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107An impossibility result on semantic resemblanceDialectica 62 (3): 293-306. 2008.We show that a set of prima facie plausible assumptions on the relation of meaning resemblance – one of which is a compositionality postulate – is inconsistent. On this basis we argue that either there is no theoretically useful notion of semantic resemblance at all, or the traditional conception of the compositionality of meaning has to be adapted. In the former case, arguments put forward by Nelson Goodman and Paul Churchland in favor of the concept of meaning resemblance are defeated. In the …Read more
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203Scientific Philosophy, Mathematical Philosophy, and All ThatMetaphilosophy 44 (3): 267-275. 2013.This article suggests that scientific philosophy, especially mathematical philosophy, might be one important way of doing philosophy in the future. Along the way, the article distinguishes between different types of scientific philosophy; it mentions some of the scientific methods that can serve philosophers; it aims to undermine some worries about mathematical philosophy; and it tries to make clear why in certain cases the application of mathematical methods is necessary for philosophical progr…Read more
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178How Serious Is the Paradox of Serious Possibility?Mind 121 (481): 1-36. 2012.The so-called Paradox of Serious Possibility is usually regarded as showing that the standard axioms of belief revision do not apply to belief sets that are introspectively closed. In this article we argue to the contrary: we suggest a way of dissolving the Paradox of Serious Possibility so that introspective statements are taken to express propositions in the standard sense, which may thus be proper members of belief sets, and accordingly the normal axioms of belief revision apply to them. Inst…Read more
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126On the Ramsey Test without TrivialityNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 51 (1): 21-54. 2010.We present a way of classifying the logically possible ways out of Gärdenfors' inconsistency or triviality result on belief revision with conditionals. For one of these ways—conditionals which are not descriptive but which only have an inferential role as being given by the Ramsey test—we determine which of the assumptions in three different versions of Gärdenfors' theorem turn out to be false. This is done by constructing ranked models in which such Ramsey-test conditionals are evaluated and wh…Read more
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Logic and Philosophy of MathematicsJournal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 27 (2). 2010.
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94God − Moore = Ramsey (A Reply to Chalmers and Hájek)Topoi 30 (1): 47-51. 2011.Famously, Frank P. Ramsey suggested a test for the acceptability of conditionals. Recently, David Chalmers and Alan Hájek (2007) have criticized a qualitative variant of the Ramsey test for indicative conditionals. In this paper we argue for the following three claims: (i) Chalmers and Hájek are right that the variant of the Ramsey test that they attack is not the correct way of spelling out an acceptability test for indicative conditionals. But there is a suppositional variant of the Ramsey tes…Read more
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2What is a self-referential sentence? Critical remarks on the alleged mbox(non-)circularity of Yablo's paradoxLogique and Analyse 177 (178): 3-14. 2002.
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483An Objective Justification of Bayesianism I: Measuring InaccuracyPhilosophy of Science 77 (2): 201-235. 2010.One of the fundamental problems of epistemology is to say when the evidence in an agent’s possession justifies the beliefs she holds. In this paper and its sequel, we defend the Bayesian solution to this problem by appealing to the following fundamental norm: Accuracy An epistemic agent ought to minimize the inaccuracy of her partial beliefs. In this paper, we make this norm mathematically precise in various ways. We describe three epistemic dilemmas that an agent might face if she attempts to f…Read more
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100Theories of truth which have no standard modelsStudia Logica 68 (1): 69-87. 2001.This papers deals with the class of axiomatic theories of truth for semantically closed languages, where the theories do not allow for standard models; i.e., those theories cannot be interpreted as referring to the natural number codes of sentences only (for an overview of axiomatic theories of truth in general, see Halbach[6]). We are going to give new proofs for two well-known results in this area, and we also prove a new theorem on the nonstandardness of a certain theory of truth. The results…Read more