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18Ordo et connexio idearum non est ordo et connexio rerumAlgemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 115 (3): 291-294. 2023.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.
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7Two Accounts of Similarity ComparedIn Alexander Hieke & Hannes Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction, abstraction, analysis: proceedings of the 31th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2008, De Gruyter. pp. 389-402. 2009.
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349Which Method(s) for Conceptual Engineering?In Tomas Marvan, Hanne Andersen, Hasok Chang, Benedikt Löwe & Ivo Pezlar (eds.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology, College Publications. 2022.
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Frege's Theorem and Mathematical CognitionIn Francesca Boccuni & Andrea Sereni (eds.), Origins and Varieties of Logicism: On the Logico-Philosophical Foundations of Logicism, Routledge. pp. 372-394. 2022.
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94Conceptual change and conceptual engineering: the case of colour conceptsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2): 168-185. 2021.I analyse conceptual change and conceptual engineering in the special case of colour concepts. The case raises the prospects of conceptual engineering because a precise standard for measuring the amelioration of the structure of concepts is available. On the other hand, the study highlights the problems with controlling conceptual engineering pointed out by Cappelen. I argue that in the case of conceptual change of colour concepts varying degrees of optimization, design and control are possible.…Read more
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32Accessing medical biobanks to solve crimes: ethical considerationsJournal of Medical Ethics 47 (7): 502-509. 2021.Millions of human biological samples are stored worldwide for medical research or treatment purposes. These biospecimens are of enormous potential value to law enforcement as DNA profiles can be obtained from these samples. However, forensic use of such biospecimens raises a number of ethical questions. This article aims to explore ethical issues of using human bodily material in medical biobanks for crime investigation and prosecution purposes. Concerns about confidentiality, trust, autonomy an…Read more
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107Quine's Weak and Strong Indispensability ArgumentJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 33 (2): 231-250. 2002.Quine's views on indispensability arguments in mathematics are scrutinised. A weak indispensability argument is distinguished from a strong indispensability thesis. The weak argument is the combination of the criterion of ontological commitment, holism and a mild naturalism. It is used to refute nominalism. Quine's strong indispensability thesis claims that one should consider all and only the mathematical entities that are really indispensable. Quine has little support for this thesis. This is …Read more
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215Vagueness: A Conceptual Spaces ApproachJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1): 137-160. 2013.The conceptual spaces approach has recently emerged as a novel account of concepts. Its guiding idea is that concepts can be represented geometrically, by means of metrical spaces. While it is generally recognized that many of our concepts are vague, the question of how to model vagueness in the conceptual spaces approach has not been addressed so far, even though the answer is far from straightforward. The present paper aims to fill this lacuna.
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127Qualia CompressionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 87 (1): 129-150. 2012.Color qualia inversion scenarios have played a key role in various philosophical debates. Most notably perhaps, they have figured in skeptical arguments for the fundamental unknowability of other persons’ color experiences. For these arguments to succeed, it must be assumed that a person's having inverted color qualia may go forever unnoticed. This assumption is now generally deemed to be implausible. The present paper defines a variant of color qualia inversion—termed ‘‘color qualia compression…Read more
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18Two accounts of similarity comparedIn Hieke Alexander & Leitgeb Hannes (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos Verlag. pp. 387--389. 2009.
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113What Is Graded Membership?Noûs 48 (4): 653-682. 2012.It has seemed natural to model phenomena related to vagueness in terms of graded membership. However, so far no satisfactory answer has been given to the question of what graded membership is nor has any attempt been made to describe in detail a procedure for determining degrees of membership. We seek to remedy these lacunae by building on recent work on typicality and graded membership in cognitive science and combining some of the results obtained there with a version of the conceptual spaces …Read more
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145Cognitive metaphysicsFrontiers in Psychology 11 1700. 2018.In recent years philosophers have been interested in the methodology of metaphysics. Most of these developments are related to formal work in logic or physics, often against the backdrop of the Carnap-Quine debate on ontology. Drawing on Quine’s later work, I argue that a psychological or cognitive perspective on metaphysical topics may be a valuable addition to contemporary metametaphysics. The method is illustrated by means of cognitive studies of the notions “identity,” “vagueness,” and “obje…Read more
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The Phenomenal Color 'Space' is not a SpaceIn Barbara Saunders & Jaap Van Brakel (eds.), Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Color, University Press of America. pp. 343-351. 2002.
