Institut für Philosophie
Fachbereich 08

Wissenschaftlicher Assistent

Sprechstunde:	Nach Vereinbarung per E-Mail
E-Mail:	kauss@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Raum:	IG 2.556
Telefon:	069 798-32809
Anschrift:	Norbert Wollheim Platz 1 60629 Frankfurt am Main

Areas of Specialization / Current Research

Belief and Credence
• Epistemology: According to an attractive picture of epistemic rationality, a belief that P is rational only if the agent's total evidence sufficiently supports P; a credence in P is rational only if proportional to P's degree of evidential support conditional on the agent's total evidence. But what is it for an evidence set to support P sufficiently, or to a particular degree? Can support relations be made sense of in absolute terms, or is evidential support somehow relative, say to a respective evidential standard/degree of skepticism? If the latter, is the agent's adherence to one standard as opposed to another itself subject to norms of rationality, and if so, are they epistemic in turn or of a practical nature? A parallel line of questions centers around the following ones: Within the purview of epistemic rationality, are belief and credence subject to any norms beyond purely evidential ones, say norms devaluating performative self-refutation or other ways of being incoherent? If not, are there cases in which perfect compliance with the evidential norms can lead the agent into incoherence? To what extent, if any, is self-awareness necessary for the epistemic rationality of belief/credence?
• Ontology: Our praxis of ascribing mental states features both a binary and a graded use of 'believes', with at least the latter tolerating paraphrase in terms of `[adv-ly] sure/certain/convinced'. Reserving 'belief' for the attitude ascribed on the binary use and relabelling the one ascribed on the graded use 'credence', are we dealing with two distinct types of mental state here, or just one state designated by two idioms, one binary, the other graded? Assuming the former, is one of the two states somehow reducible to the other (Unity View, Threshold View, Content View) or are they mutually irreducible (Dualism)? Working hypothesis: Ultimately, none of these questions are decidable without some degree of conceptual engineering. The aim is to motivate and defend a particular explication of 'belief' and 'credence' designed to strike a satisfactory balance between phenomenological plausibility and parsimony of conceptual primitives.
• Phenomenology: From the agent's viewpoint, believing that P is indistinguishable from it's being the case that P. In this sense, belief is transparent. If one believes that snow is white, the world appears to one exactly as if snow was white. Beyond that, being in the mental state of believing that snow is white has no further characteristic noticeable to the agent. If that much is correct about the phenomenology of belief, how does the latter compare to that of credence? In having a respective credence that snow is white, is there anything analogous to doxastic transparency? One approach would be to argue that, just as believing that P is transparent towards proposition P, a credence of degree r in P is transparent towards the proposition it's probable to degree r that P. A drawback of the idea is that it makes the phenomenology of credence entirely dependent on the agent's conceptual repertoire. An alternative approach would be to locate the respective degree not in the content of the appearance but somehow in its quality. Working hypothesis: Ultimately, both approaches are untenable. While having a given credence is typically unnoticeable, credence isn't transparent; with the notable exception of credence 1.

Areas of Competence and Interest

• Epistemology. Epistemic entitlement; degree of evidential support; default entitlement
• Propositional Content. Individuation and conceptualization of content; coarse-grained vs. fine-grained accounts; content vs. implicature; modeling content
• Philosophical Puzzles. Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability; Russell's Riddle of Nonbeing; Makinson’s Preface Paradox; Kripke’s Dogmatism Paradox; Wright’s Skepticism Paradox
• Meta-Ontology. The ontological commitments of simple predication, first- and second-order quantification; nominalization, de-nominalization, and their effect on ontological commitment
• Truth. Realism, Antirealism, Deflationism
• History of Analytic Philosophy. Frege, Russell, Quine, Prior, Kripke
• Singular Existentials. Their epistemology, semantics, pragmatics, and metaphysics
• Conceivability. Notions of conceivability and their inter-relations: believability, imaginability, thinkability; conceivability vs. metaphysical possibility; conceivability and its relation to experience and apriority
• Philosophy of Logic. Conceptions of logical validity
• Meta-Semantics. The causal theory of reference; philosophical applications of two-dimensional model theory

Papers

• "A Rational Agent With Our Evidence". Erkenntnis (fc). Accepted Nov 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00653-4
• "Context-Sensitivity and the Preface Paradox for Credence". Synthese (2021). Accepted Mar 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03115-6
• "Existence and Believability". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming). Accepted Jan 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12392
• "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability". Philosophical Studies 177: 3885-3902 (2020). Accepted Jan 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01413-2
• "Credence as Doxastic Tendency''. Synthese 197(10): 4495-4518 (2020). Accepted Sep 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01938-4

 

Reviews

• "BOB HALE Necessary Beings – An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them. Oxford University Press, 2013. x + 298 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐966957‐8 [Book Review]''. Theoria 80(3): 277-282.

