Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Epistemology — knowledge, belief and evidence — justification and rational credence, the value of knowledge, testimony, trust and expertise, and social and inductive-risk questions about evidence (group: philosophy).
103 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-014 v3 | Reckless disregard for the truth coming from cops, doctors, and scientists: A rant. | Gelman (2025), https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/24/reckless-disregard-for-the-truth-coming-from-cops-doctors-and-scientists-a-rant/. Gelman argues that scientists (a 3-day study titled “long-term”; the power-pose abstract’s “instantly become more powerful”), a paid medical expert (Ludmerer’s 2002 “no opinion” on smoking and lung cancer) and DHS spokespeople (Lander “assaulting”, Padilla “lunging”, ICE’s unsourced “413 percent” assaults) share one pattern, which he calls “reckless disregard for the truth”. In his account it strengthens a weak case, is carried by journals, courts and media, is accepted as a term of art and goes unpunished. It is negative-sum, and bystanders who tolerate it sustain it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-019); worth reading as a short, clearly argued statement of an incentive account of socially accepted falsehood, with a relevant section on overclaiming in paper titles and abstracts. Its evidence is a handful of anecdotes, and its police examples rest on press accounts that this reading did not check. |
| LIT-104 v4 | Philosophy of Mathematics from Descartes to Kant | Carson (2026), DOI-10.1017/9781108982405. The early-modern debate over whether metaphysics can be demonstrated with geometric certainty turned on how Euclidean demonstration secures certainty, and the Element traces the answers from Descartes through Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, Lambert and Mendelssohn to Kant. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the Element is not open access (Cambridge Core shows “Get access” with purchase temporarily unavailable; Crossref gives only the standard Cambridge licence). Print publication 2026-08-31. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-118 v2 | A Pragmatist Theory of Evidence | Reiss (2015), DOI-10.1086/681643. Reiss proposes an “eliminativist hypothetico-contextualist” (EHC) theory of evidence for type-level causal claims in biomedical and social science. Support comes in two kinds: direct support (patterns we are “entitled to expect” if h is true) and indirect support (patterns incompatible with relevant alternatives). Warrant is graded by which alternatives have been eliminated, on four grades from “weak warrant” to “proof”. Where to stop probing is set by context, meaning background knowledge, a default entitlement to other scientists’ claims, and cost-benefit values. On this account there is no gold standard: RCTs are good only because they eliminate many alternatives at once. The 1950s smoking–lung cancer case illustrates the theory; it does not test it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-197); worth reading as the clearest short statement of an eliminativist, anti-hierarchy account of evidence that works for observational science, and of how values and trust set stopping rules. Its grades of warrant and pragmatic guidelines are proposals illustrated on one historical case, not validated criteria. |
| LIT-119 v2 | Conspiracy Theories and Public Trust | Keeley (2023), DOI-10.5040/9781978734494.ch-011. Public Trust Skepticism — discounting conspiracy theories because they erode trust in institutions — gets things backwards: for an important class of theories it is the sweeping distrust they presuppose that undermines their own credibility, by leading to “epistemic nihilism”. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no open copy: the chapter is in a closed-access Lexington Books volume, PhilPapers refused the request, and the author lists it on his CV without posting it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-129 v3 | Epistemic injustice in the clinical care of practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions | Porcher & Santaella (2026), DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2623889. When clinicians override a patient’s religious interpretation of her experience in domains where medicine has no interpretive authority (“interpretive exclusivism”), they commit an epistemic injustice — racialised in the Brazilian case — that the authors say only epistemic humility remedies. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis refused the request, and no preprint or repository copy was found (the UFRGS repository did not respond). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-131 v2 | A Model of Understanding in Deep Learning Systems | Freeborn (2026), ARXIV-2604.04171. Freeborn defines “systematic understanding” as four conditions: an internal model, non-memorizing tracking of a property, bridge principles fixed in the deployed pipeline, and derivation by the agent itself. Four small demonstrations (the genus of a torus, Mars’s eccentricity e≈0.096 with Kepler’s form built in, grokked modular addition mod 113, and Othello-GPT from Li et al.) show it can be met. The Fractured Understanding Hypothesis (§7.5), which the paper argues for but does not test, says the understanding deep networks reach is characteristically symbolically misaligned, non-reductive, locally fractured, proxy-dependent and representationally fragmented. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-123); worth reading as a careful, explicitly “thin” explication that turns the proxy disputes (memorization vs generalization, interpolation vs extrapolation) into testable conditions. The FUH is a programmatic hypothesis, not a finding, and two of the four worked examples do not meet the paper’s own bridge-principle conditions (see Limitations). |
| LIT-139 v2 | Inductive Risk and Values in Science | Douglas (2000), DOI-10.1086/392855. Hempel’s “inductive risk” (the chance of wrongly accepting or rejecting a hypothesis) arises at three internal stages of science: choosing a methodology such as a significance level, characterising data, and interpreting results. Wherever the non-epistemic consequences of error can be foreseen, weighing them requires non-epistemic values. Douglas shows this on dioxin cancer studies. Three pathologist panels (1978, 1980, 1990) scored the same Kociba rat-liver slides differently (e.g. 34/50, 33/47, 18/50 tumours at 100 ng/kg/day). Choosing between threshold and no-threshold readings of the same data has meant regulatory limits about 100× apart. Values enter only indirectly, through the consequences of error, never as evidence that a claim is true. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-145); worth reading as the canonical, compact statement of the modern inductive-risk argument. It is carefully scoped, with an explicit direct/indirect distinction and exemptions for negligible uncertainty and consequence-free research, and it is well illustrated. Its normative premise, that scientists bear moral responsibility for foreseeable consequences of error, is explicitly left unargued (§2, p. 563). |
| LIT-155 v2 | Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers | Prinzing & Vazquez (2025), DOI-10.1017/apa.2025.10007. In HERI/CIRP freshman–senior survey data (N = 649,511 students at 804 US institutions, 4,843 philosophy majors), one SD more SAT Verbal raises the odds of majoring in philosophy by 57% (OR 1.57), and freshman Habits of Mind by 34%. After adjusting for SAT or freshman scores, philosophy majors still score higher than non-majors on GRE Verbal (+33 points, SMD 0.48), LSAT (+2, SMD 0.35), Habits of Mind (SMD .24) and Pluralistic Orientation (SMD .21), with no difference on GRE Quantitative. On point estimates they rank first of 57 or 62 majors on GRE Verbal, LSAT and Habits of Mind. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-167); worth reading as the largest baseline-adjusted observational study of what studying philosophy does, and it is candid about its design; but its causal claim rests on covariate adjustment with self-reported scores, and a reader should take “philosophy causes better thinking” as well supported for verbal-test gains and weakly supported beyond that. |
