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53Should Probabilistic Design Replace Safety Factors?Philosophy and Technology 24 (2): 151-168. 2011.Should Probabilistic Design Replace Safety Factors? Content Type Journal Article Pages 151-168 DOI 10.1007/s13347-010-0003-6 Authors Neelke Doorn, Department of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, PO Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Sven Ove Hansson, Department of Philosophy and the History of Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, Teknikringen 78 B, 100 44 Stockholm, Sweden Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Jour…Read more
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52Repertoire ContractionJournal of Logic, Language and Information 22 (1): 1-21. 2013.The basic assumption of repertoire contraction is that only some of the logically closed subsets of the original belief set are viable as contraction outcomes. Contraction takes the form of choosing directly among these viable outcomes, rather than among cognitively more far-fetched objects such as possible worlds or maximal consistent subsets of the original belief set. In this first investigation of repertoire contraction, postulates for various variants of the operation are introduced. Necess…Read more
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52Decision theoretic foundations for axioms of rational preferenceSynthese 109 (3). 1996.Rationality postulates for preferences are developed from two basic decision theoretic principles, namely: (1) the logic of preference is determined by paradigmatic cases in which preferences are choice-guiding, and (2) excessive comparison costs should be avoided. It is shown how the logical requirements on preferences depend on the structure of comparison costs. The preference postulates necessary for choice guidance in a single decision problem are much weaker than completeness and transitivi…Read more
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52De-Marginalizing the Philosophy of TechnologyTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 16 (2): 89-93. 2012.Five examples are given of major philosophical discussions in which technology needs to be taken into account. In the philosophy of science, the notion of mechanism has a central role. It has a technological origin, and its interpretation has links to technology. In the philosophy of mind, a series of technological analogues have had a deep influence on our understanding of human cognition: automata and watches, telegraphy and telephony, and most recently computers. The discussion on free will l…Read more
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51Social constructionism and climate science denialEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 10 (3): 1-27. 2020.It has been much debated whether epistemic relativism in academia, for instance in the form of social constructivism, the strong programme, deconstructionism, and postmodernism, has paved the way for the recent upsurge in science denial, in particular climate science denial. In order to provide an empirical basis for this discussion, an extensive search of the social science literature was performed. It showed that in the 1990s, climate science was a popular target among academic epistemic relat…Read more
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51Order-Independent Transformative Decision RulesSynthese 147 (2): 323-342. 2005.A transformative decision rule alters the representation of a decision problem, either by changing the set of alternative acts or the set of states of the world taken into consideration, or by modifying the probability or value assignments. A set of transformative decision rules is order-independent in case the order in which the rules are applied is irrelevant. The main result of this paper is an axiomatic characterization of order-independent transformative decision rules, based on a single ax…Read more
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50Crop Biotechnology for the Environment?Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 26 (4): 759-770. 2013.In public debates, agricultural biotechnology is almost invariably discussed as a potential threat to the environment and to human health. Without downplaying the risks associated with this technology we emphasize that if properly regulated, it can be a forceful tool to solve environmental problems and promote human health. Agricultural biotechnology can reduce environmental problems in at least three ways: it can diminish the need for environmentally damaging agricultural practices such as pest…Read more
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50A formal representation of declaration-related legal relationsLaw and Philosophy 9 (4). 1990.A formal language is introduced that contains expressions for the dependency of a legal relation on the claims that the concerned individuals make and on the permissions that they grant. It is used for a classification of legal relations into six major categories: categorical obligation, categorical permission, claimable obligation, grantable permission, claim-dependent obligation and grant-dependent permission. Legal rights may belong to any of these six categories, but the characteristics of a…Read more
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49Informed Consent Out of ContextJournal of Business Ethics 63 (2): 149-154. 2006.Several attempts have been made to transfer the concept of informed consent from medical and research ethics to dealing with affected groups in other areas such as engineering, land use planning, and business management. It is argued that these attempts are unsuccessful since the concept of informed consent is inadequate for situations in which groups of affected persons are dealt with collectively (rather than individually, as in clinical medicine). There are several reasons for this. The affec…Read more
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48Money-pumps, self-torturers and the demons of real lifeAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (4). 1993.This Article does not have an abstract
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48Category-specified Value StatementsSynthese 148 (2): 425-432. 2006.A value statement such as “she is a good teacher” is categoryspecified, i.e., the criteria of evaluation are specified as those that are applicable to a given category, in this case the category of teachers. In this study of categoryspecified value statements, certain categories are identified that cannot be used to specify value aspects. Special attention is paid to categories that are constituted by functional characteristics. The logical properties of value statements that refer to such categ…Read more
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47Maximal and perimaximal contractionSynthese 190 (16): 3325-3348. 2013.Generalizations of partial meet contraction are introduced that start out from the observation that only some of the logically closed subsets of the original belief set are at all viable as contraction outcomes. Belief contraction should proceed by selection among these viable options. Several contraction operators that are based on such selection mechanisms are introduced and then axiomatically characterized. These constructions are more general than the belief base approach. It is shown that p…Read more
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47Hannes Leitgeb: The Stability of Belief: How Rational Belief Coheres with ProbabilityJournal of Philosophy 115 (5): 276-280. 2018.
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46The Role of Technology in Science: Philosophical Perspectives (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2015.In the first part of this paper, I clear the ground from frequent misconceptions of the relationship between fact and value by examining some uses of the adjective “natural” in ethical controversies. Such uses bear evidence to our “natural” tendency to regard nature as the source of ethical norms. I then try to account for the origins of this tendency by offering three related explanations, the most important of which is evolutionistic: if any behaviour that favours our equilibrium with the envi…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Areas of Interest
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