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13Polymath as an Epistemic CommunityIn Bharath Sriraman (ed.), Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, Springer. pp. 2727-2756. 2024.The Polymath Project is an online collaborative enterprise that was initiated in 2009, when Timothy Gowers asked whether and how groups could work together to solve mathematical problems that “do not naturally split up into a vast number of subtasks.” Gowers proposed to answer this question himself by actually trying to set up such a collaboration, based on interactions taking place in the comment-threads of a series of posts on a WordPress blog. Hence, the first project officially started in ea…Read more
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Laat ons niet ernstig blijven, Huldeboek voor Jean Paul Van Bendegem (edited book)Academia Press. 2018.
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11Putting Information First: Luciano Floridi and the Philosophy of InformationIn Armen T. Marsoobian, Brian J. Huschle, Eric Cavallero & Patrick Allo (eds.), Putting Information First, Wiley‐blackwell. 2011-04-22.This chapter contains sections titled: First Misconception Second Misconception The Chapters Conclusion Acknowledgments References.
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150Informational Semantics as a Third Alternative?Erkenntnis 77 (2): 167-185. 2011.Informational semantics were first developed as an interpretation of the model-theory of substructural (and especially relevant) logics. In this paper we argue that such a semantics is of independent value and that it should be considered as a genuine alternative explication of the notion of logical consequence alongside the traditional model-theoretical and the proof-theoretical accounts. Our starting point is the content-nonexpansion platitude which stipulates that an argument is valid iff the…Read more
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17Annotated Natural Deduction for Adaptive ReasoningIn Can Başkent & Thomas Macaulay Ferguson (eds.), Graham Priest on Dialetheism and Paraconsistency, Springer Verlag. pp. 409-437. 2019.We present a multi-conclusion natural deduction calculus characterizing the dynamic reasoning typical of Adaptive Logics. The resulting system AdaptiveND is sound and complete with respect to the propositional fragment of adaptive logics based on CLuN. This appears to be the first tree-format presentation of the standard linear dynamic proof system typical of Adaptive Logics. It offers the advantage of full transparency in the formulation of locally derivable rules, a connection between restrict…Read more
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26The Epistemology of Non-distributive ProfilesPhilosophy and Technology 33 (3): 379-409. 2020.The distinction between distributive and non-distributive profiles figures prominently in current evaluations of the ethical and epistemological risks that are associated with automated profiling practices. The diagnosis that non-distributive profiles may coincidentally situate an individual in the wrong category is often perceived as the central shortcoming of such profiles. According to this diagnosis, most risks can be retraced to the use of non-universal generalisations and various other sta…Read more
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9Processen, veranderingen en interacties in computerwetenschappen en quantumfysica: Verslag van de SLI-2003 workshop, gehouden te Brussel, op 31 maart 2003 (review)Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 3. 2003.
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16Formalising the 'No Information without Data-representation'PrincipleIn P. Brey, A. Briggle & K. Waelbers (eds.), Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy, Ios Press. pp. 79. 2008.
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387The Meaning of ‘Other’ in Classifications: Formal Methods Meet Artistic ResearchPhilosophy and Technology 30 (4): 541-545. 2017.This commentary is a reflection on a collaboration with the artist Rossella Biscotti and comments on how artistic research and logico-mathematical methods can be used to contribute to the development of critical perspectives on contemporary data practices.
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168The logic of 'being informed' revisited and revisedPhilosophical Studies 153 (3): 417-434. 2011.The logic of ‘being informed’ gives a formal analysis of a cognitive state that does not coincide with either belief, or knowledge. To Floridi, who first proposed the formal analysis, the latter is supported by the fact that unlike knowledge or belief, being informed is a factive, but not a reflective state. This paper takes a closer look at the formal analysis itself, provides a pure and an applied semantics for the logic of being informed, and tries to find out to what extent the formal analys…Read more
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156Logic, Reasoning and RevisionTheoria 82 (1): 3-31. 2015.The traditional connection between logic and reasoning has been under pressure ever since Gilbert Harman attacked the received view that logic yields norms for what we should believe. In this article I first place Harman's challenge in the broader context of the dialectic between logical revisionists like Bob Meyer and sceptics about the role of logic in reasoning like Harman. I then develop a formal model based on contemporary epistemic and doxastic logic in which the relation between logic and…Read more
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84Adaptive Logic as a Modal LogicStudia Logica 101 (5): 933-958. 2013.Modal logics have in the past been used as a unifying framework for the minimality semantics used in defeasible inference, conditional logic, and belief revision. The main aim of the present paper is to add adaptive logics, a general framework for a wide range of defeasible reasoning forms developed by Diderik Batens and his co-workers, to the growing list of formalisms that can be studied with the tools and methods of contemporary modal logic. By characterising the class of abnormality models, …Read more
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2662The ethics of algorithms: mapping the debateBig Data and Society 3 (2): 2053951716679679. 2016.In information societies, operations, decisions and choices previously left to humans are increasingly delegated to algorithms, which may advise, if not decide, about how data should be interpreted and what actions should be taken as a result. More and more often, algorithms mediate social processes, business transactions, governmental decisions, and how we perceive, understand, and interact among ourselves and with the environment. Gaps between the design and operation of algorithms and our und…Read more
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144Reasoning about data and information: Abstraction between states and commoditiesSynthese 167 (2): 231-249. 2009.Cognitive states as well as cognitive commodities play central though distinct roles in our epistemological theories. By being attentive to how a difference in their roles affects our way of referring to them, we can undoubtedly accrue our understanding of the structure and functioning of our main epistemological theories. In this paper we propose an analysis of the dichotomy between states and commodities in terms of the method of abstraction, and more specifically by means of infomorphisms bet…Read more
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181Kees van Deemter: Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, xvi+341, $29.95, ISBN: 0-199-5459-01 (review)Minds and Machines 22 (1): 41-45. 2012.
