Read the recent Scientific American article about my work on Newton’s First Law. Alternatively, you can watch this cool video or read my short piece for the Institute of Art and Ideas (journal article, international press coverage). 🍎
Preprints / Free access
Review of Reason and Inquiry, Mind, fc. (journal).
Million Dollar Questions (with Richard Bradley), Social Choice and Welfare, fc.
Questions in Action, winner of the Isaac Levi Prize, J. Phil., 2022.
Forced Changes Only: A New Take on the Law of Inertia, profiled in Scientific American, Phil. of Science, 2023.
Minimal Rationality and the Web of Questions, Unstructured Content, OUP, fc.
Øystein vs Archimedes, Erkenntnis, 2023 (journal).
Chance and the Continuum Hypothesis, PPR, 2021.
Loose Talk, Scale Presuppositions and QUD. 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium, 2019.
Conversational Exculpature, Phil. Review, 2018.
About Daniel Hoek CV E-mail
I am a philosophy professor at Virginia Tech, writing about topics like loose talk, questions, choices, probability and infinity. Before coming to Tech, I was the Louis Skolnick postdoc in philosophy at Princeton, and did my PhD at NYU under Cian Dorr. I am also a regular visitor of the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris.
According to my theory of conversational exculpature, information can be pragmatically subtracted from what we literally say. This can account for a range of linguistic phenomena, including loose talk and some metaphors (non-technical explanation). My other big research project is about inquisitive decision theory, an account of belief-guided action that emphasises the centrality of questions in decision-making (non-technical explanation). I’ve also written an influential article about Newton’s Law of Inertia, and defended a surprising argument against the continuum hypothesis.
Lately, I have also been busy rethinking the philosophy proseminar as a setting for graduate students to develop their philosophical skills in a structured and self-conscious way. I’m part of VTLx, a community of faculty at VT whose work intersects with linguistics. With Sam Berstler, I organised the Revisiting the Common Ground workshop series at Princeton; I used to help organise the weekly New York Philosophy of Language Workshop. I like philosophy swag as a way of building community: with the help of local artist George Wills I put together the Hokie Philosophy t-shirt, and I also designed the NYU Philosophy t-shirt. When it’s rainy out or I can’t sleep, I enjoy trying my hand at translating Dutch children’s poetry into English.
In English-speaking contexts, I pronounce my last name the same way as Captain Hook’s, rhyming “Hoek” with “book” and “crook.” If you want to pronounce it the Dutch way, use a longer “oo” sound, so that “Dr. Hoek” becomes “Dr. Who” with a K appended at the end. (And if you pronounce it any other way, that’s also fine: I’m not particular about it.)