-
237The preface, the lottery, and the logic of beliefMind 108 (430): 241-264. 1999.John Locke proposed a straightforward relationship between qualitative and quantitative doxastic notions: belief corresponds to a sufficiently high degree of confidence. Richard Foley has further developed this Lockean thesis and applied it to an analysis of the preface and lottery paradoxes. Following Foley's lead, we exploit various versions of these paradoxes to chart a precise relationship between belief and probabilistic degrees of confidence. The resolutions of these paradoxes emphasize di…Read more
-
234Henry James, Paardenrennen, en Relatieve Deprivatie--Rational Choice Theory aan het WerkIn J. Verhoeven (ed.), Social Theory, Acco. 1987.I illustrate the use of decision-theory and game-theory in the social sciences by means of examples from Gauthier, Tversky and Kahneman, and Bouldon.
-
225Affirmative action - a Polish example?In Robert Solomon (ed.), Above the Bottom Line - An Introduction to Business Ethics, Harcourt. pp. 337-9. 1994.I argue that the post-1990 practice of giving leadership positions in companies to non-ex-communists is an example of affirmative action.
-
211Do beliefs supervene on degrees of confidenceIn Anthonie W. M. Meijers (ed.), Belief, Cognition, and the Will, Tilburg University Press. pp. 6--27. 1999.I examine the relationship between belief and credences and distinguish between a dogmatic, a Lockean, an agentic, and an abductive notion of belief. I conclude with some thoughts on voluntarism and evidentialism.
-
209Too Odd (Not) to Be True? A Reply to OlssonBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (4): 539-563. 2002.Corroborating Testimony, Probability and Surprise’, Erik J. Olsson ascribes to L. Jonathan Cohen the claims that if two witnesses provide us with the same information, then the less probable the information is, the more confident we may be that the information is true (C), and the stronger the information is corroborated (C*). We question whether Cohen intends anything like claims (C) and (C*). Furthermore, he discusses the concurrence of witness reports within a context of independent witnesses…Read more
-
208An Impossibility Result for Coherence RankingsPhilosophical Studies 128 (1): 77-91. 2006.If we receive information from multiple independent and partially reliable information sources, then whether we are justified to believe these information items is affected by how reliable the sources are, by how well the information coheres with our background beliefs and by how internally coherent the information is. We consider the following question. Is coherence a separable determinant of our degree of belief, i.e. is it the case that the more coherent the new information is, the more justi…Read more
-
208Real NudgeEuropean Journal of Risk Regulation 3 (1): 43-6. 2012.The novelty in Adam Burgess’ paper is that he assesses nudge policies in the context of the shift in the UK government’s approach to risk from the nannying policies of Labour to the nudge policies of the Conservatives. There is a wealth of ideas in this paper. I find it useful to disentangle some of these ideas focusing on the following two questions: 1. In what respects do Labour’s nannying policies and the Conservatives’ nudge policies differ? 2. What is problematic about Labour’s nannyi…Read more
-
207There are two curious features about the backward induction argument (BIA) to the effect that repeated non-cooperation is the rational solution to the finite iterated prisoner’s dilemma (FIPD). First, however compelling the argument may seem, one remains hesitant either to recommend this solu- tion to players who are about to engage in cooperation or to explain cooperation as a deviation from rational play in real-life FIPD’s. Second, there seems to be a similarity between t…Read more
-
205Judy Benjamin is a Sleeping BeautyAnalysis 70 (1): 23-26. 2010.I argue that van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin Problem and Elga's Sleeping Beauty Problem have the same structure.
-
201A response to PrelecIn Adam Oliver (ed.), Essays in Behavioural Public Policy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 228-33. 2013.At the heart of Drazen Prelec’s chapter is the distinction between outcome utility and diagnostic utility. There is a particular distinction in the literature on causal networks (Pearl 2000), namely the distinction between observing and intervening, that maps onto Prelec’s distinction between diagnostic and outcome utility. I will explore the connection between both frameworks.
-
201The meaning of "darn it!"In Iwao Hirose & Andrew Reisner (eds.), Weighing and Reasoning: Themes from the Philosophy of John Broome, Oxford University Press. pp. 129-39. 2015.In decision-theory, the notion of regret enters into the minimax decision-rule and has a determinate usage in this context. However, there are many alternative ways of conceiving of regret. The chapter constructs the einmalist- nicht-keinmal ('once is not never') game, in which a single sampling radically changes the expected value of the game in a way that is quite counterintuitive, as the basis for studying regret after a loss following the choice of an uncertain action. Crucially, the very lo…Read more
-
188Interview: Epistemology: 5 QuestionsIn Vincent F. Hendricks & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemology: 5 Questions, Automatic Press. pp. 47-61. 2008.Interview
-
187Rawls on mutual disinterest and Hume's subjective circumstances of justiceArchiv Fuer Rechts- Und Sozialphilosophie 80 (2): 203-207. 1994.It is important in its own right to determine what conception of mutual disinterest Rawls has in mind at the various junctions in the text. Furthermore, disambiguating this notion counters a common objection that there is no reason to accept principles of justice that are chosen by rational egoists. The persons in Rawls' OP are not rational egoists. Rather, in identifying with the token persons in society they make the actual interests of the token persons into their ends and they know that they…Read more
-
183Vergiffenis in Elsschots Het Been: Boorman vs. LaarmansAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100 (4). 2008.In the novel "Het Been" by the Flemish writer Willem Elsschot. In the novel, a businessman becomes obsessive over the fact that a victim of his unscrupulous business practices refuses to forgive him. This raises the following questions: Why does one find it upsetting when the victim of one's wrongdoing refuses to accept our apologies? Why does one find it upsetting when the victim is unwilling to grant us the forgiveness that we are asking for?
