• Radboud University
    Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies
    Assistant Professor (Part-time)
KU Leuven
Institute of Philosophy
PhD, 2014
Nijmegen, Gelderland, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology
Philosophy of Mind
  •  2
    De bestorming van het Capitool
    with Ronald Tinnevelt
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 116 (1): 1-3. 2024.
    Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
  • Redactioneel
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 113 (3): 329-330. 2021.
    Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
  •  13
    This thesis mounts an attack against accounts of perceptual justification that attempt to analyze it in terms of evidential justifiers, and has defended the view that perceptual justification should rather be analyzed in terms of non-evidential justification. What matters most to perceptual justification is not a specific sort of evidence, be it experiential evidence or factive evidence, what matters is that the perceptual process from sensory input to belief output is reliable. I argue for this…Read more
  •  57
    This paper critically assesses Sosa’s normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa’s central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we argue that given Sosa’s account of full aptness according to which a performance is fully apt only if safe from failure, this thesis can’t be true. We th…Read more
  •  35
    Understanding implicit bias: A case for regulative dispositionalism
    Philosophical Psychology 35 (8): 1212-1233. 2022.
    What attitude does someone manifesting implicit bias really have? According to the default representationalist picture, implicit bias involves having conflicting attitudes (explicit versus implicit) with respect to the topic at hand. In opposition to this orthodoxy, dispositionalists argue that attitudes should be understood as higher-level dispositional features of the person as a whole. Following this metaphysical view, the discordance characteristic of implicit bias shows that someone’s attit…Read more
  •  13
    According to pluralistic folk psychology (PFP) we make use of a variety of methods to predict and explain each other, only one of which makes use of attributing propositional attitudes. I discuss three related problems for this view: first, the prediction problem, according to which (some of) PFP’s methods of prediction only work if they also assume a tacit attribution of propositional attitudes; second, the interaction problem, according to which PFP cannot explain how its different methods of …Read more
  •  287
    Do looks constitute our perceptual evidence?
    Philosophical Issues 30 (1): 132-147. 2020.
    Many philosophers take experience to be an essential aspect of perceptual justification. I argue against a specific variety of such an experientialist view, namely, the Looks View of perceptual justification, according to which our visual beliefs are mediately justified by beliefs about the way things look. I describe three types of cases that put pressure on the idea that perceptual justification is always related to looks-related reasons: unsophisticated cognizers, multimodal identification, a…Read more
  •  13
    The non-evidential nature of perceptual experience
    Logique Et Analyse 57 (228). 2014.
    Most internalist views hold that experience provides evidential justification for perceptual belief, although there are different ideas about how experience is able to provide this justification. Evidentialism holds that experiences can act as evidence for belief without having propositional content, while dogmatism holds that only an experience with the content that p can provide prima facie justification for the belief that p. I argue that both views succumb to a version of the well-known Sell…Read more
  •  183
    Norms of Belief
    Philosophical Issues 26 (1): 374-392. 2016.
    When in the business of offering an account of the epistemic normativity of belief, one is faced with the following dilemma: strongly externalist norms fail to account for the intuition of justification in radical deception scenarios, while milder norms are incapable to explain what is epistemically wrong with false beliefs. This paper has two main aims; we first look at one way out of the dilemma, defended by Timothy Williamson and Clayton Littlejohn, and argue that it fails. Second, we identif…Read more
  •  62
    Predictive processing and foundationalism about perception
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 7): 1751-1769. 2018.
    Predictive processing accounts of perception assume that perception does not work in a purely bottom-up fashion but also uses acquired knowledge to make top-down predictions about the incoming sensory signals. This provides a challenge for foundationalist accounts of perception according to which perceptual beliefs are epistemically basic, that is, epistemically independent from other beliefs. If prior beliefs rationally influence which perceptual beliefs we come to accept, then foundationalism …Read more
  •  10
    Redactioneel
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 110 (3): 247-248. 2018.
    2-Page editorial introduction to an ANTW special issue on personal identity.
  •  121
    How to Explain the Rationality of Perception
    Analysis 78 (3): 500-512. 2018.
