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73Kennis 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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Intern realisme en incommensurabiliteitAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 87 (3): 142-164. 1995.
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184The Context-Insensitivity of ‘Knowing More’ and ‘Knowing Better’Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (3): 313-326. 2004.This paper argues that if epistemological contextualism is correct, then not only have knowledge-ascribing sentences context-sensitive truth conditions, certain comparative and superlative constructions involving ‘know’ have context-sensitive truth conditions as well. But not only is there no evidence for the truth of the latter consequence, the evidence seems to indicate that it is false.The position I aim to criticize has been defended by, most notably, Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, and David L…Read more
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112Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of ColorCognitive Science 41 (3): 686-722. 2017.This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue–green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of the typical blue and t…Read more
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131Learning 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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207Knowledge 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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64The 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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360Review: 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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183On 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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177Kaufmann 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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60Truly 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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100In defense of the rational credibility account: a reply to CasalegnoDialectica 66 (2): 289-297. 2012.A majority of philosophers nowadays hold that the practice of assertion is governed by the rule that one must assert only what one knows. In his last published paper, Paolo Casalegno sides with this view and criticizes rival accounts of assertion on which rational belief or rational credibility will do for warranted assertion. We take issue with Casalegno's criticisms and find them wanting.
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256Truth approximation, social epistemology, and opinion dynamicsErkenntnis 75 (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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33Realism in the Sciences: Proceedings of the Ernan McMullin Symposium, Leuven, 1995Leuven University Press. 1996.This book contains ten papers that were presented at the symposium about the realism debate, held at the Center for Logic, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language of the Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven on 10 and 11 March 1995. The first group of papers are directly concerned with the realism/anti-realism debate in the general philosophy of science. This group includes the articles by Ernan McMullin, Diderik Batens/Joke Meheus, Igor Douven and Herman de Regt…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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83Qualia Change and Colour ScienceIn Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), EPSA11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 417--428. 2013.
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155Can the World Help Us in Fixing the Reference of Natural Kind Terms?Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 29 (1): 59-70. 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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196Bootstrap 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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483A 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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40Empirische toetsing Van inductieve logica'sTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (4): 701-725. 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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586Similarity After GoodmanReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1): 61-75. 2011.In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of sim…Read more
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963Empirical equivalence, explanatory force, and the inference to the best theoryPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1): 281-309. 2005.In this paper I discuss the rule of inference proposed by Kuipers under the name of Inference to the Best Theory. In particular, I argue that the rule needs to be strengthened if it is to serve realist purposes. I further describe a method for testing, and perhaps eventually justifying, a suitably strengthened version of it.
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Conceptuele schema's en convergentie: Putnams intern realismeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 86 (2): 111-127. 1994.
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237A 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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113How to account for the oddness of missing-link conditionalsSynthese 194 (5). 2017.Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent are not somehow internally connected tend to strike us as odd. The received doctrine is that this felt oddness is to be explained pragmatically. Exactly how the pragmatic explanation is supposed to go has remained elusive, however. This paper discusses recent philosophical and psychological work that attempts to account semantically for the apparent oddness of conditionals lacking an internal connection between their parts.
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173A note on global descriptivism and Putnam's model-theoretic argumentAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 77 (3). 1999.
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278Earman on underdetermination and empirical indistinguishabilityErkenntnis 49 (3): 303-320. 1998.Earman (1993) distinguishes three notions of empirical indistinguishability and offers a rigorous framework to investigate how each of these notions relates to the problem of underdetermination of theory choice. He uses some of the results obtained in this framework to argue for a version of scientific anti- realism. In the present paper we first criticize Earman's arguments for that position. Secondly, we propose and motivate a modification of Earman's framework and establish several results co…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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| Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
| Metaphysics and Epistemology |
| Epistemology, Miscellaneous |