Language as an Object of Empirical Study in the Dutch Republic

This article takes a dictionary by Joos Lambrecht, dating from 1546, as its point of departure. It argues that this dictionary, as well as other dictionaries and treatises produced in the wake of Lambrecht’s, did more than teach their young audience in the Dutch Republic the meaning of existing words and thus transfer cultural and linguistic knowledge as was already understood. They also taught youngsters how to obtain (new) knowledge from their own empirical observations. The Dutch books on morphology, orthography, phonology, and grammar – produced in large numbers – offered their readers the opportunity to use their own language as an object for empirical study. By charting the dynamics of language, knowledge, and empirical training, it is argued that the Dutch language was, for a short time, treated by writers not merely as a means to express and share knowledge, but also as an object of study in itself. What might have formed an accessible training ground for the development of skills in empirical observation and especially self-reflexive practice, was, however, soon snuffed out by a second wave of tutorial books which emphasised the prescriptive over the explorative.

A Book Industry in Transition: The Shortage of Books in Indonesia in the Late 1940s and 1950s’

This paper examines the book shortage crisis in Indonesia in the late 1940s and 1950s. After the Second World War, several Dutch colonial publishing houses decided to continue their businesses in Indonesia. During the second half of the 1940s there seemed to be an evergrowing demand for books in Indonesia, and by the end of 1949, several Dutch newspapers reported a so-called book crisis. A small booklet entitled De boekennood van modern Indonesië (Book Crisis of Modern Indonesia) (1949) seemed to be the herald of this alarming news. It was written by A.P. van Schieveen, who was a board member of the Vereniging van Indische Boekhandelaren, a society of Dutch book traders which had been established in 1926. In this booklet he emphasizes the importance of reading for Indonesia’s development, but also warns the Dutch publishing industry of the fact that the preferred second language seems to have become English. As a solution to support the continuing use of the Dutch language, he urged the Dutch publishing industry to distribute large quantities of Dutch books all over Indonesia. G. Ockeloen, the editor of Madjallah perdagangan buku di Indonesia/Maandblad voor de boekhandel in Indonesië (1949), responded to this matter. According to Ockeloen, Van Schieveen was stating the obvious, and he wrote that there was an even larger crisis going on, which was the shortage of books in Bahasa Indonesia.

Lockean Beliefs, Dutch Books, and Scoring Systems

On the Lockean thesis one ought to believe a proposition if and only if one assigns it a credence at or above a threshold (Foley in Am Philos Q 29(2):111–124, 1992). The Lockean thesis, thus, provides a way of characterizing sets of all-or-nothing beliefs. Here we give two independent characterizations of the sets of beliefs satisfying the Lockean thesis. One is in terms of betting dispositions associated with full beliefs and one is in terms of an accuracy scoring system for full beliefs. These characterizations are parallel to, but not merely derivative from, the more familiar Dutch Book (de Finetti in Theory of probability, vol 1, Wiley, London, 1974) and accuracy (Joyce in Philos Sci 65(4):575–603, 1998) arguments for probabilism.

A simple interpretation of undirected edges in essential graphs is wrong

Artificial intelligence for causal discovery frequently uses Markov equivalence classes of directed acyclic graphs, graphically represented as essential graphs, as a way of representing uncertainty in causal directionality. There has been confusion regarding how to interpret undirected edges in essential graphs, however. In particular, experts and non-experts both have difficulty quantifying the likelihood of uncertain causal arrows being pointed in one direction or another. A simple interpretation of undirected edges treats them as having equal odds of being oriented in either direction, but I show in this paper that any agent interpreting undirected edges in this simple way can be Dutch booked. In other words, I can construct a set of bets that appears rational for the users of the simple interpretation to accept, but for which in all possible outcomes they lose money. I put forward another interpretation, prove this interpretation leads to a bet-taking strategy that is sufficient to avoid all Dutch books of this kind, and conjecture that this strategy is also necessary for avoiding such Dutch books. Finally, I demonstrate that undirected edges that are more likely to be oriented in one direction than the other are common in graphs with 4 nodes and 3 edges.

Why Approximate Coherence?

Chapter 4 begins to answer the question of how Bayesians can justify the claim that approximating probabilistic coherence is beneficial for non-ideal thinkers. Dutch book arguments are often put forth to argue that ideal rationality requires being coherent. I show that we can justify that it is better to be less incoherent by showing that decreased incoherence is associated with decreased losses from Dutch books. While incoherent thinkers can never be immune from Dutch book losses, the amount they stand to lose, given that we standardize bet sizes, is greater the more incoherent their credences are.