Read more
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45A Defence of van Fraassen’s Critique of Abductive Inference: Reply to PsillosPhilosophical Quarterly 47 (188): 305-321. 1997.
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67Formal Methods in the Philosophy of ScienceStudia Logica 89 (2): 151-162. 2008.In this article, we reflect on the use of formal methods in the philosophy of science. These are taken to comprise not just methods from logic broadly conceived, but also from other formal disciplines such as probability theory, game theory, and graph theory. We explain how formal modelling in the philosophy of science can shed light on difficult problems in this domain.
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387The Sequential Lottery ParadoxAnalysis 72 (1): 55-57. 2012.The Lottery Paradox is generally thought to point at a conflict between two intuitive principles, to wit, that high probability is sufficient for rational acceptability, and that rational acceptability is closed under logical derivability. Gilbert Harman has offered a solution to the Lottery Paradox that allows one to stick to both of these principles. The solution requires the principle that acceptance licenses conditionalization. The present study shows that adopting this principle alongside t…Read more
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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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73A New Angle on the Knobe Effect: Intentionality Correlates with Blame, not with PraiseMind and Language 31 (2): 204-220. 2016.In a celebrated experiment, Joshua Knobe showed that people are much more prone to attribute intentionality to an agent for a side effect of a given act when that side effect is harmful than when it is beneficial. This asymmetry has become known as ‘the Knobe Effect’. According to Knobe's Moral Valence Explanation, bad effects trigger the attributions of intentionality, whereas good effects do not. Many others believe that the Knobe Effect is best explained in terms of the high amount of blame a…Read more
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466Delving 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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