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105Inference to the Best Explanation, Dutch Books, and Inaccuracy MinimisationPhilosophical 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
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Intern realisme en incommensurabiliteitAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 87 (3): 142-164. 1995.
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16On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionalsErkenntnis 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.
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291The discursive dilemma as a lottery paradoxEconomics 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
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17Knowledge and Practical ReasoningDialectica 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
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50The anti-realist argument for underdeterminationPhilosophical 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.
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Kuipers' comparatief realisme: een vraag en een suggestieAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100 (3): 201-202. 2008.
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23Radim Belohlavek and George J. Klir , Concepts and Fuzzy LogicStudia Logica 102 (5): 1075-1077. 2014.
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59Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of ColorCognitive 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
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318Empirical equivalence, explanatory force, and the inference to the best theoryPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1): 281-309. 2005.In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.
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18Two accounts of similarity comparedIn Alexander Hieke & Hannes Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos. pp. 387--389. 2009.
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Conceptuele schema's en convergentie: Putnams intern realismeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 86 (2): 111-127. 1994.
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36A role for normativismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 252-253. 2011.Elqayam & Evans (E&E) argue against prescriptive normativism and in favor of descriptivism. I challenge the assumption, implicit in their article, that there is a choice to be made between the two approaches. While descriptivism may be the right approach for some questions, others call for a normativist approach. To illustrate the point, I briefly discuss two questions of the latter sort
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158A Puzzle About Stalnaker’s HypothesisTopoi 30 (1): 31-37. 2011.According to Stalnaker’s Hypothesis, the probability of an indicative conditional, $\Pr(\varphi \rightarrow \psi),$ equals the probability of the consequent conditional on its antecedent, $\Pr(\psi | \varphi)$ . While the hypothesis is generally taken to have been conclusively refuted by Lewis’ and others’ triviality arguments, its descriptive adequacy has been confirmed in many experimental studies. In this paper, we consider some possible ways of resolving the apparent tension between the anal…Read more
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83How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionalsSynthese 194 (5). 2017.Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts
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181Earman on underdetermination and empirical indistinguishabilityErkenntnis 49 (3): 303-320. 1998.Earman (1993) distinguishes three notions of empirical indistinguishability and offers a rigorous framework to investigate how each of these notions relates to the problem of underdetermination of theory choice. He uses some of the results obtained in this framework to argue for a version of scientific anti- realism. In the present paper we first criticize Earman's arguments for that position. Secondly, we propose and motivate a modification of Earman's framework and establish several results co…Read more
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273Similarity After GoodmanReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1): 61-75. 2011.In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of sim…Read more
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35Evidence, Explanation, and the Empirical Status of Scientific RealismErkenntnis 63 (2): 253-291. 2005.There is good reason to believe that, if it can be decided at all, the realism debate must be decided on a posteriori grounds. But at least prima facie the prospects for an a posteriori resolution of the debate seem bleak, given that realists and antirealists disagree over two of the most fundamental questions pertaining to any kind of empirical research, to wit, what the range of accessible evidence is and what the methodological status of explanatory considerations is. The present paper aims t…Read more
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132A paradox for empiricism (?)Philosophy of Science 63 (3): 297. 1996.According to van Fraassen, constructive empiricism yields a better account of science than does scientific realism. One particularly important advantage van Fraassen claims his position to have over scientific realism is that the former can make sense of science without invoking (what he calls) pre-Kantian metaphysics. In the present paper the consistency of van Fraassen's position is put in doubt. Specifically, it will be argued that van Fraassen faces the paradox that he cannot do with nor wit…Read more
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86A note on global descriptivism and Putnam's model-theoretic argumentAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (3). 1999.This Article does not have an abstract
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27Fricker on testimonial justificationStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 40 (1): 36-44. 2009.Elizabeth Fricker has recently proposed a principle aimed at stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for testimonial justification. Her proposal entails that a hearer is justified in believing a speaker’s testimony only if she recognizes the speaker to be trustworthy, which, given Fricker’s internalist commitments, requires the hearer to have within her epistemic purview grounds which justify belief in the speaker’s trustworthiness. We argue that, as it stands, Fricker’s principle is too…Read more
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290Ramsey’s test, adams’ thesis, and left-nested conditionalsReview of Symbolic Logic 3 (3): 467-484. 2010.Adams famously suggested that the acceptability of any indicative conditional whose antecedent and consequent are both factive sentences amounts to the subjective conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. The received view has it that this thesis offers an adequate partial explication of Ramsey’s test, which characterizes graded acceptability for conditionals in terms of hypothetical updates on the antecedent. Some results in van Fraassen may raise hope that this explicator…Read more
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