208 research outputs found
Rationality: a social-epistemology perspective
Both in philosophy and in psychology, human rationality has traditionally been studied from an "individualistic" perspective. Recently, social epistemologists have drawn attention to the fact that epistemic interactions among agents also give rise to important questions concerning rationality. In previous work, we have used a formal model to assess the risk that a particular type of social-epistemic interactions lead agents with initially consistent belief states into inconsistent belief states. Here, we continue this work by investigating the dynamics to which these interactions may give rise in the population as a whole
Health Insurance Competition: The Effect of Group Contracts
In countries like the US and the Netherlands health insurance is provided by private firms. These private firms can offer both individual and group contracts. The strategic and welfare implications of such group contracts are not well understood. Using a Dutch data set of about 700 group health insurance contracts over the period 2007-2008, we estimate a model to determine which factors explain the price of group contracts. We find that groups that are located close to an insurers’ home turf pay a higher premium than other groups. This finding is not consistent with the bargaining argument in the literature as it implies that concentrated groups close to an insurer’s home turf should get (if any) a larger discount than other groups. A simple Hotelling model, however, does explain our empirical results.health insurance;health-plan choice;managed competition
The experimental philosophy of logic and formal epistemology:Conditionals
Classical logic was long believed to provide the norms of reasoning. But more recently researchers interested in the norms of reasoning have shifted their attention toward probability theory and various concepts and rules that can be defined in probabilistic terms. In philosophy, this shift gave rise to formal epistemology, while in psychology, it led to the New Paradigm psychology of reasoning. Whereas there has traditionally been a clear division of labor between philosophers and psychologists working on reasoning, the past decade has seen an increasing collaboration between philosophers and psychologists, from which an experimental philosophy of logic and formal epistemology emerged. An area in which the fruits of this collaboration have been par-ticularly in evidence is the research concerned with conditionals and conditional rea-soning. This chapter showcases contributions to this area to underline the value of the said branch of experimental philosophy more generally.</p
Similarity after Goodman
© The Author(s) 2010. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract In a famous critique, Goodman dismissed similarity as a slippery and both philosophically and scientifically useless notion. We revisit his critique in the light of important recent work on similarity in psychology and cognitive science. Specifically, we use Tversky’s influential set-theoretic account of similarity as well as Gärdenfors’s more recent resuscitation of the geometrical account to show that, while Goodman’s critique contained valuable insights, it does not warrant a dismissal of similarity. 1 Formal Modes of Similarity For much of the twentieth century, both philosophical and psychological theorizing about similarity has been dominated by the geometrical model o
Identity and similarity
The standard approach to the so-called paradoxes of identity has been to argue that these paradoxes do not essentially concern the notion of identity but rather betray misconceptions on our part regarding other metaphysical notions, like that of an object or a property. This paper proposes a different approach by pointing to an ambiguity in the identity predicate and arguing that the concept of identity that figures in many ordinary identity claims, including those that appear in the paradoxes, is not the traditional philosophical concept but one that can be defined in terms of relevant similarity. This approach to the paradoxes will be argued to be superior to the standard one. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V
Zorggebruik en beloning van medisch specialisten
De introductie van het nieuwe zorgstelsel in 2006 had als doel om
een efficiëntere zorgverlening en betere kwaliteit van de zorg te
realiseren. Regio’s vertonen tijdspersistente verschillen in het aantal
behandelingen in ziekenhuizen bij eenzelfde zorgvraag tussen
2006 en 2009. Deze verschillen hangen sterk samen met het aantal
artsen en de beloningsstructuur van de specialist. De prikkel
tot meer behandelen speelt sterker bij vrij gevestigde specialisten
dan bij specialisten in loondienst
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