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Erkenntnistheorie. Positionen zwischen Tradition und Gegenwart (review)Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 57 (3). 2003.
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181A puzzle about concept possessionGrazer Philosophische Studien 68 (1): 1-22. 2005.To have a propositional attitude, a thinker must possess the concepts included in its content. Surprisingly, this rather trivial principle refl ects badly on many theories of concept possession because, in its light, they seem to require too much. To solve this problem, I point out an ambiguity in attributions of the form 'S possesses the concept of Fs'. There is an undemanding sense which is involved in the given principle, whereas the theoretical claims concern a stronger sense which can be br…Read more
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140Why explanation and thus coherence cannot be reduced to probabilityAnalysis 71 (2): 264-266. 2011.Some philosophers, most notably Hempel and Salmon, have tried to reduce explanation to probability by proposing analyses of explanation in probabilistic terms. Hempel claims, roughly, that a hypothesis H explains a datum D if and only if the conditional probability P is close to 1. It is well known that such an account fails in cases where H is irrelevant for D. Even though it is highly likely that Tom will not become pregnant, given that he regularly takes his wife’s birth control pills, the la…Read more
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14Semantik und Ontologie: Beiträge zur philosophischen Forschung (edited book)Ontos Verlag. 2004.Der zweite Band der Reihe Philosophische Forschung spannt zwei Kerngebiete der Analytischen Philosophie zusammen: die Semantik und die Ontologie. Was sind die Grundbausteine unserer Ontologie? Wie beziehen wir uns sprachlich bzw. geistig auf sie? Diese und weitere Fragen werden von international renommierten Philosophen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektive diskutiert. Die Beiträge sind in Deutsch und English verfasst. Sie stammen von Christian Beyer, Johannes Brandl, Dagfinn Føllesdal…Read more
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28“It Falls somewhat short of logical precision.” Bolzano on Kant’s definition of analyticityGrazer Philosophische Studien 82 (1): 91-127. 2011.
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114Gricean Communication and Transmission of ThoughtsErkenntnis 69 (1): 55-67. 2008.Gricean communication is communication between utterers and their audiences, where the utterer means something and the audience understands what is meant. The weak transmission idea is that, whenever such communication takes place, there is something which is transmitted from utterer to audience; the strong transmission idea adds that what is transmitted is nothing else than what is communicated. We try to salvage these ideas from a seemingly forceful attack by Wayne Davis. Davis attaches too mu…Read more
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Variation, Derivability and Necessity: In Bolzano's view, a proposition is necessarily true iff it is derivable from true propositions that include no intuition (Anschauung)Grazer Philosophische Studien. forthcoming.
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154Red watermelons and large elephants: A case against compositionality?Theoria 15 (38): 263-280. 2000.The standard argument against the compositionality of adjective-noun compounds containing "red" says that "red" does not make the same semantic contribution because a red car has to be red outside whereas a red watermelon has to be red inside. Fodor's reply to that argument is that the inside/outside feature is semantically irrelevant because "red F" just means F which is red for Fs. That account agrees with our intuitions concerning analyticity; but it seems to be in conflict with a central tes…Read more
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115Equivalent testimonies as a touchstone of coherence measuresSynthese 161 (2): 167-182. 2008.Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.
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87Against Probabilistic Measures of CoherenceErkenntnis 63 (3): 335-360. 2005.It is shown that the probabilistic theories of coherence proposed up to now produce a number of counter-intuitive results. The last section provides some reasons for believing that no probabilistic measure will ever be able to adequately capture coherence. First, there can be no function whose arguments are nothing but tuples of probabilities, and which assigns different values to pairs of propositions {A, B} and {A, C} if A implies both B and C, or their negations, and if P(B)=P(C). But such se…Read more
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40William P. Alston: Illocutionary acts and sentence meaning, Cornell university press: Ithaca and London 2000Grazer Philosophische Studien 62 (1): 249-261. 2001.
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33Truth and intra-personal concept stabilityBehavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (4): 632-633. 1999.I criticize three claims concerning simulators: (1) That a simulator provides the best-fitting simulation of the perceptual impression one has of an object does not guarantee, pace Barsalou, that the object belongs to the simulator's category. (2) The people described by Barsalou do not acquire a concept of truth because they are not sensitive about the potential inadequacy of their sense impressions. (3) Simulator update prevents Barsalou's way of individuating concepts (i.e., identifying them …Read more
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24La notion bolzanienne de déductibilitéPhilosophiques 30 (1): 171-189. 2003.L’article présente le concept de déductibilité que Bolzano introduit dans sa Wissenscahftslehre, indique quelques traits caractéristiques en vertu desquels ce concept diffère de plusieurs conceptions contemporaines de la conséquence et examine l’affirmation selon laquelle il présente une forte similarité avec la conception de Tarski et la logique de la pertinence.The article presents the concept of deducibility which Bolzano introduced in his Wissenschaftslehre, points out some of the characteri…Read more
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48Der Rabe und der BayesianistJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 35 (2): 313-329. 2004.The Raven and the Bayesian. As an essential benefit of their probabilistic account of confirmation, Bayesians state that it provides a twofold solution to the ravens paradox. It is supposed to show that (i) the paradox’s conclusion is tenable because a white shoe only negligibly confirms the hypothesis that all ravens are black, and (ii) the paradox’s first premise is false anyway because a black raven can speak against the hypothesis. I argue that both proposals are not only unable to solve the…Read more
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8Variation, Derivability and NecessityGrazer Philosophische Studien 53 (1): 117-137. 1997.In Bolzano's view, a proposition is necessarily true iff it is derivable from true propositions that include no intuition (Anschauung). This analysis is historically important because it displays close similarities to Quine's and Kripke's ideas. Its systematic significance, however, is reduced by the fact that derivability is defined with recourse to the method of variation, which we are allowed to apply even to propositions containing none of the respective variables. This liberality leads to t…Read more
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