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80From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2014.Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely ac…Read more
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87Epstein on groups: virtues of the status accountInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (2): 185-197. 2019.ABSTRACTEpstein compares models of group agents that focus on their internal organization to models that focus on the statuses they have. He argues that status models are inadequate because agency is not something that can be attributed by fiat. Even if this is true, however, certain agential powers can be attributed to group agents. I argue that Epstein’s arguments stand to benefit a lot from recognizing that some group agents have statuses and constitute corporate agents. For instance, only co…Read more
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9Russell Hardin's How do you know?: the economics of ordinary knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, 256 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 3 (1): 93. 2010.
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47Explanatory Unification in Experimental Philosophy: Let’s Keep It RealReview of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (1): 219-242. 2019.Experimental philosophers have discovered a large number of asymmetries in our intuitions about philosophically significant notions. Often those intuitions turned out to be sensitive to normative factors. Whereas optimists have insisted on a unified explanation of these findings, pessimists have argued that it is impossible to formulate a single factor explanation. I defend the intermediate position according to which unification is possible to some extent, but should be pursued within limits. T…Read more
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23Freedom under an indifferent dictator: Intentionality and responsibilityEconomics and Philosophy 33 (1): 25-41. 2017.:Freedom is often analysed in terms of the absence of intentionally imposed constraints. I defend the alternative view on which the relevant constraints are those for which some agent can be held morally responsible. I argue that this best captures the relation between freedom and respect. Berlin correctly points out that intentional restrictions exhibit ill will and hence are disrespectful. However, the same holds, I argue, for restrictions that are due to indifference. Berlin also observed tha…Read more
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67Group Freedom: A Social Mechanism AccountPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (6): 410-439. 2017.Many existing defenses of group rights seem to rely on the notion of group freedom. To date, however, no adequate analysis of this notion has been offered. Group freedom is best understood in terms of processes of social categorization that are embedded in social mechanisms. Such processes often give rise to group-specific constraints and enablements. On the proposed social mechanism account, group rights are demands for group freedom. Even so, group rights often serve to eradicate individual un…Read more
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329Constitutive Rules, Language, and OntologyErkenntnis 71 (2): 253-275. 2009.It is a commonplace within philosophy that the ontology of institutions can be captured in terms of constitutive rules. What exactly such rules are, however, is not well understood. They are usually contrasted to regulative rules: constitutive rules (such as the rules of chess) make institutional actions possible, whereas regulative rules (such as the rules of etiquette) pertain to actions that can be performed independently of such rules. Some, however, maintain that the distinction between reg…Read more
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122A modest solution to the problem of rule-followingPhilosophical Studies 121 (1): 65-98. 2004.A modest solution to the problem(s) of rule-following is defended against Kripkensteinian scepticism about meaning. Even though parts of it generalise to other concepts, the theory as a whole applies to response-dependent concepts only. It is argued that the finiteness problem is not nearly as pressing for such concepts as it may be for some other kinds of concepts. Furthermore, the modest theory uses a notion of justification as sensitivity to countervailing conditions in order to solve the jus…Read more
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259Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social WorldPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 43 (3): 373-389. 2013.Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed…Read more
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48Language and societyIn Ian Jarvie Jesus Zamora Bonilla (ed.), The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences, . pp. 137. 2011.
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84Explanation, understanding, and unrealistic modelsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (3): 523-531. 2013.
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68Traditional accounts of explanation fail to illuminate the explanatory relevance of “models that are descriptively false” in the sense that the regularities they entail fail to obtain. In this paper, I propose an account of explanation, which I call ‘explanation by concretization’, that serves to explicate the explanatory relevance of such models. Starting from a highly abstract and idealized model, causal explanations of the absence of regularities are sought by adding complexity to the model o…Read more
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1931Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its RelativesMind and Language 29 (1): 51-72. 2014.Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as ‘the Knobe effect’, in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an…Read more
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130Person as Lawyer: How Having a Guilty Mind Explains Attributions of Intentional AgencyBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (4): 339-340. 2010.In criminal law, foresight betrays a guilty mind as much as intent does: both reveal that the agent is not properly motivated to avoid an illegal state of affairs. This commonality warrants our judgment that the state is brought about intentionally, even when unintended. In contrast to Knobe, I thus retain the idea that acting intentionally is acting with a certain frame of mind.
