•  16
    On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionals
    Erkenntnis 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.
  •  289
    The discursive dilemma as a lottery paradox
    Economics and Philosophy 23 (3): 301-319. 2007.
    List and Pettit have stated an impossibility theorem about the aggregation of individual opinion states. Building on recent work on the lottery paradox, this paper offers a variation on that result. The present result places different constraints on the voting agenda and the domain of profiles, but it covers a larger class of voting rules, which need not satisfy the proposition-wise independence of votes
  •  17
    Knowledge and Practical Reasoning
    Dialectica 62 (1): 101-118. 2008.
    The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assum…Read more
  •  48
    The anti-realist argument for underdetermination
    Philosophical Quarterly 50 (200): 371-375. 2000.
    Typically, anti-realists argue for the underdetermination of theory by the data on the basis of the claim that each theory has empirically equivalent rivals. Leplin has recently sought to show that, whatever the truth-value of this latter claim, it cannot play any positive role in an argument for underdetermination. I argue that Leplin’s attempt fails.
  • Kuipers' comparatief realisme: een vraag en een suggestie
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100 (3): 201-202. 2008.
  •  23
  •  59
    Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of Color
    with Sylvia Wenmackers, Yasmina Jraissati, and Lieven Decock
    Cognitive Science 41 (3): 686-722. 2017.
    This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue–green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of the typical blue and t…Read more
  •  84
    The Formal Epistemology Project
    Synthese 190 (1): 1-2. 2013.
  •  14
    Nelkin on the Lottery Paradox
    Philosophical 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
  •  106
    The Context-Insensitivity of "Knowing More" and "Knowing Better"
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (3): 313-326. 2004.
    This paper argues that if epistemological contextualism is correct, then not only have knowledge-ascribing sentences context-sensitive truth conditions, certain comparative and superlative constructions involving ‘know’ have context-sensitive truth conditions as well. But not only is there no evidence for the truth of the latter consequence, the evidence seems to indicate that it is false.The position I aim to criticize has been defended by, most notably, Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, and David L…Read more
  •  17
    Kennis en de wetenschappelijke methode
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 107 (3): 323-335. 2015.
    Knowledge and Scientific Method According to scientism, our scientific knowledge is the best knowledge we have. But what exactly is it that is supposed to give this knowledge its special status? I defend the claim that scientific knowledge deserves its special status because it results from application of the scientific method.
  •  8
    This book contains ten papers that were presented at the symposium about the realism debate, held at the Center for Logic, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language of the Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven on 10 and 11 March 1995. The first group of papers are directly concerned with the realism/anti-realism debate in the general philosophy of science. This group includes the articles by Ernan McMullin, Diderik Batens/Joke Meheus, Igor Douven and Herman de Regt…Read more
  •  164
    There has been a probabilistic turn in contemporary cognitive science. Far and away, most of the work in this vein is Bayesian, at least in name. Coinciding with this development, philosophers have increasingly promoted Bayesianism as the best normative account of how humans ought to reason. In this paper, we make a push for exploring the probabilistic terrain outside of Bayesianism. Non-Bayesian, but still probabilistic, theories provide plausible competitors both to descriptive and normative B…Read more
  •  85
    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.
  •  22
    Conditionals are sentences of the form 'If A, then B', and they play a central role in scientific, logical, and everyday reasoning. They have been in the philosophical limelight for centuries, and more recently, they have been receiving attention from psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. In spite of this, many key questions concerning conditionals remain unanswered. While most of the work on conditionals has addressed semantical questions - questions about the truth conditions of c…Read more
  •  73
    Lewis on fallible knowledge
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (4). 2005.
    Lewis has offered a contextualist epistemology that he claims is non-fallibilist. The present note aims to show that, while there seems to be a simple argument for Lewis's claim, the argument is fallacious, and Lewis's epistemology is fallibilist after all.
  •  77
    Style and supervenience
    British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (3): 255-262. 1999.
  •  124
    Knowledge and practical reasoning
    Dialectica 62 (1). 2008.
    The idea that knowledge is conceptually related to practical reasoning is becoming increasingly popular. In defending this idea, philosophers have been relying on a conception of practical reasoning that drastically deviates from one which has been more traditionally advocated in analytic philosophy and which assigns no special role to knowledge. This paper argues that these philosophers have failed to give good reasons for thinking that the conception of practical reasoning they have been assum…Read more
  •  142
    Quantum probabilities and the conjunction principle
    with Jos Uffink
    Synthese 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
  •  244
    Identity and similarity
    Philosophical 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
  •  20
    Truly empiricist semantics
    Dialectica 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
  •  110
    Nelkin on the lottery paradox
    Philosophical 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
  •  106
    This 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
  •  121
    Kaufmann on the Probabilities of Conditionals
    Journal 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
  •  14
    Reasoning about evidence
    Journal of Applied Logic 12 (3): 263-278. 2014.
  • Principles of Truth (review)
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 3. 2004.