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96The functions of institutions: etiology and teleologySynthese 198 (3): 2027-2043. 2019.Institutions generate cooperative benefits that explain why they exist and persist. Therefore, their etiological function is to promote cooperation. The function of a particular institution, such as money or traffic regulations, is to solve one or more cooperation problems. We go on to argue that the teleological function of institutions is to secure values by means of norms. Values can also be used to redesign an institution and to promote social change. We argue, however, that an adequate theo…Read more
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74The Duty to Join Forces: When Individuals Lack ControlThe Monist 102 (2): 204-220. 2019.Some harms are such that they cannot be prevented by a single individual because she lacks the requisite control. Because of this, no individual has the obligation to do so. It may be, however, that the harm can be prevented when several individuals combine their efforts. I argue that in many such situations each individual has a duty to join forces: to approach others, convince them to contribute, and subsequently make a coordinated effort to prevent the harm. A distinctive feature of this prop…Read more
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40From 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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82Epstein 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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48Explanatory 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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22Freedom 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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73Group 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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196Collective Acceptance and the Is-Ought ArgumentEthical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3): 465-480. 2013.According to John Searle’s well-known Is-Ought Argument, it is possible to derive an ought-statement from is-statements only. This argument concerns obligations involved in institutions such as promising, and it relies on the idea that institutions can be conceptualized in terms of constitutive rules. In this paper, I argue that the structure of this argument has never been fully appreciated. Starting from my status account of constitutive rules, I reconstruct the argument and establish that it …Read more
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86In the literature on social ontology, two perspectives on collective agency have been developed. The first is the internal perspective, the second the external one. The internal perspective takes the point of view of the members as its point of departure and appeals, inter alia, to the joint intentions they form. The idea is that collective agents perform joint actions such as dancing the tango, organizing prayer meetings, or performing symphonies. Such actions are generated by joint intentions,…Read more
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454Beyond the Big Four and the Big FiveIn Gerhard Preyer, Frank Hindriks & Sara Rachel Chant (eds.), From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-9. 2014.
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138The freedom of collective agentsJournal of Political Philosophy 16 (2). 2007.Corporate freedom is the freedom of a collective agent to perform a joint action. According to a reductive account, a collective or corporate agent is free exactly if the individuals who constitute the corporate agent are free. It is argued that individual freedoms are neither necessary nor sufficient for corporate freedom. The alternative account proposed here focuses on the performance of the joint action by the corporate agent itself. Subsequently, the analysis is applied to Cohen’s (1983) an…Read more
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Opzet en morele veranbvoordelijkheid in de experimentele filosofieAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 101 (1): 49-55. 2009.
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94How Does Reasoning Contribute to Moral Judgment? Dumbfounding and DisengagementEthical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2): 237-250. 2015.Recent experiments in moral psychology have been taken to imply that moral reasoning only serves to reaffirm prior moral intuitions. More specifically, Jonathan Haidt concludes from his moral dumbfounding experiments, in which people condemn other people’s behavior, that moral reasoning is biased and ineffective, as it rarely makes people change their mind. I present complementary evidence pertaining to self-directed reasoning about what to do. More specifically, Albert Bandura’s experiments con…Read more
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332Constitutive 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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125A 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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265Restructuring 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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49Language and societyIn Ian Jarvie Jesus Zamora Bonilla (ed.), The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences., Sage Publications. pp. 137. 2011.
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86Explanation, 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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1980Normativity 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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132Person 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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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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368The 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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25Reaffirming 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
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 |