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361The status of the knowledge account of assertionLinguistics and Philosophy 30 (3): 393-406. 2007.According to the increasingly popular knowledge account, assertion is governed by the rule that speech acts of that kind require knowledge of their content. Timothy Williamson has argued that this knowledge rule is the constitutive rule of assertion. It is argued here that it is not the constitutive rule of assertion in any sense of the term, as it governs only some assertions rather than all of them. A (qualified) knowledge rule can in fact be derived from the traditional analysis of assertion …Read more
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1British classical economists and their methodological heritage A review of Deborah A. Redman's The Rise of Political Economy as a Science. Methodology and the Classical Economists (review)Journal of Economic Methodology 8 (1): 145-152. 2001.
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60Reaffirming the Status of the Knowledge Account of AssertionJournal of Philosophical Research 39 87-92. 2014.According to the expression account, assertion is the linguistic expression of belief. Given the knowledge rule of belief, this entails that knowledge is a normative requirement of sincere assertions. On this account, which is defended in Hindriks, knowledge can be a normative requirement of sincere assertions even though there is no knowledge rule that is constitutive of assertion. Ball criticizes this claim arguing that the derivation of the knowledge rule equivocates between epistemic and mor…Read more
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81Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, John R. Searle, Oxford University Press, 2010, 224 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 27 (3): 338-346. 2011.
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152False models as explanatory enginesPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 38 (3): 334-360. 2008.Many models in economics are very unrealistic. At the same time, economists put a lot of effort into making their models more realistic. I argue that in many cases, including the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance theorem investigated in this paper, the purpose of this process of concretization is explanatory. When evaluated in combination with their assumptions, a highly unrealistic model may well be true. The purpose of relaxing an unrealistic assumption, then, need not be to move from a false mode…Read more
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129Control, intentional action, and moral responsibilityPhilosophical Psychology 24 (6). 2011.Skill or control is commonly regarded as a necessary condition for intentional action. This received wisdom is challenged by experiments conducted by Joshua Knobe and Thomas Nadelhoffer, which suggest that moral considerations sometimes trump considerations of skill and control. I argue that this effect (as well as the Knobe effect) can be explained in terms of the role normative reasons play in the concept of intentional action. This explanation has significant advantages over its rivals. It in…Read more
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35The Inner Life of a Rational Agent. In Defence of Philosophical Behaviourism, by R. StoutMind 119 (473): 246-249. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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184A unified social ontologyPhilosophical Quarterly 65 (259): 177-201. 2015.Current debates in social ontology are dominated by approaches that view institutions either as rules or as equilibria of strategic games. We argue that these two approaches can be unified within an encompassing theory based on the notion of correlated equilibrium. We show that in a correlated equilibrium each player follows a regulative rule of the form ‘if X then do Y’. We then criticize Searle's claim that constitutive rules of the form ‘X counts as Y in C’ are fundamental building blocks for…Read more
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14Review of Nikos Psarros, katainka Schulte-Ostermann (eds.), Facets of Sociality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (7). 2007.
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217Intentional action and the praise-blame asymmetryPhilosophical Quarterly 58 (233): 630-641. 2008.Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First, people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These findings suggest that the notion of intentional action…Read more
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61Deconstructing Searle’s Making the Social WorldPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 45 (3): 363-369. 2015.Hindriks argued that Searle’s theory of institutions suffers from a number of problems pertaining to the notions of constitutive rule, status function, Status Function Declaration, deontic power, and human right. Lobo argues that these criticisms are not sufficiently charitable. In response, it is argued here that the problems that were identified earlier are sufficiently severe to call for substantial revisions of the theory
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Social Science |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Other Academic Areas |