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4Verzerrung trifft Unsicherheitsverarbeitung: Ein Kommentar zu Weakness of Will and Delay DiscountingZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 78 (2): 280-284. 2024.
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19Knowledge in real-world contexts: not glamorous, but indispensableAsian Journal of Philosophy 2 (2): 1-32. 2023.During the past several decades, many epistemologists have argued for and contributed to a paradigm shift according to which knowledge is central to assertion, action, and interaction. This general position stands in sharp contrast to several recently developed accounts regarding specific epistemic contexts. These specific accounts resist applying traditional epistemic norms, including strong knowledge norms, to real-world situations of interest. In particular, I consider recent arguments about …Read more
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26The key to the knowledge norm of action is ambiguitySynthese 199 (3-4): 9669-9698. 2021.Knowledge-first epistemology includes a knowledge norm of action: roughly, act only on what you know. This norm has been criticized, especially from the perspective of so-called standard decision theory. Mueller and Ross provide example decision problems which seem to show that acting properly cannot require knowledge. I argue that this conclusion depends on applying a particular decision theory which is ill-motivated in this context. Agents’ knowledge is often most plausibly formalized as an am…Read more
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23Naturalism, tractability and the adaptive toolboxSynthese 198 (6): 5749-5784. 2019.Many compelling examples have recently been provided in which people can achieve impressive epistemic success, e.g. draw highly accurate inferences, by using simple heuristics and very little information. This is possible by taking advantage of the features of the environment. The examples suggest an easy and appealing naturalization of rationality: on the one hand, people clearly can apply simple heuristics, and on the other hand, they intuitively ought do so when this brings them high accuracy…Read more
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18Objective and subjective rationality and decisions with the best and worst case in mindTheory and Decision 90 (3-4): 309-320. 2020.We study decision under uncertainty in an Anscombe–Aumann framework. Two binary relations characterize a decision-maker: one incomplete relation, reflecting her objective rationality, and a second complete relation, reflecting her subjective rationality. We require the latter to be an extension of the former. Our key axiom is a dominance condition. Our main theorem provides a representation of the two relations. The objectively rational relation has a Bewley-style multiple prior representation. …Read more
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23How Intractability Spans the Cognitive and Evolutionary Levels of ExplanationTopics in Cognitive Science 12 (4): 1382-1402. 2020.This paper focuses on the cognitive/computational and evolutionary levels. It describes three proposals to make cognition computationally tractable, namely: Resource Rationality, the Adaptive Toolbox and Massive Modularity. While each of these proposals appeals to evolutionary considerations to dissolve the intractability of cognition, Rich, Blokpoel, de Haan, and van Rooij argue that, in each case, the intractability challenge is not resolved, but just relocated to the level of evolution.
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18How Intractability Spans the Cognitive and Evolutionary Levels of ExplanationTopics in Cognitive Science 12 (4): 1382-1402. 2020.This paper focuses on the cognitive/computational and evolutionary levels. It describes three proposals to make cognition computationally tractable, namely: Resource Rationality, the Adaptive Toolbox and Massive Modularity. While each of these proposals appeals to evolutionary considerations to dissolve the intractability of cognition, Rich, Blokpoel, de Haan, and van Rooij argue that, in each case, the intractability challenge is not resolved, but just relocated to the level of evolution.
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68The logic of probabilistic knowledgePhilosophical Studies 177 (6): 1703-1725. 2020.Sarah Moss’ thesis that we have probabilistic knowledge is from some perspectives unsurprising and from other perspectives hard to make sense of. The thesis is potentially transformative, but not yet elaborated in sufficient detail for epistemologists. This paper interprets Mossean probabilistic knowledge in a suitably-modified Kripke framework, thus filling in key details. It argues that probabilistic knowledge looks natural and plausible when so interpreted, and shows how the most pressing cha…Read more
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81Comparing the axiomatic and ecological approaches to rationality: fundamental agreement theorems in SCOPSynthese 195 (2): 529-547. 2018.There are two prominent viewpoints regarding the nature of rationality and how it should be evaluated in situations of interest: the traditional axiomatic approach and the newer ecological rationality. An obstacle to comparing and evaluating these seemingly opposite approaches is that they employ different language and formalisms, ask different questions, and are at different stages of development. I adapt a formal framework known as SCOP to address this problem by providing a comprehensive comm…Read more