    In her book The Rationality of Perception, Susanna Siegel argues for the interesting idea that perceptual experiences are in an important epistemic sense much more like beliefs than has previously been supposed. Like beliefs, perceptual experiences themselves already manifest a certain epistemic status, and, like beliefs, the way in which those experiences are formed will impact what that epistemic status will be. In what follows, I will first contrast this view of the rationality of perception …Read more
  •  30
    This book provides an accessible and up-to-date discussion of contemporary theories of perceptual justification that each highlight different factors related to perception, i.e., conscious experience, higher-order beliefs, and reliable processes. The book’s discussion starts from the viewpoint that perception is not only one of our fundamental sources of knowledge and justification, but also plays this role for many less sophisticated animals. It proposes a scientifically informed reliabilist th…Read more
  •  28
    Menselijke kennis en rechtvaardiging: Eindige of oneindige ketens?
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 107 (2): 193-197. 2015.
    According to Jeanne Peijnenburg having an infinite chain of justification isn't in principle incompatible with having a justified belief at the end of this chain. I argue that, as long as we're talking about human knowledge and justification, infinite chains of justification remain problematic.
  •  189
    The real epistemic problem of cognitive penetration
    Philosophical Studies 173 (6): 1457-1475. 2016.
    The phenomenon of cognitive penetration has received a lot of attention in recent epistemology, as it seems to make perceptual justification too easy to come by for experientialist theories of justification. Some have tried to respond to this challenge by arguing that cognitive penetration downgrades the epistemic status of perceptual experience, thereby diminishing its justificatory power. I discuss two examples of this strategy, and argue that they fail on several grounds. Most importantly, th…Read more
  •  125
    The cases of Norman the Clairvoyant and Mr. Truetemp form classic counterexamples to the process reliabilist's claim that reliability is sufficient for prima facie justification. I discuss several ways in which contemporary reliabilists have tried to deal with these counterexamples, and argue that they are all unsuccessful. Instead, I propose that the most promising route lies with an appeal to a specific kind of higher-order defeat that is best cashed out in terms of properly functioning monito…Read more
  •  65
    Two different versions of epistemological disjunctivism have recently been upheld in the literature: a traditional, Justified True Belief Epistemological Disjunctivism (JTBED) and a Knowledge First Epistemological Disjunctivism (KFED). JTBED holds that factive reasons of the form “S sees that p” provide the rational support in virtue of which one has perceptual knowledge, while KFED holds that factive reasons of the form “S sees that p” just are ways of knowing that p which additionally provide …Read more
  •  160
    Phenomenalist dogmatist experientialism (PDE) holds the following thesis: if $S$ has a perceptual experience that $p$ , then $S$ has immediate prima facie evidential justification for the belief that $p$ in virtue of the experience’s phenomenology. The benefits of PDE are that it (a) provides an undemanding view of perceptual justification that allows most of our ordinary perceptual beliefs to be justified, and (b) accommodates two important internalist intuitions, viz. the New Evil Demon Intuit…Read more
  •  109
    Grounding Perceptual Dogmatism: What are Perceptual Seemings?
    Southern Journal of Philosophy 53 (2): 196-215. 2015.
    Perceptual Dogmatism holds that if it perceptually seems to S that p, then S has immediate prima facie justification for the belief that p. Various philosophers have made the notion of a perceptual seeming more precise by distinguishing perceptual seemings from both sensations and beliefs to accommodate a) the epistemic difference between perceptual judgments of novices and experts, and, b) the problem of the speckled hen. Using somewhat different terminology, perceptual seemings are supposed to…Read more
  •  73
    The Basis Problem for Epistemological Disjunctivism Revisited
    Erkenntnis 80 (6): 1147-1156. 2015.
    Duncan Pritchard has defended a version of epistemological disjunctivism which holds that in a paradigmatic case of perceptual knowledge, one knows that \ in virtue of having the reflectively accessible reason that one sees that \. This view faces what is known as the basis problem: if seeing that \ just is a way of knowing that \, then that one sees that \ cannot constitute the rational basis in virtue of which one knows that \. To solve this problem, Pritchard has argued that seeing that \ sho…Read more