 

Talks

• "Is the Fallibilism Debate a Case of Pseudo-Disagreement?", delivered at the Joint Colloquium of the Department of Philosophy/Prof. Holger Sturm et al., Universität Saarbrücken (May 21, 2025).
• "A Transparency Argument Against Fallibilism", delivered at the Frankfurt-Mannheim Colloquium in Theoretical Philosophy/Prof. Alexandra Zinke & Prof. Wolfgang Freitag (June 14, 2024).
• "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science/Prof. Kai Wehmeier, University of California, Irvine (Jun 1, 2019).
• "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the Work in Progress Seminar/Prof. Stephen Yablo et al., Department of Philosophy, MIT (May 16, 2019).
• "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the General Meeting of the DFG research group What If/Prof. Thomas Müller et al., University of Konstanz (May 4, 2018).
• "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the Logics for Imagination workshop/Prof. Heinrich Wansing et al., Ruhr University Bochum (Mar 14, 2018).
• "Credence as Doxastic Tendency", delivered at the Colloquium in Theoretical Philosophy/Prof. Wolfgang Barz, Goethe University Frankfurt (Dec 18, 2017).
• "Existence and Believability", delivered at the Joint Colloquium of the Department of Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt (Aug 06, 2016).
• "Three Takes On Ontological Commitment", delivered at the Colloquium on the Foundations of Logical Consequence/Prof. Stephen Read, Arché, University of St Andrews (Jun 4, 2012).
• "Two Deflationist Conceptions of Truth And Their Problems", delivered at the Colloquium in Logic/Prof. Volker Halbach, University of Oxford (Feb 8, 2012).

 

Teaching

• Introduction to Logic (Winter 2025/26)
• Modal Logic II (Summer 2025)
• Modal Logic I (Summer 2025)
• Decision Theory (Summer 2025)
• Introduction to Logic (Winter 2024/25)
• Decision Theory (Summer 2024)
• Existence and Reference (Winter 2023/24)
• Introduction to Logic (Winter 2022/23)
• Foundations of Bayesian Epistemology (Summer 2022)
• Decision Theory (Summer 2022)
• Evidence and Epistemic Rationality (Winter 2021/22)
• Philosophy of Evidence (Summer 2021)
• Decision Theory (Summer 2021)
• Evidence and Context (Winter 2020/21)
• Decision Theory (Summer 2018)
• Epistemic Paradoxes, Advanced (Winter 2017/18)
• Epistemic Paradoxes, Introduction (Winter 2017/18)
• Belief and Probability (Summer 2017)
• Philosophy of Propositional Content, Advanced (Summer 2017)
• Philosophy of Propositional Content, Introduction (Summer 2017)
• Decision Theory and Game Theory (Winter 2016/17)
• The Ethics of Belief (Summer 2016)
• A priori Justification (Winter 2015/16)
• Analytic Philosophy of Language (Summer 2013)
• Fiction, Narration, Medium - Current Debates in the Analytic Philosophy of Art (Summer 2013)
• Conceivability and Possibility (Winter 2012/13)
• Ontological Commitment (Winter 2012/13)
• Fitch's Paradox of Knowability (Summer 2011)

 

CV

2025/Apr - 2026/Mar 2020/Sep - 2025/Mar 2019/Oct - 2020/Aug 2018/Jul - 2019/Jul 2010 - 2015 2012/Jan-Aug 2003 - 2010

Interim holder of the Chair for Theoretical Philosophy and Logic, Institute of Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt Assistant at the Chair for Theoretical Philosophy and Logic/Prof. André Fuhrmann, Institute of Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt DFG scholarship holder and post doc visiting fellow at the Eidyn Research Centre, Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh (coordination partner: Martin Smith) DFG scholarship holder and post doc visiting fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT (coordination partner: Stephen Yablo) PhD thesis on Conceivability, Existence, and Logic (Supervisors: André Fuhrmann, Stephen Read) DAAD scholarship holder and visiting student at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology, St Andrews (Supervisor: Stephen Read) and at the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford (Supervisor: Volker Halbach) Study of Philosophy, History-and-Philosophy-of-Science, and Musicology, mostly at the Goethe University Frankfurt, one semester at the Free University of Berlin and one at the University of Marburg. Magister Thesis on Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology and Semantics (Supervisors: André Fuhrmann, Jasper Liptow)