•  2
    Introduction
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 35 (3): 209-210. 2023.
    The East European Network for Philosophy of Science (EENPS) is a network of philosophers of science and researchers from related disciplines educated, affiliated, or working at the academic institu...
  •  23
    Conjunctive Explanations: A Coherentist Appraisal
    In Conjunctive Explanations. The Nature, Epistemology, and Psychology of Explanatory Multiplicity. J. Schupbach and D. Glass (eds.), New York: Routledge, . pp. 111-134. 2023.
    A conjunction of two hypotheses may provide a better explanation than either one of them individually, even if each already provides a good explanation on its own. An appropriate measure of explanatory power should reflect this, but none of the measures discussed in the literature do so because they only consider how much an explanatory hypothesis reduces our surprise at the evidence – which is problematic. This chapter introduces and defends a class of coherentist measures of explanatory power,…Read more
  •  134
    Confirmation, Coherence and the Strength of Arguments
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45 1473-1479. 2023.
    Alongside science and law, argumentation is also of central importance in everyday life. But what characterizes a good argument? This question has occupied philosophers and psychologists for centuries. The theory of Bayesian argumentation is particularly suitable for clarifying it, because it allows us to take into account in a natural way the role of uncertainty, which is central to much argumentation. Moreover, it offers the possibility of measuring the strength of an argument in probabilistic…Read more
  •  104
    Coherence of Information: What It Is and Why It Matters
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 45 3617-3623. 2023.
    Coherence considerations play an important role in science and in everyday reasoning. However, it is unclear what exactly is meant by coherence of information and why we prefer more coherent information over less coherent information. To answer these questions, we first explore how to explicate the dazzling notion of ``coherence'' and how to measure the coherence of an information set. To do so, we critique prima facie plausible proposals that incorporate normative principles such as ``Agreement…Read more
  •  20
    Bayesians Still Don’t Learn from Conditionals
    Acta Analytica 38 (3): 439-451. 2022.
    One of the open questions in Bayesian epistemology is how to rationally learn from indicative conditionals (Douven, 2016). Eva et al. (Mind 129(514):461–508, 2020) propose a strategy to resolve this question. They claim that their strategy provides a “uniquely rational response to any given learning scenario”. We show that their updating strategy is neither very general nor always rational. Even worse, we generalize their strategy and show that it still fails. Bad news for the Bayesians.
  •  22
    Against Methodological Gambling
    Erkenntnis 88 (3): 907-927. 2023.
    Should a scientist rely on methodological triangulation? Heesen et al. (Synthese 196(8):3067–3081, 2019) recently provided a convincing affirmative answer. However, their approach requires belief gambles if the evidence is discordant. We instead propose epistemically modest triangulation (EMT), according to which one should withhold judgement in such cases. We show that for a scientist in a methodologically diffident situation the expected utility of EMT is greater than that of Heesen et al.’s (…Read more
  •  1
    What is Learned from Conditionals?
    Balkan Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 125-136. 2015.
    Some of the information that we learn comes to us in a conditional form. This has proven to be a problem for philosophers, who try to explain how probabilistic beliefs change when one learns from conditional sentences. The problem is that a straight-forward solution is not possible: the partial belief in the antecedent and the partial belief in the consequent either increase, decrease, or remain the same. Two existing approaches to learning from indicative conditionals are considered: an explana…Read more
  •  19
    Lying, more or less: a computer simulation study of graded lies and trust dynamics
    with Anna Dobrosovestnova and Sebastian J. Götzendorfer
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 1-28. 2020.
    Partial lying denotes the cases where we partially believe something to be false but nevertheless assert it with the intent to deceive the addressee. We investigate how the severity of partial lying may be determined and how partial lies can be classified. We also study how much epistemic damage an agent suffers depending on the level of trust that she invests in the liar and the severity of the lies she is told. Our analysis is based on the results from exploratory computer simulations of an ar…Read more
  •  458
    Jeffrey conditionalization: proceed with caution
    Philosophical Studies 177 (10): 2985-3012. 2020.
    It has been argued that if the rigidity condition is satisfied, a rational agent operating with uncertain evidence should update her subjective probabilities by Jeffrey conditionalization or else a series of bets resulting in a sure loss could be made against her. We show, however, that even if the rigidity condition is satisfied, it is not always safe to update probability distributions by JC because there exist such sequences of non-misleading uncertain observations where it may be foreseen th…Read more
  •  37
    Corrigendum to: Inference to the Best Explanation in Uncertain Evidential Situations
    with Max Pellert
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1): 355-355. 2021.
    Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 0, 1–25. Published 14 March 2018
  • Influence of Conditionals on Belief Updating
    Dissertation, University of Ljubljana. 2018.
    This doctoral dissertation investigates what influence indicative conditionals have on belief updating and how learning from conditionals may be modelled in a probabilistic framework. Because the problem is related to the interpretation of conditionals, we first assess different semantics of indicative conditionals. We propose that conditionals should be taken as primary concepts. This allows us to defend a claim that learning a conditional is equivalent to learning that the relevant conditional…Read more
  •  35
    Characters in Richard II utter a number of neglected, yet philosophically interesting imperative conditionals. Based on a close reading of these examples, I provide a tripartite typology of imperative conditionals. The type 1 constitute the class of standard imperative conditionals; the type 2 implicate that the antecedent is false; and the type 3 implicate that the command in the consequent is to be complied with. I show how the type 2 and type 3 conditionals can be identified, and explain when…Read more
  •  84
    Inference to the Best Explanation in Uncertain Evidential Situations
    with Max Pellert
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (4): 977-1001. 2019.
    It has recently been argued that a non-Bayesian probabilistic version of inference to the best explanation (IBE*) has a number of advantages over Bayesian conditionalization (Douven [2013]; Douven and Wenmackers [2017]). We investigate how IBE* could be generalized to uncertain evidential situations and formulate a novel updating rule IBE**. We then inspect how it performs in comparison to its Bayesian counterpart, Jeffrey conditionalization (JC), in a number of simulations where two agents, eac…Read more