Leander Vignero

In light of growing calls to demonstrate the societal relevance of academic work, this paper explores whether peer review can reliably evaluate the societal relevance of humanities research. It also estimates how relevant published journal articles and books from five humanities fields are to society. By modeling two evaluation tasks involving 38 early-career researchers and 885 humanities abstracts in English from Web of Science, we estimate how reviewer characteristics (such as their chauvinism and strictness) and document characteristics (such as field and content) affect societal relevance ratings. We then compare the influence of both reviewer and document characteristics on these ratings and estimate the societal relevance of humanities research where the factors contributing to peer review unreliability are controlled for. Although the study’s design and limited sample size necessitate cautious interpretation, the results of this study do provide tentative evidence that, even according to early-career researchers from the humanities, a substantial portion of published humanities research may not be relevant to society at large. Furthermore, these results also suggest that when using peer review to decide whether a particular piece of research is societally relevant, the selection of reviewers plays a more significant role than the content of the research.

According to the standard view, generics such as “ravens are black” express quite strong generalizations, even if they do allow for some exceptions. Nickel, however, defends a semantic theory for generics that radically departs from this standard view, claiming that they express existentially quantified generalizations. We argue against this existential view and in favor of a more standard view according to which generics express universally quantified normality generalizations. We consider five phenomena involving generic sentences and argue that our universal view explains each of these phenomena better than or at least equally well as Nickel's existential view.

In logical geometry, Aristotelian diagrams are studied in a precise and systematic way. Although there has recently been a good amount of progress in logical geometry, it is still unknown which underlying mathematical framework is best suited for formalizing the study of these diagrams. Hence, in this paper, the main aim is to formulate such a framework, using the powerful language of category theory. We build multiple categories, which all have Aristotelian diagrams as their objects, while having different kinds of morphisms between these diagrams. The categories developed here are assessed according to their ability to generalize previous work from logical geometry as well as their interesting category-theoretical properties. According to these evaluations, the most promising category has as its morphisms those functions on fragments that increase in informativity on both the opposition and implication relations. Focusing on this category can significantly increase the effectiveness of further research in logical geometry.

In this paper, we take a fresh look at three Popperian concepts: riskiness, falsifiability, and truthlikeness of scientific hypotheses or theories. First, we make explicit the dimensions that underlie the notion of riskiness. Secondly, we examine if and how degrees of falsifiability can be defined, and how they are related to various dimensions of the concept of riskiness as well as the experimental context. Thirdly, we consider the relation of riskiness to truthlikeness. Throughout, we pay special attention to probabilistic theories and we offer a tentative, quantitative account of verisimilitude for probabilistic theories.

In this article, we present a new logical framework to think about surprise. This research does not just aim to better understand, model and predict human behaviour, but also attempts to provide tools for implementing artificial agents. Moreover, these artificial agents should then also be able to reap the same epistemic benefits from surprise as humans do. We start by discussing the dominant literature regarding propositional surprise and explore its shortcomings. These shortcomings are of both an empirical and a conceptual nature. Next, we propose a philosophical solution to the problems that ail these systems, based on the notion of issue of epistemic interest. Finally, we give a formal framework to think about surprise. More specifically, we develop a probabilistic dynamic epistemic logic that succeeds at formalizing the relevant philosophical concepts. This will be done through an issue management system grounded in topology. As an added bonus, the additional expressive power allows us to capture a richer variety of scenarios, and it also enables a more careful analysis of said scenarios.