| LIT-158 v2 | Status Distrust of Scientific Experts | Desmond (2022), DOI-10.1080/02691728.2022.2104758. Desmond gives a “how-possibly” argument, not a demonstration, that stubborn distrust of scientific experts can be valid reasoning. A low-status truster who is vulnerable in collective decision-making (Premise 1) and has reason to think the prevailing “service-for-prestige” ethos leaves out their core interests (Premise 2) has reason to distrust a high-prestige expert because of that prestige (§6, p. 16–17). The paper explicitly declines to say when those premises are true. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-113); worth reading as a compact, clearly structured rationalising account of distrust in experts that connects the trust literature (Baier, Hawley) with the sociology of professions and prestige; its §6 argument scheme is the citable part, but it shows only validity, not soundness. |
| LIT-161 v2 | Why Replication Is Overrated | Feest (2019), DOI-10.1086/705451. Every experiment and every replication rests on individuation judgments about what is being manipulated and measured (“conceptual scope”). So direct replication can at most help rule out random error, and “perhaps” establish that some effect exists but not which effect, while conceptual replication begs the question by presupposing that two operationalisations individuate the same effect. What productive research actually does, as in the Mozart-effect debate, is probe systematic errors, which is better called exploration than replication. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-196); worth reading as a short, clearly argued statement of why replication cannot settle “what effect?” questions, built on one worked case (the Mozart effect). It is suggestive for construct-validity arguments about benchmarks, but its strongest lines are asserted rather than argued. |
| LIT-162 v2 | Is Unsupervised Clustering Somehow Truer? | Søgaard (2024), DOI-10.1007/s11023-024-09699-5. Søgaard rebuts two arguments that unsupervised clustering is epistemically superior to supervised classification. The No-Bias Argument fails because clustering is also sensitive to sample bias (a toy example moves the boundary from x = 7 to x = 6), and it is more sensitive to representation bias. The Simplicity-Truth Argument fails because clustering is also function estimation and overfits in the same way (Hansen & Larsen 1996). From the fact that every clustering hypothesis is in a supervised classifier’s hypothesis class, he concludes that supervised classification is “at least as justified”, but that positive step is under-argued. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-108); worth reading as a short corrective to Rochefort-Maranda & Liu’s claim that unsupervised clustering cannot overfit and to “no-bias” readings of Watson. Its positive thesis rests on a thin hypothesis-class reduction and has several technical slips, so it should be read critically rather than cited for that thesis. |
| LIT-163 v2 | Philosophy of Probability: Foundations, Epistemology, and Computation | Wenmackers (2011), https://philpapers.org/rec/WENPOP. A fair lottery on ℕ gets a uniform, regular probability on all of 𝒫(ℕ) by normalising Benci–Di Nasso numerosities, P_num(A) = num(A)/α. This is hyperrational-valued, determined only up to the choice of free ultrafilter, and “hypercountably” (really hyperfinitely) additive rather than countably additive, with st∘P_num = generalised asymptotic density (§2.5–2.6). The same “rounding-error” diagnosis gives Stratified Belief, a contextual Lockean thesis on which conjunction holds for a standard number of beliefs (Ch. 3). A separate agent-based model (Ch. 5) finds that one round of bounded-confidence averaging sends an agent to the inconsistent theory with probability at most 1.81 % in the cases computed (M = 2, 3 atomic sentences). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-139); worth reading for the Ch. 1 survey of interpretations of probability and the Ch. 4 synthesis, which appear only here; for the rest, each chapter has a later journal version that is the better citation, none of them held on this record: Wenmackers & Horsten, “Fair infinite lotteries”, Synthese 190 (2013) 37–61 (Ch. 2); Wenmackers, “Ultralarge lotteries”, J. Applied Logic 11 (2013) 452–467 (Ch. 3); Wenmackers, Vanpoucke & Douven, “Probability of inconsistencies in theory revision”, Eur. Phys. J. B 85 (2012) 44 (Ch. 5); and Benci, Horsten & Wenmackers, “Non-Archimedean probability”, Milan J. Math. 81 (2013) 121–151 (the Ch. 6 outlook). |
| LIT-165 v3 | Coherence-based measures of explanatory power | Hartmann & Trpin (2026), DOI-10.1007/s11098-026-02517-x. If explanatory power is measured contrastively over sets of explanantia, as E_CohOG+(E; H) = (Coh(H∪{E}) − Coh(H∪{¬E})) / (Coh(H∪{E}) + Coh(H∪{¬E})) with Olsson–Glass overlap normalised by its independence value (CohOG+), then the measure provably satisfies Roche & Sober’s Two Likelihood Inequalities for single hypotheses (Prop. 2) and violates the One Likelihood Inequality (OLI). Two numerical examples show that adding a distal cause (for P(H1) < .7) or a negatively interacting cause (for P(H1) = P(H2) < .75) can raise explanatory power. Both are existence demonstrations, not general theorems. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-168); worth reading as a current, compact reply to Roche & Sober (2023) and Lange (2022) with checkable formulas, though its escape is representational (sets instead of conjunctions) and its positive case rests on two worked examples rather than a characterisation. |
| LIT-171 v3 | The epistemology of accurate credences | Pettigrew (2025), https://philpapers.org/rec/PETTEO-44. Accuracy-first epistemology — scoring credences by their closeness to the truth (following Joyce 1999) — gives a purely epistemic foundation for Probabilism, Conditionalization and the Principal Principle, and extends to non-ideal agents, the value of inquiry, and collective credences. | Unfetched — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and failed on access, not availability: the paper is open on PhilArchive, which the author’s homepages link to, but PhilArchive refused automated requests and no other host was found. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or PhilArchive can be reached. Free copy: philarchive.org/rec/PETTEO-44 (PhilArchive). |
| LIT-175 v3 | Evidence in Medicine and Evidence-Based Medicine | Worrall (2007), DOI-10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00106.x. Worrall argues that the EBM evidence hierarchy has no sound general rationale for giving randomisation extra epistemic weight, even though it lets high-quality RCTs “trump any number of observational studies”. He examines five standard arguments. Four fail: (a) Fisher’s significance-test logic, (b) control of unknown confounders, (d) that observational studies “exaggerate” effects, and (e) probabilistic causality. The fifth, (c) selection bias, is a “cast-iron argument”, but it supports only taking allocation out of the clinicians’ hands, and randomisation is one way to do that. What matters is balance on plausible confounders, a placebo or active control and blinding. Whether balance comes from randomising or from matching “seems epistemically unimportant”, and historically controlled trials can give strong evidence for large effects. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-126); worth reading as the fullest single statement of the philosophical case against the special epistemic standing of randomisation. It is clearly argued and well documented, and it explicitly concedes the selection-bias argument. It is a partisan position piece, and its defenders-of-randomisation opponents (Pocock, Elbourne, Papineau) are summarised, not engaged at length. |
