•  118
    Nozick’s experience machine: An empirical study
    Philosophical 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
  •  164
    Unger's argument for skepticism revisited
    with Diederik Olders
    Theoria 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
  •  90
    The Lottery Paradox and the Pragmatics of Belief
    Dialectica 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
  •  126
    On the alleged impossibility of coherence
    with Wouter Meijs
    Synthese 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
  •  470
    Returning the Gift of Life
    with Robert Halliday, Rod Nicholls, Mark Wynn, Nick Trakakis, Yujin Nagasawa, Maarten Wisse, and Peter Kügler
    Ars 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
  • 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
  •  58
    Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semantics
    with Shira Elqayam, Henrik Singmann, and Janneke van Wijnbergen-Huitink
    Thinking 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
  •  16
    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
  •  142
    The Pragmatics of Belief
    Journal 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.
  •  18
    Wetenschapsfilosofie
    Van Gorcum. 2007.
    Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.
  •  88
    What Verities May Be
    Mind 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
  •  599
    From probabilities to categorical beliefs: Going beyond toy models
    with Hans Rott
    Journal 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
  •  17
    Reasoning in Non-probabilistic Uncertainty: Logic Programming and Neural-Symbolic Computing as Examples
    with Henri Prade, Markus Knauff, and Gabriele Kern-Isberner
    Minds 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
  •  151
    Uniqueness revisited
    American 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
  •  291
    Scoring in context
    Synthese 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.
  •  88
    The Lottery Paradox and Our Epistemic Goal
    Pacific 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
  •  67
    Formal Methods in the Philosophy of Science
    Studia 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.
  •  28
    Putting prototypes in place
    Cognition 193 (C): 104007. 2019.
  •  2
    Explanation, updating, and accuracy
    Journal of Cognitive Psychology 28 1004-1012. 2016.
  •  387
    The Sequential Lottery Paradox
    Analysis 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
  •  158
  •  48
    Conditionals, inference, and evidentiality
    with Karolina Krzyżanowska, Sylvia Wenmackers, and Sara Verbrugge
    Proceedings 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.
  •  73
    A New Angle on the Knobe Effect: Intentionality Correlates with Blame, not with Praise
    with Frank Hindriks and Henrik Singmann
    Mind 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
  •  466
    Delving deeper into color space
    I-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