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103Truth Approximation, Social Epistemology, and Opinion DynamicsErkenntnis (2): 271-283This 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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121Kaufmann 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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39In Defense of the Rational Credibility Account: A Reply to CasalegnoDialectica 66 (2): 289-297. 2012.
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6Peter Achinstein: Evidence, Explanation, and Realism: Essays in Philosophy of ScienceScience & Education 21 (4): 597-601. 2012.
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127The evidential support theory of conditionalsSynthese 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
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45Learning 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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116Inference 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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24Decision 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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65Introduction: 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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172Putnam’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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293Testing 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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50Marc 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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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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104Bootstrap 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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167A 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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514Generalizing 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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147Extending 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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18Two accounts of similarity comparedIn Hieke Alexander & Leitgeb Hannes (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos Verlag. pp. 387--389. 2009.
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79Decision 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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149A 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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162Assertion, 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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270A 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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97Can 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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