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208The Epistemic Predicament of a Pseudoscience: Social Constructivism Confronts Freudian PsychoanalysisTheoria 77 (2): 159-179. 2011.Social constructivist approaches to science have often been dismissed as inaccurate accounts of scientific knowledge. In this article, we take the claims of robust social constructivism (SC) seriously and attempt to find a theory which does instantiate the epistemic predicament as described by SC. We argue that Freudian psychoanalysis, in virtue of some of its well-known epistemic complications and conceptual confusions, provides a perfect illustration of what SC claims is actually going on in s…Read more
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Semantiek en de zin van het leven Semantics and the Meaning of LifeBijdragen 59 (3): 315-337. 1998.In this essay, I show how semantic theories in contemporary philosophy of language shed light on questions about the meaning of life. Current semantic theories tend to defend various forms of holism in semantics: the meaning of a word or sentence is explained by its place in a pattern of sentences, a framework, or a language . A second feature of these theories is that semantic holism rejects the idea that we understand words and sentences on the basis of a pre-established theory which can be ap…Read more
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72Psychoanalytic Facts as Unintended Institutional FactsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 42 (2): 239-269. 2012.We present an inference to the best explanation of the immense cultural success of Freudian psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic method. We argue that an account of psychoanalytic facts as products of unintended declarative speech acts explains this phenomenon. Our argument connects diverse, seemingly independent characteristics of psychoanalysis that have been independently confirmed, and applies key features of John Searle’s and Eerik Lagerspetz’s theory of institutional facts to the psychoanalytic…Read more
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Lacan begrijpen: Naar een hermeneutiek voor filosofische beweringenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 98 (3). 2006.
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133Cigarettes, dollars and bitcoins – an essay on the ontology of moneyJournal of Institutional Economics 12 (2). 2016.What does being money consist in? We argue that something is money if, and only if, it is typically acquired in order to realise the reduction in transaction costs that accrues in virtue of agents coordinating on acquiring the same thing when deciding what thing to acquire in order to exchange. What kinds of things can be money? We argue against the common view that a variety of things (notes, coins, gold, cigarettes, etc.) can be money. All monetary systems are best interpreted as implementing …Read more
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122Faultless Disagreement, Assertions and the Affective-Expressive Dimension of Judgments of TastePhilosophia 39 (4): 637-655. 2011.Contextualists and assessment relativists neglect the expressive dimension of assertoric discourse that seems to give rise to faultless disagreement. Discourse that generates the intuition makes public an attitudinal conflict, and the affective -expressive dimension of the contributing utterances accounts for it. The FD-phenomenon is an effect of a public dispute generated by a sequence of expressing opposite attitudes towards a salient object or state of affairs, where the protagonists are maki…Read more
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17De lege blik. Antwoord op Van de Vijver en VanderbeekenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 99 217-229. 2007.
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185The Dark Side of the Loon. Explaining the Temptations of ObscurantismTheoria 81 (2): 126-142. 2014.After contrasting obscurantism with bullshit, we explore some ways in which obscurantism is typically justified by investigating a notorious test-case: defences of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Obscurantism abuses the reader's natural sense of curiosity and interpretive charity with the promise of deep and profound insights about a designated subject matter that is often vague or elusive. When the attempt to understand what the speaker means requires excessive hermeneutic efforts, interpreters are re…Read more
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16Review of JA Flieger, Is Oedipus Online? Sigmund Freud after Freud (review)Nexus 46 165-169. 2006.
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22Liefde de re: Over singuliere emotiesTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (1). 2000.In this paper the author argues that love de re — love for a particular person — is an emotion that is singular in that the beloved person is an external constituent of that emotion. After comparing love de re with other de re attitudes, and distinguishing it from love de dicto, he rejects reductions of love de re to love de dicto. It will be demonstrated the lover must have a dynamic conception of the person he loves which is derived from historical connections with him or her. A merely causal …Read more
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Essential indexicality and the irreducibility of phenomenal conceptsCommunication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 34 (1-2): 75-97. 2001.
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Veldhuis, H., Geen begrip voor de ander. De kritiek van E. Levinas op de westerse filosofie, in het bijzonder op het denken van Husserl en Heidegger (review)Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 53 (2): 383. 1991.
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1Argumentatie en formele structuur (review)Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 4. 2006.
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Petit, J.-L., L'action dans la philosophie analytique (review)Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 55 (3): 573. 1993.
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20Lacan Begrijpen. Over Filosofische BeweringenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 98 197-215. 2006.
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113Developing the incentivized action view of institutional realitySynthese 191 (8). 2014.Contemporary discussion concerning institutions focus on, and mostly accept, the Searlean view that institutional objects, i.e. money, borders and the like, exist in virtue of the fact that we collectively represent them as existing. A dissenting note has been sounded by Smit et al. (Econ Philos 27:1–22, 2011), who proposed the incentivized action view of institutional objects. On the incentivized action view, understanding a specific institution is a matter of understanding the specific actions…Read more
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Grammatica van concepten: een inleiding tot de filosofieTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 66 (2): 373-374. 2004.
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De lege blik: Antwoord op Vanderbeeken en Van De VijverAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 3. 2007.
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16The Genesis of Meaning (a Myth)ProtoSociology 10 110-133. 1997.In ‘Meaning Revisited’, a reconsideration of his famous views on meaning, H.P. Grice has put forward the thesis that natural meaning (n-meaning) might be a precursor or predecessor of non-natural meaning. In this paper, I will take up Grice’s challenge and sketch a picture of how natural meaning could give rise to nn-meaning. The relevance of Grice’s challenge is obvious for current attempts at naturalizing nn-meaning: a plausible theory of the genesis of meaning must show why nn-meaning is not …Read more
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24Review of Willem R. De Jong, Argumentatie en formele structuur (review)Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 98 316-318. 2006.
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Lanz, P., Menschliches Handeln zwischen Kausalität und Rationalität (review)Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 52 (n/a): 562. 1990.
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Koppelberg, D., Die Aufhebung der analytischen Philosophie (review)Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 54 (2): 337. 1992.
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Evolutionary Revisionism and the Integrity of the Manifest SchemeTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 72 (1): 101-129. 2010.
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Zimmer, C., "Deus". Logische Syntax und Semantik (review)Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 54 (2): 355. 1992.
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22Compositionality, Aberrant Sentences and Unfamiliar SituationsIn Gerhard Schurz, Edouard Machery & Markus Werning (eds.), Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience, De Gruyter. pp. 63-82. 2005.