| LIT-181 v3 | Knowledge is not always more valuable than mere true belief | Pettigrew (2025), https://philpapers.org/rec/PETKIN-2. Knowledge is not always more valuable than mere true belief — we do not always want it for those we care about even when it costs nothing — and veritism, on which truth is the only fundamental epistemic value, predicts exactly when it is and is not. | Unfetched — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and failed on access, not availability: the paper is open on PhilArchive, which the author’s homepage (now richardpettigrew.github.io) links to, but PhilArchive refused automated requests and no other host was found. A Wayback Machine capture of the PDF (2026-04-08) exists but could not be fetched from here. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or PhilArchive can be reached. Free copy: philpapers.org/rec/PETKIN-2 (the PhilArchive PDF; a Wayback capture of 2026-04-08 also exists). |
| LIT-186 v3 | What is purely epistemic normativity, and why? A study in Wolfian epistemology | Pettigrew (2025), https://philpapers.org/rec/PETWIP. What we ought to believe “epistemically speaking” is fixed by the norms whose broad adherence across an epistemic community would give the best epistemic results — a transposition of Susan Wolf’s rule consequentialism — which explains why we separate epistemic from all-things-considered oughts. | Unfetched — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and failed on access, not availability: the paper is open on PhilArchive, which the author’s homepage (now richardpettigrew.github.io) links to, but PhilArchive refused automated requests and no other host was found. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied or PhilArchive can be reached. Free copy: philpapers.org/rec/PETWIP (the PhilArchive PDF). |
| LIT-187 v3 | On the Philosophy of Unsupervised Learning | Watson (2023), DOI-10.1007/s13347-023-00635-6. Watson argues that clustering, abstraction and generative modelling each come with an epistemic thesis (EC, EA, EG — we identify natural kinds, essential properties and unrealized possibilities via such algorithms or something like them), which he accepts. Each also comes with an ontological thesis (OC, OA, OG — these just are what the algorithms ought to find under ideal conditions), which he rejects because nothing guarantees they are effectively computable. He adds a pragmatic, context-relative view of natural kinds, and closes with the claim that unsupervised outputs are neither “objective” nor vacuous. They should be validated by error-statistical means: resampling stability, generalization of clusters to held-out data, out-of-sample likelihood, and train-on-synthetic scores. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-172); worth reading as the most systematic philosophical treatment of unsupervised learning as a family, and as the target of Søgaard’s reply. Its headline claims (“perhaps the most fundamental branch of all AI”) are argued more thinly than its E/O structure. |
| LIT-189 v2 | Philosophy of Open Science | Leonelli (2023), DOI-10.1017/9781009416368. Leonelli argues that mainstream, institutional Open Science treats openness as the unlimited, digital sharing of research objects, a transparency-first ordering running transparency → quality (reproducibility) → inclusion. This rests on an object-oriented, “resourcist” epistemology of science. Four implementation cases (GISAID COVID data, open-source software stigma, crop-data linkage, the reproducibility “crisis”) show it can narrow epistemic diversity and entrench epistemic injustice, which lowers reliability. She proposes instead “openness as judicious connection”, grounded in a process-oriented view of research as the cultivation of “active knowledge”. Her Figure 2 inverts the ordering to start from inclusion, and sharing becomes “neither a necessary starting point nor a sufficient condition” for reliable OS (p. 8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-098); worth reading as a clear, openly normative philosophical reframing of Open Science by someone who took part in the policy process, and as a compact bridge between social epistemology (epistemic injustice, pluralism) and data practice. Its evidence is four illustrative cases and the author’s own qualitative research, not systematic data, and “judicious” remains a demand for deliberation rather than a criterion. |
| LIT-191 v3 | AI and Consciousness | Schwitzgebel (2025), ARXIV-2510.09858. A book-length sceptical argument that neither introspection, conceptual analysis nor any current theory (GWT, HOT, IIT, local recurrence, unlimited associative learning, biological views) can tell us whether near-future AI is conscious. The best sceptical argument, Mimicry, only undercuts the inference from humanlike text to consciousness and does not show absence. On the Leapfrog Hypothesis the first disputably conscious AIs will be person-like, and the question will then be settled socially rather than scientifically (the “Social Semi-Solution”). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-104); worth reading as the most complete current map of the AI-consciousness debate, and as the source of the Mimicry Argument, the Problem of Minimal Instantiation and the Leapfrog Hypothesis. Its own positive contributions are informal arguments and predictions, not results. |
| LIT-203 v2 | Conspiracy theorists are not the problem; Conspiracy liars are | Keeley (2024), DOI-10.1080/0020174X.2024.2375771. Many conspiracy theories start not from errant data but from lies and fabricated facts, so the pernicious cases are bad-faith pseudo-explanations — and science has analogous value-driven false starting points. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found no reachable copy: Taylor & Francis, PhilPapers and ResearchGate refused the request, and the author lists the paper on his CV without posting it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-213 v2 | Rigour versus the need for evidential diversity | Cartwright (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-021-03368-1. Cartwright offers a characterisation of “rigour”: a method is rigorous when a valid argument shows its results are evidence for the conclusion and its premises are well established or secured by design. On that definition even well-run RCTs often fail to rigorously establish a study-population ATE, because orthogonality holds only at assignment and the potential-outcomes premise carries heavy metaphysics, and they seldom answer singular questions. Her alternative is a causal-process-tracing theory of change (pToC) with five elements (steps, causal principles, support factors, derailers, safeguards). It catalogues the diverse and mostly non-rigorous evidence that singular causal predictions need. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-161); worth reading as a compact, citable statement of the “rigour is overvalued, evidence the causal process” position. The pToC template is concrete, but the paper openly offers no method for weighing the evidence it catalogues. |
| LIT-216 v2 | The Weirdness of the World | Schwitzgebel (2024), DOI-10.1515/9780691239309. The book’s thesis is that every viable theory of how consciousness fits into the cosmos, and of the cosmos’s basic structure, is both “bizarre” (contrary to common sense) and “dubious” (not rationally compelling). So “something that seems almost too crazy to believe must be true” (p. 4), and credence should be spread across the bizarre options. Examples of those options are that the United States is conscious (if materialism is true), that we are sims or Boltzmann brains (a 0.1–1% credence), that space is transcendentally ideal, that almost every act causes almost every future event, and that there is no fact about snail consciousness. Its only positive empirical results are three self-experiments against solipsism (for example, 17 of 19 decisive chess games lost, p < .001). Everything else is informal argument. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-188); Worth reading as the one place Schwitzgebel’s separately published arguments are joined into a single case: US consciousness, crazyism, 1% skepticism, Kant meets cyberpunk, the garden snail, and the Full Rights Dilemma for AI. Chapter 3, the Universal Bizarreness and Dubiety argument, is the load-bearing contribution. Its individual chapters are informal arguments, and the manuscript that can be reached is not the published text. The published book reorders the chapters, moves the objections appendix to the end and updates the AI chapter. |
