Upshots for Other Debates

This chapter explores and draws out the consequences of both the dualist view of rationality defended in Part I and the theory of structural rationality defended in Part II for a series of standing debates in (meta)ethics and epistemology—including debates about moral rationalism, rational choice theory, higher-order evidence, the normativity of logic, epistemic permissivism, and conditionalization. It also considers and criticizes some popular ways of trying to account for the existence and force of coherence requirements in the formally inclined philosophical literature—namely, Dutch book and money pump arguments and accuracy dominance arguments.

Socratic Irony and Argumentation

Socratic irony can be understood independently of the immortal heroics of Plato’s Socrates. We need a systematic account and criticism of it both as a debate-winning strategy of argumentation and teaching method. The Speaker introduces an issue pretending to be at a lower intellectual level than her co-debaters, or Participants. An Audience looks over and evaluates the results. How is it possible that the Speaker like Socrates is, consistently, in the winning position? The situation is ironic because the Participants fight from a losing position but realize it too late. Socratic irony compares with divine irony: divine irony is a subtype of Socratic irony since you lose when you challenge gods. Socratic irony is also, prima facie, a subtype of dramatic irony when the Audience knows more than the Participants on the stage. We must distinguish between the ideal and realistic elements of Socratic Irony. The very idea of Socratic irony looks idealized, or it is an ideal case, which explains the Speaker’s consistently winning position. In real life, the debate must be rigged, or the Dutch Book argument applies to the Participants, if the Speaker is so successful.

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.

Language, Power and Success: Bestselling Translations in the Dutch CPNB Top 100 archief

This paper investigates origins, original languages and authors of bestselling translations on the annual Dutch Top 100 bestseller list. Considering the first fifty entries on the lists from the period between 1997 and 2019, the study aims to determine the Dutch position within the World Language System. The results show that about half of all the books surveyed are translations. These come from fifteen different source languages, although a clear majority are translations from English (73.2%). The analysis confirms the notion of a World Language System with central, semi-peripheral and peripheral languages and places Dutch among the peripheral languages. Furthermore, the study reveals strong globalisation and commercialisation tendencies in the Dutch book market.

The Jesuitesses in the Bookshop: Catholic Lay Sisters’ Participation in the Dutch Book Trade, 1650–1750

The institutional Catholic Church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam relied on the work of inspired women who lived under an informal religious rule and called themselves ‘spiritual daughters’. Once the States of Holland banned all public exercise of Catholicism, spiritual daughters leveraged the ambiguity of their religious status to pursue unique roles in their communities as catechists, booksellers and enthusiastic consumers of print. However, their lack of a formal order caused consternation among their Catholic confessors. It also disturbed Reformed authorities in their communities, who branded them ‘Jesuitesses’. Whilst many scholars have documented this tension between inspired daughter and institutional critique, it has yet to be contextualized fully within the literary culture of the Dutch Republic. This article suggests that due to the de-institutionalized status of the spiritual daughters and the discursive print culture that surrounded them, public criticism replaced direct censure by Catholic and Reformed authorities as the primary impediment to their inspired work.

Dutch Book against Lewis

According to the PCCP thesis, the probability of a conditional A → C is the conditional probability P(C|A). This claim is undermined by Lewis’ triviality results, which purport to show that apart from trivial cases, PCCP is not true. In the present article we show that the only rational, “Dutch Book-resistant” extension of the agent’s beliefs concerning non-conditional sentences A and C to the conditional A → C is by assuming that P(A → C) = P(C|A) (i.e., in accord with PCCP). In other cases a diachronic Dutch Book against the agent can be constructed. There is a tension between our findings and Lewis’ results, which needs to be explained. Therefore, we present a probability space which corresponds in a natural way to the diachronic Dutch Book—and which allows the conditional A → C to be interpreted as an event in a mathematically sound way. It also allows to formalize the notion of conditionalizing A → C on ¬C which plays a crucial role in Lewis’ proof. Our conclusion is that Lewis’ proof is circular, so it cannot be considered to be a sound argument against PCCP.

Bayesian Updating When What You Learn Might Be False (Forthcoming in Erkenntnis)

Rescorla (Erkenntnis, 2020) has recently pointed out that the standard arguments for Bayesian Conditionalization assume that whenever I become certain of something, it is true. Most people would reject this assumption. In response, Rescorla offers an improved Dutch Book argument for Bayesian Conditionalization that does not make this assumption. My purpose in this paper is two-fold. First, I want to illuminate Rescorla’s new argument by giving a very general Dutch Book argument that applies to many cases of updating beyond those covered by Conditionalization, and then showing how Rescorla’s version follows as a special case of that. Second, I want to show how to generalise R. A. Briggs and Richard Pettigrew’s Accuracy Dominance argument to avoid the assumption that Rescorla has identified (Briggs and Pettigrew in Noûs, 2018). In both cases, these arguments proceed by first establishing a very general reflection principle.

Captivating, splendid or instructive?

What is the impact of reading fiction? We analyze online Dutch book reviews to detect overall affective impact, narrative feelings, response to style and reflection. We create a set of rules that analyze the reviews and detect the impact aspects. We evaluate the detection by asking raters about the presence of these aspects in reviews and comparing these ratings to our detection. Interrater agreements are weak to moderate; however, there is a significant correlation between the model’s predictions for all impact aspects except reflection. The detected impact correlates with book genres in the way one would expect: Narrative feelings are highest for thrillers, and stylistic response is highest for literary books. We can thus estimate some aspects of the response books evoke in readers. Initial results suggest that the appreciation of style is linked to reflection in the reader. However, the concepts underlying the impact categories need further exploration.