-
12Judgments of taste as strategic moves in a coordination gameInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Recent work on evaluative discourse and judgements of personal taste in particular has focused on active interpersonal disagreements. I explore the communicative import of judgements of taste: why we issue them, why we sometimes get involved in disputes about taste, and what acceptance or rejection of such judgements consists of. The view developed here – that the core use of such judgements lies in seeking to align our attitudes in view of a shared project – makes it plausible that the use of a…Read more
-
15Externalism, Content, and Causal HistoriesDialectica 48 (3-4): 267-286. 1994.SummaryExternalism in philosophy of mind is usually taken to be faced with the following difficulty: from the fact that meanings are externally individuated, it follows that the subjective character of mental states and events becomes problematic. On the basis of a well‐founded approach to similar problems in the philosophy of action, I propose a solution based on two connected issues: we should think of mental states not as beliefs, but as states of knowledge, and thought experiments, designed …Read more
-
205Intentionality Versus Constructive EmpiricismErkenntnis 76 (1): 91-100. 2012.By focussing on the intentional character of observation in science, we argue that Constructive Empiricism—B.C. van Fraassen’s much debated and explored view of science—is inconsistent. We then argue there are at least two ways out of our Inconsistency Argument, one of which is more easily to square with Constructive Empiricism than the other
-
63Institutions and the Artworld – A Critical NoteJournal of Social Ontology 4 (1): 53-66. 2018.Contemporary theories of institutions as clusters of stable solutions to recurrent coordination problems can illuminate and explain some unresolved difficulties and problems adhering to institutional definitions of art initiated by George Dickie and Arthur Danto. Their account of what confers upon objects their institutional character does not fit well with current work on institutions and social ontology. The claim that “the artworld” confers the status of “art” onto objects remains utterly mys…Read more
-
320What is money? An alternative to Searle's institutional factsEconomics and Philosophy 27 (1): 1-22. 2011.In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle develops a theory of institutional facts and objects, of which money, borders and property are presented as prime examples. These objects are the result of us collectively intending certain natural objects to have a certain status, i.e. to ‘count as’ being certain social objects. This view renders such objects irreducible to natural objects. In this paper we propose a radically different approach that is more compatible with standard economic th…Read more
-
175The Incentivized Action View of Institutional Facts as an Alternative to the Searlean View: A Response to Butchard and D’AmicoPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 46 (1): 44-55. 2016.In our earlier work, we argued, contra Searle, that institutional facts can be understood in terms of non-institutional facts about actions and incentives. Butchard and D’Amico claim that we have misinterpreted Searle, that our main argument against him has no merit and that our positive view cannot account for institutional facts created via joint action. We deny all three charges.
-
58How to Do Things Without Words - A Theory of DeclarationsPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 47 (3): 235-254. 2017.Declarations like “this meeting is adjourned” make certain facts the case by representing them as being the case. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the mechanism whereby the utterance of a declaration can bring about a new state of affairs. In this paper, we use the incentivization account of institutional facts to address this issue. We argue that declarations can serve to bring about new states of affairs as their utterance have game theoretical import, typically in virtue of …Read more
-
7Kritiek van de interpreterende rede: grondslagen van Donald Davidsons filosofische projectLeuven University Press. 1996.In zijn jongste boek, Kritiek van de interpreterende rede, bekijkt Filip Buekens de centrale thema's in de taalfilosofie van Davidson. Vertrekkend vanuit de stelling dat spreken en verstaan een vorm van rationeel handelen is, wordt onderzocht hoe een theorie voor een taal (in de vorm van een Tarskiaanse waarheidstheorie) wordt geconstrueerd vanuit het standpunt van een 'radicale interpretator' die inzicht wil krijgen in het talig handelen van personen. In een uitgebreide vergelijking met de filo…Read more
-
Proceedings of Information, Indexicality and Consciousness: A Conference on John Perry (edited book)Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University. 2001.
-
5The Truth about AccuracyExperts and Consensus in Social Science 50. 2014.When we evaluate the outcomes of investigative actions as justified or unjustified, good or bad, rational or irrational, we make, in a broad sense of the term, evaluative judgments about them. We look at operational accuracy as a desirable and evaluable quality of the outcomes and explore how the concepts of accuracy and precision, on the basis of insights borrowed from pragmatics and measurement theory, can be seen to do useful work in epistemology. Operational accuracy focuses on how a stateme…Read more
-
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
-
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
-
17De lege blik. Antwoord op Van de Vijver en VanderbeekenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 99 217-229. 2007.
-
184The 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
-
16Review of JA Flieger, Is Oedipus Online? Sigmund Freud after Freud (review)Nexus 46 165-169. 2006.
-
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
-
Essential indexicality and the irreducibility of phenomenal conceptsCommunication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 34 (1-2): 75-97. 2001.
-
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.
-
1Argumentatie en formele structuur (review)Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 4. 2006.
-
Petit, J.-L., L'action dans la philosophie analytique (review)Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 55 (3): 573. 1993.
-
20Lacan Begrijpen. Over Filosofische BeweringenAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 98 197-215. 2006.
-
Grammatica van concepten: een inleiding tot de filosofieTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 66 (2): 373-374. 2004.
-
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
-
De lege blik: Antwoord op Vanderbeeken en Van De VijverAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 3. 2007.
-
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