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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
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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
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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
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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
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321What 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
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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.
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59How 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
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7Kritiek van de interpreterende rede: grondslagen van Donald Davidsons filosofische projectUniversitaire Pers. 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
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Proceedings of Information, Indexicality and Consciousness: A Conference on John Perry (edited book)Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University. 2001.
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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
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Gerecenseerde werken-bibilgraphische notities-Bermudez, jl (ed.), Thought, reference and experience. Themes from the philosophy of Gareth EvansTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 69 (1): 184. 2007.
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De Twintigste Eeuw (review)Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 100 (3): 254-256. 2008.
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Vermazen, B. and Hintikka, Merrill B. , Essays on Davidson: Actions and EventsTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 51 (n/a): 316-329. 1989.
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Lynne Rudder Bakers opraktisch realismeAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 89 (3): 240-243. 1997.
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34Keeping Track of Pierre's Mind. A Davidsonian Solution to Kripke's Puzzle About BeliefIn Ulla Wessels & Georg Meggle (eds.), Analyōmen 1 =, De Gruyter. pp. 434-443. 1994.
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25Evolutionair revisionisme en de integriteit van het manifeste zelfbeeldTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 72 (1): 101-129. 2010.
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8Most attempts at defining or elucidating ’weak’ or ’strong’ supervenience introduce various forms of _physical indiscernibility_. After glancing at some definitions, I argue that they must fail if mental events are supposed to be genuinely causally efficacious and non-epiphenomenal. Then I elucidate Davidson’s account of supervenience (’D-supervenience’), first as an abstract relation between a predicate and a set of predicates (to be illustrated by uncontroversial examples), and then as applied…Read more
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47Relativism, Assertion, and Disagreement in Matters of TasteLogique Et Analyse 52 (208): 389-405. 2009.
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32Externalism, content, and causal historiesDialectica 48 (3-4): 267-86. 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