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85Explanation, 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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1942Normativity 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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62Reaffirming 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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130Control, 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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186A 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
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 |