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27The Role of Naturalness in Concept Learning: A Computational StudyMinds and Machines 33 (4): 695-714. 2023.This paper studies the learnability of natural concepts in the context of the conceptual spaces framework. Previous work proposed that natural concepts are represented by the cells of optimally partitioned similarity spaces, where optimality was defined in terms of a number of constraints. Among these is the constraint that optimally partitioned similarity spaces result in easily learnable concepts. While there is evidence that systems of concepts generally regarded as natural satisfy a number o…Read more
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26The epistemology of 'de se'beliefsIn A. Capone & N. Feit (eds.), Attitudes de Se, University of Chicago. 2013.
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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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23Basic Beliefs, Coherence, and Bootstrap ConfirmationIn Rene van Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge, Ontos-verlag. pp. 4--57. 2005.
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22Pandemics and flexible lockdowns: In praise of agent-based modelingEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (3): 1-27. 2023.Philosophers have recently questioned the methodological status of agent-based modeling. Meanwhile, this methodology has been central to various studies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Few agent-based COVID-19 models are accessible to philosophers for inspection or experimentation. We make available a package for modeling the COVID-19 pandemic and similar pandemics and give an impression of what can be achieved with it. In particular, it is shown that by coupling an agent-based model to a standard opt…Read more
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22The Experimental Philosophy of Logic and Formal Epistemology: ConditionalsIn Alexander Max Bauer & Stephan Kornmesser (eds.), The Compact Compendium of Experimental Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 211-236. 2023.
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21The 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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21Conceptual spaces and the strength of similarity-based argumentsCognition 218 (C): 104951. 2022.
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20Moral BookkeepingErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (n/a). 2023.There is widespread agreement among philosophers about the Mens Rea Asymmetry (MRA), according to which praise requires intent, whereas blame does not. However, there is evidence showing that MRA is descriptively inadequate. We hypothesize that the violations of MRA found in the experimental literature are due to what we call “moral compositionality,” by which we mean that people evaluate the component parts of a moral problem separately and then reach an overall verdict by aggregating the verdi…Read more
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20Optimizing group learning: An evolutionary computing approachArtificial Intelligence 275 (C): 235-251. 2019.
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20Radim Belohlavek and George J. Klir , Concepts and Fuzzy LogicStudia Logica 102 (5): 1075-1077. 2014.
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20Extending 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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19Truly 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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19The Anti-realist Argument for UnderdeterminationPhilosophical Quarterly 50 (200): 371-375. 2000.
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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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18WetenschapsfilosofieVan Gorcum. 2007.Inleidend overzicht van thema's uit de wetenschapsfilosofie.
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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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17A 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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17Kennis en de wetenschappelijke methodeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 107 (3): 323-335. 2015.Knowledge and Scientific Method According to scientism, our scientific knowledge is the best knowledge we have. But what exactly is it that is supposed to give this knowledge its special status? I defend the claim that scientific knowledge deserves its special status because it results from application of the scientific method.
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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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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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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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15Williamson on conditionals and testimonyPhilosophical Studies 180 (1): 121-131. 2022.In _Suppose and Tell_, Williamson makes a new case for the material conditional account. He tries to explain away apparently countervailing data by arguing that these have been misinterpreted because researchers have overlooked the role of heuristics in the processing of conditionals. Cases involving the receipt of apparently conflicting conditionals play an important dialectical role in Williamson’s book: they are supposed to provide evidence for the material conditional account as well as for …Read more
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14Experimental Approaches to the Study of ConditionalsIn Justin Sytsma & Wesley Buckwalter (eds.), A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley. 2016.Conditionals have been studied by philosophers for over two thousand years. This should not be surprising, given how central conditionals are to human reasoning and decision making. This chapter argues that making progress in answering the questions about conditionals which have occupied so many philosophers, past and present, may require the use of methods that go beyond those traditionally used in analytic philosophy. The reasons some might have for believing that experimental methods have no …Read more
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