Mads Skipper
Biographic Data
| ID | 312844 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mads Skipper |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mads |
| FAMILY NAME | Skipper |
| SIGNATURE | SKIPPER M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3383-2762 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 12 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The transformative power of a change laboratory
How Doctors Talk About Medical Errors
During the last three decades, an increased amount of research on errors in health care has been conducted. Studies show that physicians find it challenging to handle errors because of the blame and guilt that errors cause. Communicating with colleagues has been identified as vital for coping with errors and for creating a just culture; however, many physicians do not usually discuss their errors. Knowledge about how junior doctors experience err…
The bayesian and the abductivist
A major open question in the borderlands between epistemology and philosophy of science concerns whether Bayesian updating and abductive inference are compatible. Some philosophers—most influentially Bas van Fraassen—have argued that they are not. Others have disagreed, arguing that abduction, properly understood, is indeed compatible with Bayesianism. Here we present two formal results that allow us to tackle this question from a new angle. We s…
Good guesses as accuracy-specificity tradeoffs
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 spec…
Bayesianism for Non-ideal Agents
Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience : the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, …
Becoming a doctor—The potential of a change laboratory intervention
In a previous ethnographic field study, we found that newly graduated doctors (NGDs) found their first months of practice challenging and overwhelming. By including an organisational perspective (Cultural Historical Activity Theory), we were able to identify contextual factors within the hospital organisation, which influence the NGDs’ challenges. This raised the question: What can be done about it? To address this, we designed a Change Laborator…
The change laboratory in medical education
The Humility Heuristic, or
People don’t always speak the truth. When they don’t, we do better not to trust them. Unfortunately, that’s often easier said than done. People don’t usually wear a ‘Not to be trusted!’ badge on their sleeves, which lights up every time they depart from the truth. Given this, what can we do to figure out whom to trust, and whom not? My aim in this paper is to offer a partial answer to this question. I propose a heuristic – the ‘Humility Heuristic…
Belief gambles in epistemic decision theory
Don’t form beliefs on the basis of coin flips or random guesses. More generally, don’t take belief gambles: if a proposition is no more likely to be true than false given your total body of evidence, don’t go ahead and believe that proposition. Few would deny this seemingly innocuous piece of epistemic advice. But what, exactly, is wrong with taking belief gambles? Philosophers have debated versions of this question at least since the classic dis…
Does rationality demand higher-order certainty
Hyperintensional semantics
Group disagreement
The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons . Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, …
Group disagreement
The debate on the epistemology of disagreement has so far focused almost exclusively on cases of disagreement between individual persons . Yet, many social epistemologists agree that at least certain kinds of groups are equally capable of having beliefs that are open to epistemic evaluation. If so, we should expect a comprehensive epistemology of disagreement to accommodate cases of disagreement between group agents, such as juries, governments, …
Hyperintensional semantics
The change laboratory in medical education
The Humility Heuristic, or
People don’t always speak the truth. When they don’t, we do better not to trust them. Unfortunately, that’s often easier said than done. People don’t usually wear a ‘Not to be trusted!’ badge on their sleeves, which lights up every time they depart from the truth. Given this, what can we do to figure out whom to trust, and whom not? My aim in this paper is to offer a partial answer to this question. I propose a heuristic – the ‘Humility Heuristic…
Belief gambles in epistemic decision theory
Don’t form beliefs on the basis of coin flips or random guesses. More generally, don’t take belief gambles: if a proposition is no more likely to be true than false given your total body of evidence, don’t go ahead and believe that proposition. Few would deny this seemingly innocuous piece of epistemic advice. But what, exactly, is wrong with taking belief gambles? Philosophers have debated versions of this question at least since the classic dis…
Does rationality demand higher-order certainty
Bayesianism for Non-ideal Agents
Orthodox Bayesianism is a highly idealized theory of how we ought to live our epistemic lives. One of the most widely discussed idealizations is that of logical omniscience : the assumption that an agent’s degrees of belief must be probabilistically coherent to be rational. It is widely agreed that this assumption is problematic if we want to reason about bounded rationality, logical learning, or other aspects of non-ideal epistemic agency. Yet, …
Becoming a doctor—The potential of a change laboratory intervention
In a previous ethnographic field study, we found that newly graduated doctors (NGDs) found their first months of practice challenging and overwhelming. By including an organisational perspective (Cultural Historical Activity Theory), we were able to identify contextual factors within the hospital organisation, which influence the NGDs’ challenges. This raised the question: What can be done about it? To address this, we designed a Change Laborator…
Good guesses as accuracy-specificity tradeoffs
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 spec…
The bayesian and the abductivist
A major open question in the borderlands between epistemology and philosophy of science concerns whether Bayesian updating and abductive inference are compatible. Some philosophers—most influentially Bas van Fraassen—have argued that they are not. Others have disagreed, arguing that abduction, properly understood, is indeed compatible with Bayesianism. Here we present two formal results that allow us to tackle this question from a new angle. We s…
How Doctors Talk About Medical Errors
During the last three decades, an increased amount of research on errors in health care has been conducted. Studies show that physicians find it challenging to handle errors because of the blame and guilt that errors cause. Communicating with colleagues has been identified as vital for coping with errors and for creating a just culture; however, many physicians do not usually discuss their errors. Knowledge about how junior doctors experience err…
The transformative power of a change laboratory
Computer Science (8 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Metaphysics (5 works) · Medical education (4 works) · Medicine (4 works) · Philosophy of language (4 works)