•  12
    Over denken
    Owl Press. forthcoming.
  •  3
    Conceptos de cognoscibilidad
    Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 23 287-308. 2023.
    Muchas discusiones filosóficas dependen del concepto de cognoscibilidad. Por ejemplo, hay una floreciente literatura acerca de la así llamada paradoja de la cognoscibilidad. Sin embargo, ¿cómo hemos de entender la noción? En este paper, examinamos varios enfoques: el enfoque naive de tomar a la cognoscibilidad como la posibilidad de conocer, el enfoque contrafáctico defendido por Edgington (1985) y Schlöder (2019), enfoques basados en la noción de una capacidad o habilidad de saber (Fara 2010, H…Read more
  •  25
    Het meest succesvolle denken over de natuur vind je in de natuurwetenschappen. Filosofie wordt wel eens omschreven als denken over denken. In het handboek Over wetenschappelijk denken behandelen we het denken over het wetenschappelijk denken. Dat maakt van dit boek zowel een algemene inleiding in de wijsbegeerte als meer in het bijzonder een inleiding tot de wetenschapsfilosofie. Eerst gaan we in dit handboek dieper in op de natuurfilosofische revolutie in het antieke Griekenland. De mythische…Read more
  •  33
    Stephenson (2022) has argued that Kant’s thesis that all transcendental truths are transcendentally a priori knowable leads to omniscience of all transcendental truths. His arguments depend on luminosity principles and closure principles for transcendental knowability. We will argue that one pair of a luminosity and a closure principle should not be used, because the closure principle is too strong, while the other pair of a luminosity and a closure principle should not be used, because the lumi…Read more
  •  13
    Confusion in the Bishop’s Church
    Philosophia 51 (4): 1993-2003. 2023.
    Kearns (2021) reconstructs Berkeley’s (1713) Master Argument as a formally valid argument against the Materialist Thesis, with the key premise the Distinct Conceivability Thesis, namely the thesis that truths about sensible objects having or lacking thinkable qualities are (distinctly) conceivable and as its conclusion that all sensible objects are conceived. It will be shown that Distinct Conceivability Thesis entails the Reduction Thesis, which states that de dicto propositional (ordinary or d…Read more
  •  51
    Existence hedges, neutral free logic and truth
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Semantic externalism in the style of McDowell and Evans faces a puzzle formulated by Pryor: to explain that a sentence such as 'Jack exists' is only a posteriori knowable, despite being logically entailed by the seemingly logical truth 'Jack is self-identical', and hence being itself a logical truth and therefore a priori knowable. Free logics can dissolve the puzzle. Moreover, Pryor has argued that the existentially hedged 'If Jack exists, then Jack is self-identical', when properly formalised,…Read more
  •  159
    Strict conditionals
    with Leon Horsten
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 22 (64): 123-131. 2022.
    Both Lowe and Tsai have presented their own versions of the theory that both indicative and subjunctive conditionals are strict conditionals. We critically discuss both versions and we find each version wanting.
  •  230
    Anti-Realism and Modal-Epistemic Collapse: Reply to Marton
    Erkenntnis 88 (1): 397-408. 2021.
    Marton ( 2019 ) argues that that it follows from the standard antirealist theory of truth, which states that truth and possible knowledge are equivalent, that knowing possibilities is equivalent to the possibility of knowing, whereas these notions should be distinct. Moreover, he argues that the usual strategies of dealing with the Church–Fitch paradox of knowability are either not able to deal with his modal-epistemic collapse result or they only do so at a high price. Against this, I argue tha…Read more
  •  273
    Antirealists who hold the knowability thesis, namely that all truths are knowable, have been put on the defensive by the Church-Fitch paradox of knowability. Rejecting the non-factivity of the concept of knowability used in that paradox, Edgington has adopted a factive notion of knowability, according to which only actual truths are knowable. She has used this new notion to reformulate the knowability thesis. The result has been argued to be immune against the Church-Fitch paradox, but it has en…Read more
  •  209
    Rosenkranz’s Logic of Justification and Unprovability
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 49 (6): 1243-1256. 2020.
    Rosenkranz has recently proposed a logic for propositional, non-factive, all-things-considered justification, which is based on a logic for the notion of being in a position to know, 309–338 2018). Starting from three quite weak assumptions in addition to some of the core principles that are already accepted by Rosenkranz, I prove that, if one has positive introspective and modally robust knowledge of the axioms of minimal arithmetic, then one is in a position to know that a sentence is not prov…Read more
  •  18
    In the first chapter I have introduced Carnapian intensional logic against the background of Frege's and Quine's puzzles. The main body of the dissertation consists of two parts. In the first part I discussed Carnapian modal logic and arithmetic with descriptions. In the second chapter, I have described three Carnapian theories, CCL, CFL, and CNL. All three theories have three things in common. First, they are formulated in languages containing description terms. Second, they contain a system of…Read more
  •  5
    I will examine three claims made by Ackerman and Kripke. First, they claim that not any arithmetical terms is eligible for universal instantiation and existential generalisation in doxastic or epistemic contexts. Second, Ackerman claims that Peano numerals are eligible for universal instantiation and existential generalisation in doxastic or epistemic contexts. Kripke's position is a bit more subtle. Third, they claim that the successor relation and the smaller-than relation must be effectively …Read more
  •  356
    Apophatic Finitism and Infinitism
    Logique Et Analyse 62 (247): 319-337. 2019.