| LIT-244 v2 | Natural Kinds (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | Bird & Tobin (2008; rev. 2022), SEP. Whether scientific kinds are natural breaks into four questions (are the classifications natural, are they into kinds, what the kinds are, and do they have essences). Shared properties, inductive support and a role in laws are each necessary but not sufficient for kindhood. The entry maps positions from conventionalism to essentialist strong realism, reports pluralist, cluster, epistemology-first and eliminativist turns, and doubts that Kripke–Putnam semantics delivers more than partial essences. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-769) in full; worth reading as the map of the natural-kinds debate: four metaphysical questions, six candidate criteria of which shared properties, inductive support and a role in laws are each necessary but not sufficient, cluster, pluralist and epistemology-first accounts, Hacking’s interactive kinds, and the Kripke–Putnam semantics with the doubts about getting essences from it. Read it knowing that it is a survey that argues for little, that the 2022 revision was read rather than the Spring 2024 archive the owner cites, and that it never mentions information or compression, so the link to sufficient statistics under which it was filed is the owner’s. |
| LIT-315 v2 | Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds? | Worrall (1989), DOI-10.1111/j.1746-8361.1989.tb00933.x. Worrall argues that the only position that honours both the no-miracles argument and the historical fact of radical theoretical change is Poincaré’s “structural or syntactic realism”. What survives theory change and explains predictive success is mathematical structure: equations carried over unchanged (Fresnel’s reflection/refraction amplitude ratios, reinterpreted as electric-vector amplitudes in Maxwell’s theory) or recovered as limiting cases under the correspondence principle (Newton from Einstein). The underlying ontology (elastic ether versus electromagnetic field) is not what survives. The support is one worked case and a general appeal to the correspondence principle. There are no formal definitions, and the paper says itself that “much clarificatory work needs to be done”, above all on what it is for one theory’s structure to approximate another’s (p. 121). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-297); worth reading as the short, clearly argued source that revived epistemic structural realism and supplies its canonical Fresnel→Maxwell case. It argues informally from one example, leaves “structure” and “structural approximation” undefined, and is epistemic, not ontic. For the ontic position, and for any invariance-based reading of “structure”, it must be read with Ladyman 1998 and after. |
| LIT-394 | Computing Machinery and Intelligence | Turing (1950), Mind 59(236):433–460. “Can machines think?” is replaced by whether a digital computer can play the imitation game so that an interrogator, questioning by teleprinter, identifies it no more reliably than he tells a man from a woman. Universality reduces the question to one computer suitably programmed. Turing predicts that by about 2000 a machine with 10^9 bits of storage will leave an average interrogator no more than a 70 per cent chance of a right identification after five minutes. He answers nine objections, the argument from consciousness by its collapse into solipsism, and proposes reaching the goal by educating a child-machine. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-355); worth reading as the source of the imitation game and as the first catalogue of objections to machine thought, nine of them, each still argued. Read it for what it actually proposes: not a definition of thinking but the replacement of an ill-posed question by a test, a prediction about 2000 (70 per cent right identification after five minutes, at 10^9 bits), and a programme for reaching it by educating a child-machine. Its reply to the argument from consciousness is an other-minds argument, not a theory of consciousness, and Turing says outright that he does not think there is “no mystery about consciousness”. |
| LIT-398 v2 | True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works | Dennett (1981; revised 1987, read in Mind Design II, 1997). Belief is “a perfectly objective phenomenon” that can be discerned only by one who adopts the intentional strategy. To be a true believer is to be a system “whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable” by it. The choice of stance is free, but its success is objective: Laplacean Martians who skipped it would miss real patterns. Thermostat and person differ only by degree. Why the strategy works is answered easily by evolution, and not yet at all by mechanism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-353), in the revised text reprinted in Mind Design II (1997), not the 1981 printing; worth reading as Dennett’s statement that belief is objective although only visible through a strategy: anything whose behaviour is “reliably and voluminously predictable” by the intentional strategy is a believer “in the fullest sense of the word”. It turns the 1971 paper’s observer-relativity (LIT-440) into “the facts about the success or failure of the stance … are perfectly objective”, introduces the Martian thought experiment and the intentional “real patterns” later worked out in LIT-220, and runs the thermostat-to-person continuum (“no magic moment”). Its criterion admits any system on which the strategy pays, groups included, but the essay never applies it to a group. |
| LIT-411 | Could a Large Language Model be Conscious? | Chalmers (2023), arXiv:2303.07103; Boston Review, 9 August 2023; from a NeurIPS 2022 invited talk. Asks for a feature X that LLMs have (or lack) and that indicates consciousness (or its absence). Self-report, seeming-conscious, conversation and general intelligence give at most weak evidence for it. Biology, senses and embodiment, world and self models, recurrent processing, a global workspace and unified agency are the evidence against. All but biology are temporary. On mainstream assumptions: under 10% credence for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade. Twelve challenges are offered as roadmap or red flags. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-345), from arXiv v3 (the Boston Review text), with v1’s conclusions compared; worth reading as the clearest short statement of the case for and against consciousness in LLMs, and as the origin of the “theory-balanced” credence approach that Butlin et al. built on. Its method is a regimented request for a feature X, and its verdicts are credences offered “for illustrative purposes”: under 10% for current LLMs, 25% or more for conscious LLM+ systems within a decade, on “mainstream assumptions”. It does not break the deadlock THEORY-023 describes. It is an instance of it: mimicry undercuts self-report, the main obstacles are theory-derived, and biology is set aside rather than answered. |
| LIT-421 | Foreword | Chalmers (2008), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.002.0007. The co-author’s retrospective on the extended mind: his iPhone is “part of my mind already”. The one principled objection is that perception and action bound the mental. His reply is revisionist and contextualist: whether Otto’s belief counts as extended flips with explanatory purpose. No Otto-style twin case works for consciousness, so he tentatively keeps an internal conscious core. The thesis needs only a weak, parity-style functionalism and is compatible with dualism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-369); worth reading as the shortest statement of where Chalmers stands on the thesis he co-authored, ten years on. Three things in eight pages: the iPhone as a present-day Otto’s notebook; the perception-action boundary as the one principled objection, answered by explanatory revisionism and a “Necker cube” view on which whether Otto’s belief is extended depends on explanatory purpose; and a tentative internal “conscious core”, resting on the failure of any Otto-style twin case for consciousness. It is a foreword: every position is stated briefly and several are offered as “perhaps”. |
