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266A Defence of Van Fraassen’s Critique of Abductive Inference: Reply to PsillosPhilosophical Quarterly 47 (188). 1997.Psillos has recently argued that van Fraassen’s arguments against abduction fail. Moreover, he claimed that, if successful, these arguments would equally undermine van Fraassen’s own constructive empiricism, for, Psillos thinks, it is only by appeal to abduction that constructive empiricism can be saved from issuing in a bald scepticism. We show that Psillos’ criticisms are misguided, and that they are mostly based on misinterpretations of van Fraassen’s arguments. Furthermore, we argue that Psi…Read more
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81What Verities May BeMind 126 (502): 386-428. 2017.Edgington has proposed a solution to the sorites paradox in terms of ‘verities’, which she defines as degrees of closeness to clear truth. Central to her solution is the assumption that verities are formally probabilities. She is silent on what verities might derive from and on why they should be probabilities. This paper places Edgington’s solution in the framework of a spatial approach to conceptualization, arguing that verities may be conceived of as deriving from how our concepts relate to e…Read more
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A Bayesian perspective on Likert scales and central tendencyPsychonomic Bulletin and Review 25 1202-1211. 2018.
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294The rationality of vaguenessIn Richard Dietz (ed.), Vagueness and rationality, Springer. forthcoming.
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147Uniqueness revisitedAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 46 (4). 2009.Various authors have recently argued that you cannot rationally stick to your belief in the face of known disagreement with an epistemic peer, that is, a person you take to have the same evidence and judgmental skills as you do. For, they claim, because there is but one rational response to any body of evidence, a disagreement with an epistemic peer indicates that at least one of you is not responding rationally to the evidence. Given that you take your peer to have the same judgmental skills as…Read more
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162The Lottery Paradox and Our Epistemic GoalPacific Philosophical Quarterly 89 (2): 204-225. 2008.Many have the intuition that the right response to the Lottery Paradox is to deny that one can justifiably believe of even a single lottery ticket that it will lose. The paper shows that from any theory of justification that solves the paradox in accordance with this intuition, a theory not of that kind can be derived that also solves the paradox but is more conducive to our epistemic goal than the former. It is argued that currently there is no valid reason not to give preference to the derived…Read more
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124On the alleged impossibility of coherenceSynthese 157 (3). 2007.If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We p…Read more
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149Formal Methods in the Philosophy of ScienceStudia Logica 89 (2): 151-162. 2008.In this article, we reflect on the use of formal methods in the philosophy of science. These are taken to comprise not just methods from logic broadly conceived, but also from other formal disciplines such as probability theory, game theory, and graph theory. We explain how formal modelling in the philosophy of science can shed light on difficult problems in this domain.
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55Conditionals and inferential connections: toward a new semanticsThinking and Reasoning 26 (3): 311-351. 2020.In previous published research (“Conditionals and Inferential Connections: A Hypothetical Inferential Theory,” Cognitive Psychology, 2018), we investigated experimentally what role the presence and strength of an inferential connection between a conditional’s antecedent and consequent plays in how people process that conditional. Our analysis showed the strength of that connection to be strongly predictive of whether participants evaluated the conditional as true, false, or neither true nor fals…Read more
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16Vagueness, graded membership, and conceptual spacesCognition 151 80-95. 2016.This paper is concerned with a version of Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership that relies on the conceptual spaces framework. Three studies are reported, one to construct a particular shape space, one to detect which shapes representable in that space are typical for certain sorts of objects, and one to elicit degrees of category membership for the various shapes from which the shape space was constructed. Taking Kamp and Partee's proposal as given, the first two studies allowed us to…Read more
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384The Sequential Lottery ParadoxAnalysis 72 (1): 55-57. 2012.The Lottery Paradox is generally thought to point at a conflict between two intuitive principles, to wit, that high probability is sufficient for rational acceptability, and that rational acceptability is closed under logical derivability. Gilbert Harman has offered a solution to the Lottery Paradox that allows one to stick to both of these principles. The solution requires the principle that acceptance licenses conditionalization. The present study shows that adopting this principle alongside t…Read more
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105Introduction to the Special Issue: Probability, Confirmation and FallaciesSynthese 184 (1): 1-1. 2012.
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142Much recent discussion in social epistemology has focussed on the question of whether peers can rationally sustain a disagreement. A growing number of social epistemologists hold that the answer is negative. We point to considerations from the history of science that favor rather the opposite answer. However, we also explain how the other position can appear intuitively attractive.
