Mattias Skipper

• Skipper, Mattias & Bjerring, Jens Christian (2024). Hyperintensionality and Topicality: Remarks on Berto's Topics of Thought. Analysis. ISSN 0003-2638. doi: 10.1093/analys/anad077.
• Skipper, Mattias (2023). Good guesses as accuracy-specificity tradeoffs. Philosophical Studies. ISSN 0031-8116. p. 2025–2050. doi: 10.1007/s11098-022-01915-1. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Guessing is a familiar activity, one we engage in when we are uncertain of the answer to a question under discussion. It is also an activity that lends itself to normative evaluation: some guesses are better than others. The question that interests me here is what makes for a good guess. In recent work, Dorst and Mandelkern have argued that good guesses are distinguished from bad ones by how well they optimize a tradeoff between accuracy and specificity. Here I argue that Dorst and Mandelkern’s implementation of this idea fails to satisfy some plausible constraints on good guesses, and I develop an alternative implementation that satisfies the relevant constraints. The result is a new account of good guesses which retains the positive aspects of Dorst and Mandelkern’s proposal, but without the drawbacks.

• Skipper, Mattias (2023). Wise Groups and Humble Persons: The Best of Both Worlds? Asian Journal of Philosophy. ISSN 2731-4642. 2(4). doi: 10.1007/s44204-022-00057-9. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper is about a problem that can arise when we try to harness the “wisdom of the crowd” from groups comprised of individuals who exhibit a certain kind of epistemic humility in the way they respond to testimonial evidence. I begin by setting out the problem and then make some initial steps toward solving it. The solution I develop is tentative and may not apply in all circumstances, but it promises to alleviate what seems to me to be a problem of both theoretical interest and practical importance.

• Skipper, Mattias (2022). Can Arbitrary Beliefs Be Rational? Episteme: A journal of individual and social epistemology. ISSN 1742-3600. Full text in Research Archive
• Skipper, Mattias (2022). Unifying Epistemic and Practical Rationality. Mind. ISSN 0026-4423. doi: 10.1093/mind/fzac049. Show summary

  Many theories of rational action are predicated on the idea that what it is rational to do in a given situation depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe in that situation. In short: they treat epistemic rationality as explanatorily prior to practical rationality. If they are right in doing so, it follows, on pain of explanatory circularity, that epistemic rationality cannot itself be a form of practical rationality. Yet, many epistemologists have defended just such a view of epistemic rationality. According to them, there is no such thing as a distinctively epistemic form of rationality which could be explanatorily prior to practical rationality. Rather, they maintain, there is just one form of rationality—practical rationality—of which epistemic rationality is a species. What to make of this conflict? The aim of this paper is to motivate a view about the relationship between epistemic and practical rationality which resolves the conflict in a way that should be attractive to both sides. The central idea is to ground both epistemic and practical rationality in an independently motivated notion of evidential probability which is itself to be understood in non-normative terms. Doing so, I argue, allows us to unify epistemic and practical rationality in a way that does justice to the idea that what it is rational to do depends, in part, on what it is rational to believe; and to do so in a way that avoids explanatory circularity.

• Skipper, Mattias (2021). Belief Gambles in Epistemic Decision Theory. Philosophical Studies. ISSN 0031-8116. 178.
• Skipper, Mattias (2021). Does Rationality Demand Higher-Order Certainty? Synthese. ISSN 0039-7857. 198, p. 11561–11585.
• Skipper, Mattias (2021). The Humility Heuristic or: People Worth Trusting Admit to What They Don't Know . Social Epistemology. ISSN 0269-1728. 35, p. 323–336.
• Skipper, Mattias & Bjerring, Jens Christian (2020). Hyperintensional Semantics: A Fregean Approach. Synthese. ISSN 0039-7857.
• Skipper, Mattias & Bjerring, Jens Christian (2020). Bayesianism for Non-Ideal Agents. Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Scientific Philosophy. ISSN 0165-0106.
• Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (2019). Group Disagreement: A Belief Aggregation Perspective. Synthese. ISSN 0039-7857.
• Skipper, Mattias (2019). Reconciling Enkrasia and Higher-Order Defeat. Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Scientific Philosophy. ISSN 0165-0106.
• Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (2019). Explaining the Illusion of Asymmetric Insight. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. ISSN 1878-5158.
• Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (2019). An Instrumentalist Account of How to Weigh Epistemic and Practical Reasons for Belief. Mind. ISSN 0026-4423.
• Skipper, Mattias & Bjerring, Jens Christian (2019). A Dynamic Solution to the Problem of Logical Omniscience. Journal of Philosophical Logic. ISSN 0022-3611.
• Skipper, Mattias; Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn & Bjerring, Jens Christian (2018). A Higher-Order Approach to Disagreement. Episteme: A journal of individual and social epistemology. ISSN 1742-3600.
• Skipper, Mattias (2018). Higher-Order Defeat Without Epistemic Dilemmas. logos & episteme an international journal of epistemology. ISSN 2069-3052.
• Skipper, Mattias (2016). Counterpossibles and the Nature of Impossible Worlds. Sats: northern european journal of philosophy. ISSN 1600-1974.
• Skipper, Mattias (2015). Dynamic Epistemic Logic and Logical Omniscience. Logic and Logical Philosophy. ISSN 1425-3305.

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• Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (2019). Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198829775. 321 p.

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• Skipper, Mattias (2021). Higher-Order Evidence and the Normativity of Logic. In Stapleford, S; Steup, M & McCain, K (Ed.), Epistemic Dilemmas: New Arguments, New Angles. Routledge. ISSN 9780367681425.
• Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (2020). Instrumental Reasons for Belief: Elliptical Talk and Elusive Properties. In Schmidt, S & Ernst, G. (Ed.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond. Routledge. ISSN 9781032336541.
• Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (2020). When Conciliation Frustrates the Epistemic Priorities of Groups. In Broncano-Berrocal, Fernando & Carter, Adam (Ed.), The Epistemology of Group Disagreement. Routledge. ISSN 9780367652647.
• Skipper, Mattias (2019). Higher-Order Defeat and the Impossibility of Self-Misleading Evidence. In Skipper, Mattias & Steglich-Petersen, Asbjørn (Ed.), Higher-Order Evidence: New Essays. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198829775.

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