| LIT-425 | The Meta-Problem of Consciousness | Chalmers (2018), Journal of Consciousness Studies 25(9–10):6–61. The meta-problem is to explain, in terms that do not mention consciousness, why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem. It is an “easy” problem with an empirical programme. Of thirteen candidate mechanisms, the most promising is an introspective model that attributes primitive relations of awareness to primitive qualities, with a sense of acquaintance. A realist theory should explain how its basis of consciousness produces these judgments, which IIT and biological theories struggle to do. Debunking arguments for illusionism can be blocked, but a residual sense of coincidence remains. Only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, and it is false because people feel pain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-354); worth reading as the statement of the meta-problem, explaining in topic-neutral terms why we judge that consciousness poses a hard problem, and as a survey of thirteen candidate mechanisms. Cite it for four things: the meta-problem as an “easy” problem with a research programme; the meta-problem challenge to theories of consciousness, which tells against IIT and biological theories; the analysis of debunking and coincidence arguments for illusionism; and the argument that only strong illusionism dissolves the hard problem, with a Moorean rejection of strong illusionism. Its own preferred solution is offered as “closer to a fleshed-out explanandum” than an explanation. |
| LIT-430 v2 | The Intentional Stance | Dennett (1987), MIT Press. Per its publisher, the “first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality” Dennett had been developing for almost twenty years: we understand each other by adopting a stance, “a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality” of whatever we predict. Six chapters reprint papers of the 1980s, each followed by a new “Reflections” essay; the first and the last three chapters are new. Chapter 2 is True Believers (LIT-398). Unread: registered from the description and a catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library catalogue’s contents note, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The Internet Archive scans are lending-only (access-restricted, printdisabled), the MIT Press page and loc.gov were blocked, and the Tufts Digital Library holds earlier versions of several chapters as papers but not the book. Its chapter 2 is True Believers (LIT-398), read in full in its 1997 reprint, which is the revised book text. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-433 | Quining Qualia | Dennett (1988), in Marcel & Bisiach (eds.), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, OUP, pp. 42–77. Qualia as tradition has them are ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible, and fifteen intuition pumps argue that nothing has all four. Two neurosurgical routes to an apparent colour inversion, one changing qualia and one only memory-linked reactions, feel the same from the inside. So the subject cannot know his own qualia better than an outside tester can. What is real is practical ineffability and idiosyncrasy: we refer to information-rich public properties through our own detectors of them. Hence “there simply are no qualia at all”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-357); worth reading as the founding statement of qualia eliminativism and the source of the post-Cartesian side in the record’s consciousness readings. It argues by fifteen intuition pumps, not by proof, and says so. Its lasting results are two: the alternative-neurosurgery and Chase-and-Sanborn cases, which show that neither the subject nor the physiologist can separate a change in qualia from a change in reactions to them; and a positive account of practical ineffability and privacy as idiosyncratic, information-rich property detection. Its conclusion, “there simply are no qualia at all”, is a tactical choice of words by the author’s own endnote 2, not a stronger thesis than that. |
| LIT-440 | Intentional Systems | Dennett (1971), Journal of Philosophy 68(4):87–106. An Intentional system is one whose behaviour can be explained and predicted by ascribing beliefs and desires and assuming rationality, which is the Intentional stance beside the design and physical stances. Being one is relative to an observer’s strategy, and the choice of stance is pragmatic. The stance is “unmetaphysical”: it sets aside composition, consciousness and moral standing. As psychology it is vacuous, because it presupposes rationality. Any theory that gives content to a part takes out a “loan of intelligence”, repayable only by analysing away the part’s reader: “there a little man is concealed”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-350); worth reading as the first statement in print of the intentional stance and of the homunculus debt that Dennett later answers with “discharge”. Its definition makes being an Intentional system relative to an observer’s predictive strategy, and it says outright that the definition “does not say that Intentional systems really have beliefs and desires” (p. 91). True Believers (LIT-398) later withdraws exactly that relativity. Its lasting tool for this record is the “loan of intelligence” (p. 96): any theory that gives a part content owes an account of that part’s reader, and “wherever a theory relies on a formulation bearing the logical marks of Intentionality, there a little man is concealed”. The paper does not treat a group as an Intentional system. |
| LIT-451 | Of Personal Identity | Hume (1739), Treatise 1.4.6, with the Appendix (1740). There is no impression of a self, “constant and invariable”, so no idea of one: introspection finds only “some particular perception or other”, and the mind is “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”. The identity we ascribe to it is “fictitious”, like that of plants, ships and churches: an easy transition of the imagination along resemblance and causation, with memory discovering rather than producing it, so that hard cases are “grammatical” rather than philosophical. The Appendix retracts the account of the connecting principle: two principles he cannot reconcile or renounce leave the matter “too hard for my understanding”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-386), in the Merivale–Millican critical text on davidhume.org, with the Appendix’s second thoughts (App. 10–21); worth reading as the founding statement of the bundle view and the first published retraction of it. The section finds no impression of a self, calls the mind “a bundle or collection of different perceptions”, and explains our ascription of identity to it as a fiction of the imagination run on resemblance and causation, the same fiction that makes a repaired ship or a rebuilt church “the same”. The Appendix then confesses that it cannot explain what unites the perceptions and leaves the problem “too hard for my understanding”. The section’s case is introspective and associationist; its Appendix is the clearest statement of what any bundle view owes. |
| LIT-458 | Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness | Frankish (2016), Journal of Consciousness Studies 23(11–12):11–39, the target article of the issue later published as Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017). Names “illusionism”: phenomenal properties are not instantiated, and the task is the “illusion problem” of explaining why experiences seem to have them. Strong illusionism (no phenomenal properties at all, only “quasi-phenomenal” physical ones introspection misrepresents) is separated from weak illusionism (real phenomenal properties that merely seem ineffable, intrinsic, private), which it argues collapses into the strong form or into radical realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-384); worth reading as the founding statement of illusionism under that name, and the target article that Dennett’s “Illusionism as the Obvious Default Theory of Consciousness” (LIT-434) answers. It names the “illusion problem”, draws the strong/weak illusionism line with “quasi-phenomenal” properties, and argues from conservatism, anomalousness and the debunking argument that strong illusionism should be the research programme. It states a programme, not a theory: by its own account it “will not propose a detailed illusionist theory” (p. 1 of the eprint), and its positive arguments are abductive and openly so. |