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61Hard and Soft Logical InformationJournal of Logic and Computation 1-20. 2017.In this paper I use the distinction between hard and soft information from the dynamic epistemic logic tradition to extend prior work on informational conceptions of logic to include non-monotonic consequence-relations. In particular, I defend the claim that at least some non-monotonic logics can be understood on the basis of soft or “belief-like” logical information, and thereby question the orthodox view that all logical information is hard, “knowledge-like”, information.
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194The Many Faces of Closure and Introspection: An Interactive PerspectiveJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (1): 91-124. 2013.In this paper I present a more refined analysis of the principles of deductive closure and positive introspection. This analysis uses the expressive resources of logics for different types of group knowledge, and discriminates between aspects of closure and computation that are often conflated. The resulting model also yields a more fine-grained distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and places Hintikka’s original argument for positive introspection in a new perspective.
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134M. Augier and J. G. March : Models of a man: Essays in memory of Herbert Simon (review)Minds and Machines 16 (2): 221-224. 2006.Herbert Simon was definitely 20th century’s most influential proponent of bounded rationality. His work was of a highly philosophical nature, but—as made clear time and again in this book—his ideas did not originate in philosophy at all. If the present collection of essays has any value to the philosophically oriented reader, it lies in the way it shows how a traditionally philosophical topic as human rationality and action cannot be claimed by philosophy alone. Even more, it shows that importan…Read more
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65Relevant Information and Relevant Questions: Comment on Floridi’s “Understanding Epistemic Relevance” (review)Minds and Machines 24 (1): 71-83. 2014.Floridi’s chapter on relevant information bridges the analysis of “being informed” with the analysis of knowledge as “relevant information that is accounted for” by analysing subjective or epistemic relevance in terms of the questions that an agent might ask in certain circumstances. In this paper, I scrutinise this analysis, identify a number of problems with it, and finally propose an improvement. By way of epilogue, I offer some more general remarks on the relation between (bounded) rationali…Read more
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52Local information and adaptive consequenceLogique Et Analyse 149 461-488. 2006.In this paper we provide a formal description of what it means to be in a local or partial information-state. Starting from the notion of locality in a relational structure, we define so-called adaptive gen- erated submodels. The latter are then shown to yield an adaptive logic wherein the derivability of Pφ is naturally interpreted as a core property of being in a state in which one holds the information that φ.
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81A Classical Prejudice?Knowledge, Technology & Policy 23 (1): 25-40. 2010.In this paper I reassess Floridi's solution to the Bar-Hillel-Carnap paradox (the information-yield of inconsistent propositions is maximal) by questioning the orthodox view that contradictions cannot be true. The main part of the paper is devoted to showing that the veridicality thesis (semantic information has to be true) is compatible with dialetheism (there are true contradictions), and that unless we accept the additional non-falsity thesis (information cannot be false) there is no reason t…Read more
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94Vincent Hendricks, mainstream and formal epistemology (review)Erkenntnis 69 (3): 427-432. 2008.As Vincent Hendricks remarks early on in this book, the formal and mainstream traditions of epistemic theorising have mostly evolved independently of each other. This initial impression is confirmed by a comparison of the main problems and methods practitioners in each tradition are concerned with. Mainstream epistemol- ogy engages in a dialectical game of proposing and challenging definitions of knowledge. Formal epistemologists proceed differently, as they design a wide variety of axiomatic an…Read more
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32Noisy vs. Merely Equivocal LogicsIn Francesco Berto, Edwin Mares, Koji Tanaka & Francesco Paoli (eds.), Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications, Springer. pp. 57--79. 2012.Substructural pluralism about the meaning of logical connectives is best understood as the view that natural language connectives have all (and only) the properties conferred by classical logic, but that particular occurrences of these connectives cannot simultaneously exhibit all these properties. This is just a more sophisticated way of saying that while natural language connectives are ambiguous, they are not so in the way classical logic intends them to be. Since this view is usually framed …Read more
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609Formalising the 'No Information Without Data-Representation' PrincipleIn P. Brey, A. Briggle & K. Waelbers (eds.), Current Issues in Computing and Philosophy, Ios Press. 2008.One of the basic principles of the general definition of information is its rejection of dataless information, which is reflected in its endorsement of an ontological neutrality. In general, this principles states that “there can be no information without physical implementation” (Floridi (2005)). Though this is standardly considered a commonsensical assumption, many questions arise with regard to its generalised application. In this paper a combined logic for data and information is elaborated,…Read more
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102Synonymy and Intra-Theoretical PluralismAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1): 77-91. 2015.The starting point of this paper is a version of intra-theoretical pluralism that was recently proposed by Hjortland [2013]. In a first move, I use synonymy-relations to formulate an intuitively compelling objection against Hjortland's claim that, if one uses a single calculus to characterise the consequence relations of the paraconsistent logic LP and the paracomplete logic K3, one immediately obtains multiple consequence relations for a single language and hence a reply to the Quinean charge o…Read more
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220Logical pluralism and semantic informationJournal of Philosophical Logic 36 (6). 2007.Up to now theories of semantic information have implicitly relied on logical monism, or the view that there is one true logic. The latter position has been explicitly challenged by logical pluralists. Adopting an unbiased attitude in the philosophy of information, we take a suggestion from Beall and Restall at heart and exploit logical pluralism to recognise another kind of pluralism. The latter is called informational pluralism, a thesis whose implications for a theory of semantic information w…Read more