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48Learning Conditional InformationMind 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
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19The Anti-realist Argument for UnderdeterminationPhilosophical Quarterly 50 (200): 371-375. 2000.
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119Inference to the Best Explanation versus Bayes’s Rule in a Social SettingBritish 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
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10Decision Theory and Rationality, José Luis Bermúdez. Oxford University Press, 2009. 189 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 27 (1): 59-64. 2011.
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66Introduction: Computer Simulations in Social EpistemologyEpisteme 6 (2): 107-109. 2009.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
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173Putnam’s Model-Theoretic Argument ReconstructedJournal 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.
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56Testing Inference To The Best ExplanationSynthese 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
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51Marc Slors on personal identityPhilosophical 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
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29Lotteries, 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
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95Simulating peer disagreementsStudies 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
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227Inference to the best explanation made coherentPhilosophy 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
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295Review: Bradley Monton: Images of Empiricism: Essays on Science and Stances, with a Reply from Bas C. van Fraassen (review)Mind 118 (470): 504-507. 1999.
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150Extending the Hegselmann–Krause Model III: From Single Beliefs to Complex Belief StatesEpisteme 6 (2): 145-163. 2009.In recent years, various computational models have been developed for studying the dynamics of belief formation in a population of epistemically interacting agents that try to determine the numerical value of a given parameter. Whereas in those models, agents’ belief states consist of single numerical beliefs, the present paper describes a model that equips agents with richer belief states containing many beliefs that, moreover, are logically interconnected. Correspondingly, the truth the agents…Read more
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45Qualia Change and Colour Science.In Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 417--428. 2013.
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82Decision theory and the rationality of further deliberationEconomics and Philosophy 18 (2): 303-328. 2002.Bayesian decision theory operates under the fiction that in any decision-making situation the agent is simply given the options from which he is to choose. It thereby sets aside some characteristics of the decision-making situation that are pre-analytically of vital concern to the verdict on the agent's eventual decision. In this paper it is shown that and how these characteristics can be accommodated within a still recognizably Bayesian account of rational agency.
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Conceptual Spaces as Philosophers’ ToolsIn Peter Gärdenfors & Frank Zenker (eds.), Applications of Conceptual Spaces : the Case for Geometric Knowledge Representation, Springer Verlag. pp. 207-221. 2015.
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55A Pragmatic Dissolution of Harman’s ParadoxPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (2): 326-345. 2007.There is widespread agreement that we cannot know of a lottery ticket we own that it is a loser prior to the drawing of the lottery. At the same time we appear to have knowledge of events that will occur only if our ticket is a loser. Supposing any plausible closure principle for knowledge, the foregoing seems to yield a paradox. Appealing to some broadly Gricean insights, the present paper argues that this paradox is apparent only.
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71Assertion, Moore, and BayesPhilosophical Studies 144 (3): 361-375. 2009.It is widely believed that the so-called knowledge account of assertion best explains why sentences such as “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t believe it” and “It’s raining in Paris but I don’t know it” appear odd to us. I argue that the rival rational credibility account of assertion explains that fact just as well. I do so by providing a broadly Bayesian analysis of the said type of sentences which shows that such sentences cannot express rationally held beliefs. As an interesting aside, it wi…Read more
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Grondslagen en toepassingen van de formele epistemologieAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 101 (4): 237-244. 2009.
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276A contextualist solution to the Gettier problemGrazer Philosophische Studien 69 (1): 207-228. 2005.According to the deontological view on justification, being justified in believing some proposition is a matter of having done one's epistemic duty with respect to that proposition. The present paper argues that, given a proper articulation of the deontological view, it is defensible that knowledge is justified true belief, pace virtually all epistemologists since Gettier. One important claim to be argued for is that once it is appreciated that it depends on contextual factors whether a person h…Read more
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Empiricist Semantics and Indeterminism of ReferencePoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 70 171-188. 2000.
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54Can the World Help Us in Fixing the Reference of Natural Kind Terms?Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 29 (1). 1998.According to Putnam the reference of natural kind terms is fixed by the world, at least partly; whether two things belong to the same kind depends on whether they obey the same objective laws. We show that Putnam's criterion of substance identity only "works" if we read "objective laws" as "OBJECTIVE LAWS". Moreover, at least some of the laws of some of the special sciences have to be included. But what we consider to be good special sciences and what not depends upon our values. Hence, "objecti…Read more
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23Basic Beliefs, Coherence, and Bootstrap ConfirmationIn René van Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge: Papers in Epistemology, Ontos-verlag. pp. 4--57. 2005.
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18A Paradox for EmpiricismPhilosophy of Science 63 (5). 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 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 without the pre-Kan…Read more
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14Empirische toetsing Van inductieve logica'sTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (4). 2000.Inductive logics purport to specify, for any given hypothesis and any given evidence statement, whether and, if so, to what extent the evidence statement should bear on our confidence that the hypothesis is true. If we agree that there can only be one true answer to questions of this sort, then the project of inductive logic faces a serious difficulty, namely that the many different systems that have been proposed in the literature rarely reach an unanimous verdict. In this paper I investigate t…Read more
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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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