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86On Bradley’s preservation condition for conditionalsErkenntnis 67 (1). 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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81Lewis on fallible knowledgeAustralasian 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.
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22The Epistemology of Indicative Conditionals: Formal and Empirical ApproachesCambridge University Press. 2015.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
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126Knowledge and practical reasoningDialectica 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
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143Quantum probabilities and the conjunction principleSynthese 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
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244Identity and similarityPhilosophical 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
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Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Rationality: A revoew of Alfred R. Mele and Piers Rawling (eds) The Oxford Handbook of RationalityJournal of Economic Methodology 12 (4): 618. 2005.
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110Nelkin on the lottery paradoxPhilosophical 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
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20Truly empiricist semanticsDialectica 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
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50Kaufmann on the Probabilities of ConditionalsJournal 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
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47Truth Approximation, Social Epistemology, and Opinion DynamicsErkenntnis (2): 271-283. 2011.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
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6In Defense of the Rational Credibility Account: A Reply to CasalegnoDialectica 66 (2): 289-297. 2012.
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172A new resolution of the Judy Benjamin ProblemMind 120 (479). 2011.A paper on how to adapt your probabilisitc beliefs when learning a conditional
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92Further results on the intransitivity of evidential supportReview of Symbolic Logic 4 (4): 487-497. 2011.It is known that evidential support, on the Bayesian definition of this notion, is intransitive. According to some, however, the Bayesian definition is too weak to be materially adequate. This paper investigates whether evidential support is transitive on some plausible probabilistic strengthening of that definition. It is shown that the answer is negative. In fact, it will appear that even under conditions under which the Bayesian notion of evidential support is transitive, the most plausible c…Read more
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122A Davidsonian argument against incommensurabilityInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16 (2). 2002.The writings of Kuhn and Feyerabend on incommensurability challenged the idea that science progresses towards the truth. Davidson famously criticized the notion of incommensurability, arguing that it is incoherent. Davidson's argument was in turn criticized by Kuhn and others. This article argues that, although at least some of the objections raised against Davidson's argument are formally correct, they do it very little harm. What remains of the argument once the objections have been taken acco…Read more
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23Extending the Hegselmann–Krause Model ILogic Journal of the IGPL 18 (2): 323-335. 2009.Hegselmann and Krause have developed a simple yet powerful computational model for studying the opinion dynamics in societies of epistemically interacting truth-seeking agents. We present various extensions of this model and show their relevance to the investigation of socio-epistemic questions, with an emphasis on normative questions
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74Deflating the correspondence intuitionDialectica 59 (3). 2005.A common objection against deflationist theories of truth is that they cannot do justice to the correspondence intuition, i.e. the intuition that there is an explanatory relationship between, for instance, the truth of ‘Snow is white’ and snow's being white. We scrutinize two attempts to meet this objection and argue that both fail. We then propose a new response to the objection which, first, sheds doubt on the correctness of the correspondence intuition and, second, seeks to explain how we may…Read more
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25A Principled Solution to Fitch’s ParadoxErkenntnis 62 (1): 47-69. 2005.To save antirealism from Fitch's Paradox, Tennant has proposed to restrict the scope of the antirealist principle that all truths are knowable to truths that can be consistently assumed to be known. Although the proposal solves the paradox, it has been accused of doing so in an ad hoc manner. This paper argues that, first, for all Tennant has shown, the accusation is just; second, a restriction of the antirealist principle apparently weaker than Tennat's yields a non-ad hoc solution to Fitch's P…Read more
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38Fitch’s Paradox and Probabilistic AntirealismStudia Logica 86 (2): 149-182. 2007.Fitch’s paradox shows, from fairly innocent-looking assumptions, that if there are any unknown truths, then there are unknowable truths. This is generally thought to deliver a blow to antirealist positions that imply that all truths are knowable. The present paper argues that a probabilistic version of antirealism escapes Fitch’s result while still offering all that antirealists should care for.
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124What Is Graded Membership?Noûs 48 (4): 653-682. 2012.It has seemed natural to model phenomena related to vagueness in terms of graded membership. However, so far no satisfactory answer has been given to the question of what graded membership is nor has any attempt been made to describe in detail a procedure for determining degrees of membership. We seek to remedy these lacunae by building on recent work on typicality and graded membership in cognitive science and combining some of the results obtained there with a version of the conceptual spaces …Read more
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107Can the skepticism debate be resolved?Synthese 168 (1). 2009.External world skeptics are typically opposed to admitting as evidence anything that goes beyond the purely phenomenal, and equally typically, they disown the use of rules of inference that might enable one to move from premises about the phenomenal alone to a conclusion about the external world. This seems to bar any a posteriori resolution of the skepticism debate. This paper argues that the situation is not quite so hopeless, and that an a posteriori resolution of the debate becomes possible …Read more
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43Bootstrap Confirmation Made QuantitativeSynthese 149 (1): 97-132. 2006.Glymour’s theory of bootstrap confirmation is a purely qualitative account of confirmation; it allows us to say that the evidence confirms a given theory, but not that it confirms the theory to a certain degree. The present paper extends Glymour’s theory to a quantitative account and investigates the resulting theory in some detail. It also considers the question how bootstrap confirmation relates to justification.
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177A new solution to the paradoxes of rational acceptabilityBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (3): 391-410. 2002.The Lottery Paradox and the Preface Paradox both involve the thesis that high probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The standard solution to these paradoxes denies that rational acceptability is deductively closed. This solution has a number of untoward consequences. The present paper suggests that a better solution to the paradoxes is to replace the thesis that high probability suffices for rational acceptability with a somewhat stricter thesis. This avoids the untoward conseque…Read more
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487Generalizing the lottery paradoxBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (4): 755-779. 2006.This paper is concerned with formal solutions to the lottery paradox on which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. It considers some recently proposed solutions of this type and presents an argument showing that these solutions are trivial in that they boil down to the claim that perfect probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The argument is then generalized, showing that a broad class of similar solutions faces the same problem. An argument against some formal solutio…Read more
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