RUB » Department of Philosophy » Philosophy of Language and Cognition

Dr. Matthias Unterhuber

Postdoctoral Researcher/Lecturer
Department of Philosophy
Ruhr University Bochum
Universitätsstraße 150
Room GA 04/44
44870 Bochum, Germany
Phone: +49-(0)234-32-27159
Email: matthias.unterhuber{at}rub.de

Office Hours: Thursdays, 11.30 (with appointment, during semesters)


I am postdoctoral researcher/lecturer at the chair of Philosophy of Language and Cognition, Department of Philosophy II. My eduction includes a combined bachelor/master’s degree in Philosophy (four-year program) and a PhD in Philosophy in addition to a combined bachelor/master’s degree in Psychology (five-year program).
I have worked on

  • the logic and philosophy of conditionals as well as
  • ceteris paribus laws and
  • Bayesianism.

As a member of the project “The Interaction of Bayesian Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics in Linguistic Interpretation: Using Event-Related Potentials to Investigate Hearers’ Probabilistic Predictions” of the Framework Program XPrag by the German Research Foundation (DFG), I am currently focusing on

  • conducting EEG studies of pragmatic influence on sentence meaning in our EEG lab and
  • developing of Bayesian pragmatics account of these findings (with Prof. Dr. Markus Werning).

Please find the CV and the full publication list here.

Areas of Specialization

(1) Logic and Philosophy of Language, (2) Neuroscience/Philosophy of Psychology, and (3) Philosophy of Science

Areas of Competence

(1) Metaphysics and (2) History of Analytic Philosophy


Selected Publications:

  • Werning, M., Unterhuber, M., & Wiedemann, G. (in press). Bayesian Pragmatics Provides the Best Quantitative Model of Context Effects on Word Meaning in EEG and Cloze Data. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
    Wansing, H. and Unterhuber, M. (in press). Connexive Conditional Logic. Part I. Logic and Logical Philosophy.
  • Prochownik, K. & Unterhuber, M. (2018). Does the Blame Blocking Effect for Assignments of Punishment Generalize to Legal Experts? In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, and T. T. Rodgers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci, pp. 2285–2290). Austin, Texas: Cognitive Science Society.Unterhuber, M. (2017). (Download Published Version here).
  • Unterhuber, M. (2017). Notwendigkeit und mögliche Welten [Necessity and Possible Worlds], in M. Schrenk (Ed.), Handbuch Metaphysik [Handbook Metaphysics] (pp. 381–387). Metzler: Stuttgart. (Download Published Version here).
  • Unterhuber, M. (2016). Beyond System P – Hilbert-Style Convergence Results for Conditional Logics with a Connexive Twist, IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Application, 3, 377–412. (Open Access, Download Published Version here).
  • Unterhuber, M. (2014). Do Ceteris Paribus Laws Exist? A Regularity-Based Best System Analysis. Erkenntnis, 79, 1833-1847.(Download Published Version here).
  • Unterhuber, M. & Schurz, G. (2014). Completeness and Correspondence in Chellas-Segerberg Semantics. Studia Logica, 102, 891–911. (Download Published Version here).
  • Unterhuber, M. (2013). Possible Worlds Semantics for Indicative and Counterfactual Conditionals? A Formal-Philosophical Inquiry into Chellas-Segerberg Semantics. Frankfurt: DeGruyter. (Download Published Version here).
  • Unterhuber, M. & Schurz, G. (2013). The New Tweety Puzzle. Arguments against Monistic Bayesian 
Approaches in Epistemology and Cognitive Science. Synthese, 190, 1407–1435. (Download Published Version here).