| LIT-470 v2 | Foundations for a Social Ontology | Thomasson (2003), ProtoSociology 18–19:269–290. Per its abstract: the social world poses a metaphysical puzzle (how facts and objects created by human intentionality can be real) and an epistemological one (how such products can include objective facts for the social sciences to discover). Searle’s account in The Construction of Social Reality is too narrow to solve either; rules for constructing social reality that parallel rules for make-believe give a more comprehensive ontology, but talk of social reality is not pretence. Unread: filed from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s abstract; no lawful full text was reachable (the Philosophy Documentation Center sells it at $20, PhilPapers returned 403, and the Academia.edu copy sits behind a bot check), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. By its abstract it argues that Searle’s account of social facts is too narrow and that rules modelled on the rules of make-believe give a fuller social ontology; how, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-474 v2 | The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge | Berger & Luckmann (1966), Doubleday. A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. By its contents: the reality of everyday life and its language; society as objective reality (institutionalization, sedimentation and tradition, roles, legitimation, symbolic universes); society as subjective reality (primary and secondary socialization, identity). Unread: filed from catalogue records and the table of contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from library catalogue records and the 1966 edition’s table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in copyright, the Internet Archive scans of the 1966 Doubleday edition and a 1967 printing are lending-only, and there is no author-posted text), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the sociology-of-knowledge treatise whose title phrase ADR-017’s topic blurb uses; what it claims, beyond its contents page, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-485 v2 | The Construction of Social Reality | Searle (1995), Free Press, New York (xiii + 241 pp.). The founding book of Searle’s social ontology. Per its catalogue description, it argues that some facts are independent of human observers and some require human agreement. Its chapters move from the building blocks of social reality and the creation of institutional facts through language and a general theory of institutional facts, to a defence of external realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Unread: filed from the catalogue record and contents; the record reads the theory in Searle’s 2006 restatement. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from catalogue records and a library scan of the table of contents; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in print with Free Press / Simon & Schuster, the Internet Archive copies are either lending-only or unauthorised uploads, and Searle posted no draft), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The record reads the theory through Searle’s own 2006 restatement (LIT-482, read in full), which is the entry to start from. |
| LIT-492 v2 | On Social Facts | Gilbert (1989), Routledge (reissued by Princeton University Press, 1992; DOI-10.1515/9780691214627). The book asks whether social groups are real over and above individuals’ thoughts. It analyses everyday concepts of social action, social groups, collective belief and social convention, in dialogue with Weber, Simmel, Durkheim and David Lewis, and proposes that core social phenomena are “plural subject” phenomena. Unread: filed from the publishers’ descriptions and the chapter list. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publishers’ records and the chapter list; no lawful full text was reachable (the Princeton reissue is sold as an e-book on De Gruyter, and the Internet Archive’s copy of the Routledge edition is lending-only), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is Gilbert’s book-length treatment of plural subjects, collective belief and social convention; “Walking Together” (LIT-477) is the short version. |
| LIT-639 | The Harder Problem of Consciousness | Block (2002), The Journal of Philosophy 99(8):391–425. For anyone who is both a naturalist (physicalism is the default) and a phenomenal realist (consciousness is real and not defined by function), a merely superficial functional isomorph of us with a different physical basis, “Commander Data”, poses a harder problem than the hard one. We have no conception of evidence that could show whether he is conscious, so physicalism is the default yet inaccessible, and it is the subjective default that he is not conscious though the question is open. Disjunctive or functional bases would save naturalism but could never be known. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-501); worth reading as the argument that whether a functional duplicate of us made of different stuff is conscious is not just unknown but “meta-inaccessible”: we have no conception of evidence that would settle it. For a naturalist who is also a phenomenal realist, physicalism is the default and yet whether such a being is conscious cannot bear on it. The paper also dissolves one form of the hard problem by treating subjective and objective as properties of concepts, not of properties. It lays out the tension and argues for no way out. |
| LIT-716 | Network Epistemology: Communication in Epistemic Communities | Zollman (2013), Philosophy Compass 8:15–27. A survey of how communication structure affects group learning. No structure is best for all problems. With costly lossless transmission, minimally connected networks are optimal; with lossy transmission, stars. When agents average opinions, regular networks are best and denser is faster. In bandit problems minimally connected networks are best even when communication is free. Optimal networks may not be reached by individuals’ choices. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-567): read in full from the author’s posted manuscript. Worth reading as the short survey of network epistemology up to 2012. Its main lesson is that the best communication structure depends on the learning problem. Pooling estimates favours dense, regular networks. Costly transmission favours sparse ones, often a star. Active learning in bandit problems favours minimally connected ones. Intuitions about “too little” or “too centralized” communication are often wrong. A survey, weighed as one. |
| LIT-717 v2 | Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry | Longino (1990), Princeton University Press: develops contextual empiricism. Data support hypotheses only through background assumptions, so objectivity is secured not by individual method but by critical interaction in a community, and is a matter of degree. Applied to research on human evolution and neuroendocrinology. Unread: the account is read in Longino’s SEP entry LIT-725. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (Princeton University Press via De Gruyter is closed). Its account is read first-hand in Longino’s own Stanford Encyclopedia entry, “The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge” (LIT-725), §5, which states the argument from underdetermination and the four community norms. Filed because an essay the owner is writing cites “Helen Longino’s social epistemology” for institutionalized criticism. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-724 | The Communication Structure of Epistemic Communities | Zollman (2007), Philosophy of Science 74:574–587. Simulating Bala and Goyal’s model, in which scientists learn only about the method they pursue, small communities connected in a cycle chose the better method more often than wheels or complete graphs, and took longer to do so. Over all networks of up to six agents, density predicted failure, and hub centrality did not. Misleading early results spread through dense networks before diversity could correct them. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-583): read in full from the author’s posted copy. Worth reading as the origin of the “Zollman effect”. In a Bala–Goyal bandit model, where agents learn only about the method they pursue, simulated communities with fewer communication links converged on the better method more often and more slowly than fully connected ones. The cause was density, not the centrality of a hub. A simulation study of small networks (3–10 agents) at one payoff gap. LIT-733 shows the effect is confined to hard inquiry. |