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58Quine's Ideological DebaclePrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 8 (1). 2004.In two papers in the mid-seventies, Quine has discussed an ontological deba-cle, the reduction of ontology to an ontology of pure sets only. This debacle, which weakened Quine’s interest in ontology, is the natural outcome of on-tological relativity, or, more precisely, the proxy-function argument. It is ex-plained how Quine unavoidably came to this conclusion. Moreover, it is ar-gued that the result is even more damaging for Quine’s philosophy than has hitherto been assumed. It is shown that in…Read more
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Trading Ontology for Ideology. The Interplay of Logic, Set Theory and Semantics in Quine's PhilosophyTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 66 (2): 370-371. 2004.
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254I want to analyse the Quine-Carnap discussion on analyticity with regard to logical, mathematical and set-theoretical statements. In recent years, the renewed interest in Carnap’s work has shed a new light on the analytic-synthetic debate. If one fully appreciates Carnap’s conventionalism, one sees that there was not a metaphysical debate on whether there is an analytic-synthetic distinction, but rather a controversy on the expedience of drawing such a distinction. However, on this view, there c…Read more
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Review of Tim Button's The Limits of Realism (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (01.07). 2014.
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54Measuring Graded Membership: The Case of ColorCognitive Science 41 (3): 686-722. 2017.This paper considers Kamp and Partee's account of graded membership within a conceptual spaces framework and puts the account to the test in the domain of colors. Three experiments are reported that are meant to determine, on the one hand, the regions in color space where the typical instances of blue and green are located and, on the other hand, the degrees of blueness/greenness of various shades in the blue–green region as judged by human observers. From the locations of the typical blue and t…Read more
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347Similarity After GoodmanReview of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (1): 61-75. 2011.In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of sim…Read more
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42Orange laser beams are not illusory: The need for a plurality of “real” color ontologiesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (1): 27-28. 2003.Reflectance physicalism only provides a partial picture of the ontology of color. Byrne & Hilbert’ account is unsatisfactory because the replacement of reflectance functions by productance functions is ad hoc, unclear, and only leads to new problems. Furthermore, the effects of color contrast and differences in illumination are not really taken seriously: Too many “real” colors are tacitly dismissed as illusory, and this for arbitrary reasons. We claim that there cannot be an all-embracing ontol…Read more
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1Mathematical EntitiesIn Robrecht Vanderbeeken & Bart D'Hooghe (eds.), Worldviews, Science and Us, World Scientific. pp. 224-241. 2010.
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29Which colour space(s) is Shepard talking about?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (4): 661-662. 2001.Contra Shepard we argue, first, that his presentation of a three-dimensional representational (psychological or phenomenal) colour space is at odds with many results in colour science, and, second, that there is insufficient evidence for Shepard's stronger claim that the three-dimensionality of colour perception has resulted from natural selection, moulded by the particulars of the solar spectrum and its variations. [Shepard].
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44Qualia Change and Colour Science.In Vassilios Karakostas & Dennis Dieks (eds.), Epsa11 Perspectives and Foundational Problems in Philosophy of Science, Springer. pp. 417--428. 2013.
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15The taming of changeIn Michel Weber (ed.), After Whitehead: Rescher on process metaphysics, Ontos Verlag. pp. 95-112. 2004.
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42Trading Ontology for Ideology: The Interplay of Logic, Set Theory and Semantics in Quine's PhilosophySynthese Library. Kluwer/Springer. 2002.The Interplay of Logic, Set Theory and Semantics in Quine's Philosophy L. Decock. In philosophy of science Quine's name is linked to the so-called Quine- Duhem thesis. The discussion of this thesis still continues even after several decades.9 ...
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81What Verities May BeMind 126 (502): 386-428. 2017.Edgington has proposed a solution to the sorites paradox in terms of ‘verities’, which she defines as degrees of closeness to clear truth. Central to her solution is the assumption that verities are formally probabilities. She is silent on what verities might derive from and on why they should be probabilities. This paper places Edgington’s solution in the framework of a spatial approach to conceptualization, arguing that verities may be conceived of as deriving from how our concepts relate to e…Read more
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22Structuur en ontologie: Enkele tendensen in de hedendaagse filosofie Van de wiskundeTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 61 (1). 1999.
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Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
PhilPapers Editorships
Mathematical Cognition |