•  15
    Reasoning about evidence
    Journal of Applied Logic 12 (3): 263-278. 2014.
  • Principles of Truth (review)
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 3. 2004.
  •  127
    The evidential support theory of conditionals
    Synthese 164 (1): 19-44. 2008.
    According to so-called epistemic theories of conditionals, the assertability/acceptability/acceptance of a conditional requires the existence of an epistemically significant relation between the conditional’s antecedent and its consequent. This paper points to some linguistic data that our current best theories of the foregoing type appear unable to explain. Further, it presents a new theory of the same type that does not have that shortcoming. The theory is then defended against some seemingly …Read more
  •  48
    Learning Conditional Information
    Mind and Language 27 (3): 239-263. 2012.
    Some of the information we receive comes to us in an explicitly conditional form. It is an open question how to model the accommodation of such information in a Bayesian framework. This paper presents data suggesting that there may be no strictly Bayesian account of updating on conditionals. Specifically, the data seem to indicate that such updating at least sometimes proceeds on the basis of explanatory considerations, which famously have no home in standard Bayesian epistemology. The paper als…Read more
  •  19
  •  119
    Inference to the Best Explanation versus Bayes’s Rule in a Social Setting
    with Sylvia Wenmackers
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2). 2017.
    This article compares inference to the best explanation with Bayes’s rule in a social setting, specifically, in the context of a variant of the Hegselmann–Krause model in which agents not only update their belief states on the basis of evidence they receive directly from the world, but also take into account the belief states of their fellow agents. So far, the update rules mentioned have been studied only in an individualistic setting, and it is known that in such a setting both have their stre…Read more
  •  66
    Over recent decades, computer simulations have become a common tool among practitioners of the social sciences. They have been utilized to study such diverse phenomena as the integration and segregation of different racial groups, the emergence and evolution of friendship networks, the spread of gossip, fluctuations of housing prices in an area, the transmission of social norms, and many more. Philosophers of science and others interested in the methodological status of these studies have identi…Read more
  •  173
    Putnam’s Model-Theoretic Argument Reconstructed
    Journal of Philosophy 96 (9): 479-490. 1999.
    Putnam's model theoretic argument against metaphysical realism can be reconstructed as valid, with premises acceptable to the realist. There is no illegitimate assumption that the causal theory of reference is false.
  •  56
    Testing Inference To The Best Explanation
    Synthese 130 (3): 355-377. 2002.
    Inference to the Best Explanation has become the subject of a livelydebate in the philosophy of science. Scientific realists maintain, while scientificantirealists deny, that it is a compelling rule of inference. It seems that anyattempt to settle this debate empirically must beg the question against theantirealist. The present paper argues that this impression is misleading. A methodis described that, by combining Glymour's theory of bootstrapping and Hacking'sarguments from microscopy, allows …Read more
  •  51
    Marc Slors on personal identity
    Philosophical Explorations 2 (2). 1999.
    Theories of personal identity purport to specify truth conditions for sentences of the form 'x-at-ti is the same person as y-at-tj. Most philosophers nowadays agree that such truth conditions are to be stated in terms of psychological continuity. However; opinions vary as to how the notion of psychological continuity is to be understood. In a recent contribution to this journal, Slors offers an account in which psychological continuity is spelled out in terms of narrative connectedness between m…Read more
  •  35
    1. The Epistemology of Conditionals
    Oxford Studies in Epistemology 4 1. 2013.
  •  29
    Lotteries, Knowledge, and Rational Belief: Essays on the Lottery Paradox (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2020.
    We talk and think about our beliefs both in a categorical and in a graded way. How do the two kinds of belief hang together? The most straightforward answer is that we believe something categorically if we believe it to a high enough degree. But this seemingly obvious, near-platitudinous claim is known to give rise to a paradox commonly known as the 'lottery paradox' – at least when it is coupled with some further seeming near-platitudes about belief. How to resolve that paradox has been a matte…Read more
  •  95
    Simulating peer disagreements
    Studies 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
  •  227
    Inference to the best explanation made coherent
    Philosophy 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
  •  114
    Probabilist antirealism
    Pacific 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.
  •  190
    Measuring coherence
    with Wouter Meijs
    Synthese 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
  •  105
    Inference to the Best Explanation, Dutch Books, and Inaccuracy Minimisation
    Philosophical 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 incommensurabiliteit
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 87 (3): 142-164. 1995.
  • Review of Belief's Own Ethics' (review)
    Ars Disputandi 3. 2003.
  •  33
  •  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.
  •  291
    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
  •  50
    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.