| LIT-725 | The Social Dimensions of Scientific Knowledge | Longino, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2002; rev. 2025). States her critical contextual empiricism: evidence bears on hypotheses only through background assumptions, so objectivity depends on critical interaction in a community. That interaction counts only if four norms hold: venues, uptake, public standards, and tempered equality of intellectual authority. It surveys rival models and reports that Zollman’s network result is fragile. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-580): §§1, 4 and 5 and the parts of §2 on network models, in the revision of 24 January 2025. Worth reading as Longino’s own statement of her position, written by her as the entry’s author, and as a survey of the rival models of social knowledge (Kitcher, Solomon, Zollman). Read §5 for critical contextual empiricism and its four community norms: venues for criticism, uptake of criticism, public standards, and tempered equality of intellectual authority. Being by Longino, its account of rivals is a participant’s, not a neutral referee’s. |
| LIT-729 | Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning | March (1991), Organization Science 2(1):71–87. Exploration’s returns are less certain, more remote and more distant than exploitation’s, so adaptive processes refine exploitation faster and become self-destructive in the long run. In a model of mutual learning, the organizational code improves only from members who deviate from it: slow socialization, mixed learning rates and moderate turnover raise organizational knowledge, at a cost to some individuals. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-581): in full, from a JSTOR copy in an NTNU doctoral-course readings folder. Worth reading as the source of the exploration–exploitation trade-off in organizations: exploitation’s returns are surer and nearer, so adaptation drives exploration out and becomes self-destructive. A simple simulation of mutual learning between members and an organizational code shows that slow socialization, a mix of learning rates and moderate turnover raise what the organization knows. Limits: the results are from simple models, and March gives no optimal balance. |
| LIT-730 | Episteme Symposium on Group Agency: Replies to Gaus, Cariani, Sylvan, and Briggs | List & Pettit (2012), Episteme 9(3):293–309. Replies to a symposium on Group Agency. Ecological rationality is classical rationality relative to an environment; robust group rationality can be relaxed by context, yet proposition-wise aggregation stays very limited. Group attitudes are real and non-redundant: role-based member acceptance does not reduce them. Group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right but should have restricted rights, on normative individualism. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-582): in full, from the authors’ copy on List’s LSE pages. Worth reading as the authors’ own short commentary on Group Agency (LIT-391, unread), which it quotes with page references. It says the premise-based procedure was only ever illustrative, that robust group rationality may be relaxed case by case without rescuing proposition-wise supervenience, that no accessible individualistic recipe makes group attitudes redundant, and that group agents are fit to be held responsible in their own right but should have restricted rights. Limits: replies to commentaries not in the record; the book’s claims are seen only as quoted. |
| LIT-732 v2 | The Fate of Knowledge | Longino (2002), Princeton University Press: argues that the cognitive processes of science, observation and reasoning included, are social processes, so the community norms that make inquiry objective apply to the constructive work of research and not only to the criticism of its results. Unread: the thesis is read in Longino’s SEP entry LIT-725. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (Princeton University Press via De Gruyter is closed). Longino’s SEP entry (LIT-725) states its thesis: observation and reasoning are themselves social processes, so the community norms govern the constructive work of research and not only the review of finished results. Filed with LIT-717 for the owner’s essay. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-733 | In Epistemic Networks, Is Less Really More? | Rosenstock, Bruner & O’Connor (2017), Philosophy of Science 84:234–252. Replicating Zollman’s models over wider parameters, the advantage of cycles over complete networks vanishes once the better action is slightly better (pB ≥ 0.525 at size 10), groups are larger, or agents gather more data per round. It persists only where inquiry is hard. Kummerfeld and Zollman’s results behave the same way. Transient diversity is the robust lesson. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-559): read in full from the copy on Cailin O’Connor’s website. Worth reading as the robustness check on the Zollman effect. Over a wider parameter space, sparse networks beat dense ones only where inquiry is hard: small groups, small batches of data, and nearly indistinguishable alternatives. Elsewhere sparsity only slows learning. The authors keep Zollman’s transient-diversity point as robust and read these models as “how-potentially” stories. |
| LIT-735 | The Epistemic Benefit of Transient Diversity | Zollman (2010), Erkenntnis 72:17–35. In a richer bandit model with beta priors, sparse networks again beat dense ones. Making priors extreme reverses the order: dogmatic agents in a complete network do best. Both limited information and dogmatism keep diversity alive. Together they keep it alive too long, and agents fail to converge. The epistemic good is diversity that is transient. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-564): read in full from the author’s posted manuscript (dated 29 September 2009). Worth reading for its conclusion, which Rosenstock et al. (LIT-733) single out as the robust result of this literature: what a community needs is transient diversity, long enough to keep a theory from being dropped too soon and short enough to allow convergence. Sparse communication and stubborn priors each supply it, and together they make diversity too stable and learning fails. The peptic-ulcer history is the motivating case. |
| LIT-744 | Experimentation by Industrial Selection | Holman & Bruner (2017), Philosophy of Science 84:1008–1019. Industry can bias a scientific community without corrupting anyone, by funding researchers whose methods already favour its product, so that they are more productive and train more newcomers. Shown in a bandit-model simulation with methodological diversity and turnover, after the antiarrhythmic drug case. An independent funder helps only if it discounts industry-funded work. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-574): in full, from the publisher’s PDF in ANU Open Research, the co-author’s institutional repository, marked open access. Worth reading for a mechanism by which an outside funder biases a scientific community without corrupting anyone: given methodological diversity, a merit-based system and turnover, funding researchers whose methods already favour a product makes them more productive and more likely to train newcomers. An independent funder helps only if it discounts industry-funded work; funding on merit alone makes things worse. Limits: one historical case and a 20-agent simulation at a few parameter settings; run counts and network are not reported, and robustness to network structure rests on a footnote. |