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57A New Angle on the Knobe Effect: Intentionality Correlates with Blame, not with PraiseMind and Language 31 (2): 204-220. 2016.In a celebrated experiment, Joshua Knobe showed that people are much more prone to attribute intentionality to an agent for a side effect of a given act when that side effect is harmful than when it is beneficial. This asymmetry has become known as ‘the Knobe Effect’. According to Knobe's Moral Valence Explanation, bad effects trigger the attributions of intentionality, whereas good effects do not. Many others believe that the Knobe Effect is best explained in terms of the high amount of blame a…Read more
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572From probabilities to categorical beliefs: Going beyond toy modelsJournal of Logic and Computation 28 (6): 1099-1124. 2018.According to the Lockean thesis, a proposition is believed just in case it is highly probable. While this thesis enjoys strong intuitive support, it is known to conflict with seemingly plausible logical constraints on our beliefs. One way out of this conflict is to make probability 1 a requirement for belief, but most have rejected this option for entailing what they see as an untenable skepticism. Recently, two new solutions to the conflict have been proposed that are alleged to be non-skeptica…Read more
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16Reasoning in Non-probabilistic Uncertainty: Logic Programming and Neural-Symbolic Computing as ExamplesMinds and Machines 27 (1): 37-77. 2017.This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty ; and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter claim, two paradigmatic examples are presented: logic programming with Kleene semantics for modelling reasoning from information in a discourse, to an interpretation of the state of affairs of the intended model, and a neural-symbolic implementation of input/output logic for …Read more
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149The Probabilities of Conditionals RevisitedCognitive Science 37 (4): 711-730. 2013.According to what is now commonly referred to as “the Equation” in the literature on indicative conditionals, the probability of any indicative conditional equals the probability of its consequent of the conditional given the antecedent of the conditional. Philosophers widely agree in their assessment that the triviality arguments of Lewis and others have conclusively shown the Equation to be tenable only at the expense of the view that indicative conditionals express propositions. This study ch…Read more
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270Scoring in contextSynthese 197 (4): 1565-1580. 2020.A number of authors have recently put forward arguments pro or contra various rules for scoring probability estimates. In doing so, they have skipped over a potentially important consideration in making such assessments, to wit, that the hypotheses whose probabilities are estimated can approximate the truth to different degrees. Once this is recognized, it becomes apparent that the question of how to assess probability estimates depends heavily on context.
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146The preface paradox revisitedErkenntnis 59 (3). 2003.The Preface Paradox has led many philosophers to believe that, if it isassumed that high probability is necessary for rational acceptability, the principleaccording to which rational acceptability is closed under conjunction (CP)must be abandoned. In this paper we argue that the paradox is far less damaging to CP than is generally believed. We describe how, given certain plausibleassumptions, in a large class of cases in which CP seems to lead tocontradiction, it does not do so after all. A rest…Read more
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44A Defence of van Fraassen’s Critique of Abductive Inference: Reply to PsillosPhilosophical Quarterly 47 (188): 305-321. 1997.
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90The role of explanatory considerations in updatingCognition 142 (C): 299-311. 2015.There is an ongoing controversy in philosophy about the connection between explanation and inference. According to Bayesians, explanatory considerations should be given weight in determining which inferences to make, if at all, only insofar as doing so is compatible with Strict Conditionalization. Explanationists, on the other hand, hold that explanatory considerations can be relevant to the question of how much confidence to invest in our hypotheses in ways which violate Strict Conditionalizati…Read more
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437Delving deeper into color spaceI-Perception 9 (4): 1-27. 2018.So far, color-naming studies have relied on a rather limited set of color stimuli. Most importantly, stimuli have been largely limited to highly saturated colors. Because of this, little is known about how people categorize less saturated colors and, more generally, about the structure of color categories as they extend across all dimensions of color space. This article presents the results from a large Internet-based color-naming study that involved color stimuli ranging across all available ch…Read more
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215Vagueness: A Conceptual Spaces ApproachJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1): 137-160. 2013.The conceptual spaces approach has recently emerged as a novel account of concepts. Its guiding idea is that concepts can be represented geometrically, by means of metrical spaces. While it is generally recognized that many of our concepts are vague, the question of how to model vagueness in the conceptual spaces approach has not been addressed so far, even though the answer is far from straightforward. The present paper aims to fill this lacuna.
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48Conditionals, inference, and evidentialityProceedings of the Logic and Cognition Workshop at ESSLLI 2012; Opole, Poland, 13-17 August, 2012 - Vol. 883 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 2012.At least many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to revive an old philosophical idea according to which the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on two Dutch linguistic markers.
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