-
181Must I be forgiven?Analysis 69 (2): 227-233. 2009.Why does an offender find it upsetting when the victim of their wrongdoing refuses to accept their apologies? Why do they find it upsetting when the victim is unwilling to grant them the forgiveness that they are asking for? I present an account of apologising and accepting apologies that can explain why this distress into an apt emotion.
-
178Contextual pluralism and the libertarian paradoxArchiv Fuer Rechts Und Sozialphilosphie 79 (2): 188-197. 1993.I argue that we can generate intransitive preference orderings for a single person on the model of Sen's Libertarian Paradox
-
176Sour grapes and character planningJournal of Philosophy 89 (2): 57-78. 1992.I argue that character planning differs from sour grapes in that the former but not the latter leaves the agent with a coherent preference structure.
-
171Minimizing the threat of a positive majority deficit in two-tier voting systems with equipopulous unitsPublic Choice 132 (1-2): 75-94. 2013.The mean majority deficit in a two-tier voting system is a function of the partition of the population. We derive a new square-root rule: For odd-numbered population sizes and equipopulous units the mean majority deficit is maximal when the member size of the units in the partition is close to the square root of the population size. Furthermore, within the partitions into roughly equipopulous units, partitions with small even numbers of units or small even-sized units yield high mean majority de…Read more
-
170‘Interview’, Probability and Statistics: 5 QuestionsIn Vincent Hendricks & Alan Hajek (eds.), Probability and Statistics: 5 Questions, Automatic Press. pp. 13-28. 2010.Interview
-
168The puzzle of the hatsSynthese 172 (1): 57-78. 2010.The Puzzle of the Hats is a betting arrangement which seems to show that a Dutch book can be made against a group of rational players with common priors who act in the common interest and have full trust in the other players’ rationality. But we show that appearances are misleading—no such Dutch book can be made. There are four morals. First, what can be learned from the puzzle is that there is a class of situations in which credences and betting rates diverge. Second, there is an analogy betwee…Read more
-
162Review: Hausman, D. Essays on Philosophy and Economic Methodology (review)Review of Metaphysics 47 (4): 818-820. 1994.Book Review
-
159We construct a probabilistic coherence measure for information sets which determines a partial coherence ordering. This measure is applied in constructing a criterion for expanding our beliefs in the face of new information. A number of idealizations are being made which can be relaxed by an appeal to Bayesian Networks.
-
155Situationist charges versus personologist defenses and the issue of skillsIn Ronna F. Dillon & James Pellegrino (eds.), Testing: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, Praeger. pp. 199-217. 1989.We discuss theoretical topics in personality theory and in the methodology of personality measurement, and present personality tests that were developed in the Center for Recruitment and Selection in the Belgian Army.
-
151Coherentism, reliability and bayesian networksMind 109 (436): 685-719. 2000.The coherentist theory of justification provides a response to the sceptical challenge: even though the independent processes by which we gather information about the world may be of dubious quality, the internal coherence of the information provides the justification for our empirical beliefs. This central canon of the coherence theory of justification is tested within the framework of Bayesian networks, which is a theory of probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. We interpret the i…Read more
-
136Factions in Rousseau's du contrat social and federal representationAnalysis 67 (1). 2007.Consider the following two seemingly unrelated questions. First, why does Rousseau (1993 [1762]) believe that the formation of factions or partial associations is not conducive to the general will in Du Contrat Social, II, 3? Second, why do federal assemblies typically strive for some form of degressive proportionality, i.e. a balance between equal and proportional representation, for the countries in the federation? We will show that there is a surprising connection between these questions. We …Read more
-
135The Ethics of DieselgateMidwest Studies in Philosophy 40 (1): 262-283. 2016.I investigate what, if anything, can be said in defense of Volkswagen's decision to install a cheat device in their diesel engines to evade NOx emission testing.
-
134Evaluating life or death prospectsEconomics and Philosophy 28 (2): 217-249. 2012.We consider a special set of risky prospects in which the outcomes are either life or death. There are various alternatives to the utilitarian objective of minimizing the expected loss of lives in such prospects. We start off with the two-person case with independent risks and construct taxonomies of ex ante and ex post evaluations for such prospects. We examine the relationship between the ex ante and the ex post in this restrictive framework: There are more possibilities to respect ex ante and…Read more
-
128Coherence and the Role of Specificity: A Response to Meijs and DouvenMind 114 (454): 365-369. 2005.Meijs and Douven (2005) present an interesting pair of alleged counterexamples and an algorithm to generate such counter-examples to our criterion for a coherence quasi-ordering over information sets as outlined in our 2003a and 2003b accounts. We agree that our criterion does not always provide an ordering when we would intuitively say that one set is more coherent than the other. Nonetheless, we think that our criterion can be salvaged.
-
125The doctrinal paradox and the mixed-motivation problemAnalysis 66 (1): 35-39. 2006.There are two seemingly unrelated paradoxes of democracy. The older one is the doctrinal paradox or the discursive dilemma. or a comprehensive bibliography, see List 1995. The younger one is the mixed motivation problem introduced by Jonathan Wolff (1994) in this journal. In the mixed motivation problem, we have voters with mixed Benthamite and Rousseauian motivations who reach a majority on an issue that is neither in the self-interest of a majority of the voters, nor considered to be conducive…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Economics |
Moral Psychology |
Formal Epistemology |
Epistemic Paradoxes |