    This article is about the ontological dispute between finitists, who claim that only finitely many numbers exist, and infinitists, who claim that infinitely many numbers exist. Van Bendegem set out to solve the 'general problem' for finitism: how can one recast finite fragments of classical mathematics in finitist terms? To solve this problem Van Bendegem comes up with a new brand of finitism, namely so-called 'apophatic finitism'. In this article it will be argued that apophatic finitism is una…Read more
  •  388
    Within the context of the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, one discussion about the status of mathematics is concerned with the ‘Enhanced Indispensability Argument’, which makes explicit in what way mathematics is supposed to be indispensable in science, namely explanatory. If there are genuine mathematical explanations of empirical phenomena, an argument for mathematical platonism could be extracted by using inference to the best explanation. The best explanation of the primeness of the …Read more
  •  344
    Factive knowability and the problem of possible omniscience
    Philosophical Studies 177 (1): 65-87. 2020.
    Famously, the Church–Fitch paradox of knowability is a deductive argument from the thesis that all truths are knowable to the conclusion that all truths are known. In this argument, knowability is analyzed in terms of having the possibility to know. Several philosophers have objected to this analysis, because it turns knowability into a nonfactive notion. In addition, they claim that, if the knowability thesis is reformulated with the help of factive concepts of knowability, then omniscience can…Read more
  •  415
    Russell's Revenge: A Problem for Bivalent Fregean Theories of Descriptions
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (4): 636-652. 2017.
    Fregean theories of descriptions as terms have to deal with improper descriptions. To save bivalence various proposals have been made that involve assigning referents to improper descriptions. While bivalence is indeed saved, there is a price to be paid. Instantiations of the same general scheme, viz. the one and only individual that is F and G is G, are not only allowed but even required to have different truth values.
  •  335
    Zelfpredicatie: Middeleeuwse en hedendaagse perspectieven
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 79 (2): 239-258. 2017.
    The focus of the article is the self-predication principle, according to which the/a such-and-such is such-and-such. We consider contemporary approaches (Frege, Russell, Meinong) to the self-predication principle, as well as fourteenth-century approaches (Burley, Ockham, Buridan). In crucial ways, the Ockham-Buridan view prefigures Russell’s view, and Burley’s view shows a striking resemblance to Meinong’s view. In short the Russell-Ockham-Buridan view holds: no existence, no truth. The Burley-M…Read more
  •  291
    Truth and Existence
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (1): 106-114. 2017.
    Halbach has argued that Tarski biconditionals are not ontologically conservative over classical logic, but his argument is undermined by the fact that he cannot include a theory of arithmetic, which functions as a theory of syntax. This article is an improvement on Halbach's argument. By adding the Tarski biconditionals to inclusive negative free logic and the universal closure of minimal arithmetic, which is by itself an ontologically neutral combination, one can prove that at least one thing e…Read more
  • Carnapian Arithmetic with Descriptions
    In Weber Erik, Libert Thierry, Vanpaemel Geert & Marage P. (eds.), Logic, Philosophy and History of Science in Belgium. Proceedings of the Young Researchers Days 2008, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie Van België Voor Wetenschappen En Kunsten. pp. 28-34. 2009.
  •  486
    The subject of this article is Modal-Epistemic Arithmetic (MEA), a theory introduced by Horsten to interpret Epistemic Arithmetic (EA), which in turn was introduced by Shapiro to interpret Heyting Arithmetic. I will show how to interpret MEA in EA such that one can prove that the interpretation of EA is MEA is faithful. Moreover, I will show that one can get rid of a particular Platonist assumption. Then I will discuss models for MEA in light of the problems of logical omniscience and logical co…Read more
  •  351
    Carnapian Modal and Epistemic Arithmetic
    In Carrara Massimiliano & Morato Vittorio (eds.), Language, Knowledge, and Metaphysics. Selected papers from the First SIFA Graduate Conference, College Publications. pp. 97-121. 2009.
    The subject of the first section is Carnapian modal logic. One of the things I will do there is to prove that certain description principles, viz. the ''self-predication principles'', i.e. the principles according to which a descriptive term satisfies its own descriptive condition, are theorems and that others are not. The second section will be devoted to Carnapian modal arithmetic. I will prove that, if the arithmetical theory contains the standard weak principle of induction, modal truth coll…Read more
  •  608
    Strict conditionals: A negative result
    Philosophical Quarterly 56 (225). 2006.
    Jonathan Lowe has argued that a particular variation on C.I. Lewis' notion of strict implication avoids the paradoxes of strict implication. We show that Lowe's notion of implication does not achieve this aim, and offer a general argument to demonstrate that no other variation on Lewis' notion of constantly strict implication describes the logical behaviour of natural-language conditionals in a satisfactory way.
  •  777
    Carnap’s Theory of Descriptions and its Problems
    Studia Logica 94 (3): 355-380. 2010.
    Carnap's theory of descriptions was restricted in two ways. First, the descriptive conditions had to be non-modal. Second, only primitive predicates or the identity predicate could be used to predicate something of the descriptum . The motivating reasons for these two restrictions that can be found in the literature will be critically discussed. Both restrictions can be relaxed, but Carnap's theory can still be blamed for not dealing adequately with improper descriptions.
  •  44
    Syntactical Treatment of Modalities, 6 February
    with Lorenz Demey
    The Reasoner 7 (4): 45-45. 2013.
  •  298
    The epistemic significance of numerals
    Synthese 198 (Suppl 5): 1019-1045. 2014.
    The central topic of this article is (the possibility of) de re knowledge about natural numbers and its relation with names for numbers. It is held by several prominent philosophers that (Peano) numerals are eligible for existential quantification in epistemic contexts (‘canonical’), whereas other names for natural numbers are not. In other words, (Peano) numerals are intimately linked with de re knowledge about natural numbers, whereas the other names for natural numbers are not. In this articl…Read more