| LIT-751 v3 | The Problem of Intransigently Biased Agents | Holman & Bruner (2015), Philosophy of Science 82:956–968. By its abstract, one intransigently biased agent in Zollman’s network model keeps an honest community from converging on the truth; two remedies are explored, one letting agents choose whom to trust. Unread: the authors’ 2017 paper LIT-744, read, applies the same model family to the same medical case. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref and the authors’ institutional portals, not read: the published PDF in ANU Open Research is embargoed until 31 December 2037 and was not downloaded, the journal is closed, and no author-hosted copy was found. Only the abstract was seen: one intransigently biased agent in a Zollman network keeps an honest community from ever converging on the truth, and letting agents choose whom to trust is one remedy explored. The authors’ 2017 paper “Experimentation by Industrial Selection” (LIT-744), read in full, uses the same model family on the same medical case and cites this one. Filed because it is the authors’ first model of biased agents in medical research. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-794 v2 | Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment | Brandom (1994), Harvard University Press. Explains meaning by use in normative terms. Asserting is undertaking a commitment, licensing others’ reassertion and taking on responsibility to show entitlement; interlocutors keep score of one another’s commitments and entitlements; a claim’s content is its inferential role (what it follows from, what follows from it, what it rules out). Logical vocabulary makes these implicit proprieties explicit. Skimmed: the Preface and the core of chapter 3 only. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-09 (NOTE-622); the Preface and the core of chapter 3 (pp. 141–157 and 172–193) were read, the rest of the 741 pages not. Worth reading as the source of the deontic scorekeeping model of assertion. Asserting undertakes a commitment, authorizes others to reassert it, and takes on a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged. Every interlocutor keeps a score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so the score is doubly perspectival, and an assertion’s significance is the change it makes to each score, fixed by the content’s inferential role. Read it with the caveat that the reading covers the model, not the book’s arguments for it (chapters 1–2, 4–9). |
| LIT-848 | Large AI models are cultural and social technologies | Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi & Evans (2025), Science 387(6739):1153–1156, Policy Forum. Large models are best understood not as intelligent agents but as a new cultural and social technology: like writing, print and search they give access to what other people have produced, and like markets, bureaucracies and elections they make lossy, uninvertible summaries of it that can be operated on at scale. The questions that follow are the old ones about such technologies: homogenization or diversity, who gains and who loses, and which countervailing institutions emerge. Argued by historical analogy, without data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-09 (NOTE-649) from the authors’ accepted version (Science galley of 25 February 2025, posted on Farrell’s site); worth reading as the compact statement of the view that large models are not agents but a new cultural and social technology, of a kind with writing, print, markets, bureaucracies and elections: lossy summaries of what other humans have produced that let people reorganize it at scale. It is a four-page Policy Forum argued by analogy, with no data. Its one mechanism with consequences is that models fit their training distribution on average, so are least accurate where the data are rare, which may homogenize culture; it sets this against the possibility of “society-like” ecologies of models that keep diversity. |
| LIT-900 v2 | The Method of Levels of Abstraction | Floridi (2008), DOI-10.1007/s11023-008-9113-7. Floridi gives up ontological levelism (levels in the system itself) and keeps an epistemological one, the method of levels of abstraction. An observable is an interpreted typed variable; an LoA is a finite non-empty set of observables; a moderated LoA adds a behaviour predicate; a gradient of abstractions (GoA) is a family of moderated LoAs with mutually inverse relations Rᵢ,ⱼ under which pⱼ ⇒ P_Rᵢ,ⱼ(pᵢ). Fixing the LoA fixes which questions can be asked and answered, and commits a theory to types (the LoA) and tokens (the model). The method is shown on Kant’s antinomies, and set apart from Marr’s, Pylyshyn’s and Dennett’s levels (which, it says, conceal their ontological commitment by privileging explanation), from Davidson’s conceptual schemes, from relativism and from naive realism. It proves nothing about GoAs; its value is the vocabulary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-700); worth reading as the source statement of the method of levels of abstraction that Floridi’s papers on agency, informational structural realism (LIT-152) and personal identity (LIT-136) all assume. Read §2 for the definitions, §2.7 for what an LoA commits a theory to, and §4.1 for the distinction between levels of abstraction, of organisation and of explanation. It is a method with definitions, not a result: no theorem is proved about GoAs, the one formal claim (disjoint and nested GoAs are interconvertible) does not go through under the paper’s own definition of nestedness, and the guard against relativism (§4.3) is one paragraph that ranks LoAs only relative to a purpose. |
| LIT-939 v2 | Modeling opinion misperception and the emergence of silence in online social system | Vilone and Polizzi (2024). In two agent-based models on scale-free networks with fixed private beliefs, a small hard-core minority makes expressed and perceived opinion lean far toward the minority. The first model has no voluntary silence. In the second, the majority falls silent: 55–60% of agents end silent, whatever the minority’s size or degree. The network’s direct (friendship-paradox) distortion of perception is small and of no fixed sign. Simulation only. No belief changes, and the majority is overturned in expression only above a minority of about 30%. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-810) in full; worth reading for its separation of two sources of opinion misperception in a network: the friendship-paradox distortion of what members see, which it finds small and of no fixed sign, and a spiral of silence, which it finds large. With private beliefs held fixed, a hard-core minority drives 55–60% of agents into silence and makes expressed opinion lean far toward the minority. Read it knowing that it is simulation only, that no belief ever changes, and that the majority is overturned in expression only above a minority of about 30%. Filed for QUESTION-047; THEORY-242 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-958 v2 | How manipulable are prediction markets? | Rasooly and Rozzi (2025). A pre-registered field experiment randomly moved prices by ±5 points in 817 Manifold prediction markets. About 25% of the yes–no gap reverted in the first week and 6% more over the next three. At 60 days, the last measurement, about 59% remained in unresolved markets. A model with finite, risk-averse traders predicts partial, slowing reversion even without learning. Markets with more traders, more activity or a Metaculus twin reverted more, but these splits are not randomised and are mostly significant only at 10%. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-778) in full; worth reading as a randomised, pre-registered field experiment that answers the counterfactual question that historical manipulation studies could not. On 817 Manifold markets about 59% of a random ±5-point shock was still present after 60 days in unresolved markets, and a price-impact model with finite, risk-averse traders explains partial persistence even when no trader learns. Read it knowing that it cannot say whether traders came to believe the shocked price, that the platform runs mostly on play money, and that its evidence on which markets resist manipulation is correlational. Filed for QUESTION-047; THEORY-267 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-966 v2 | Cooperative Dilemmas in Rational Debate | Handfield et al. (2025). Two debaters in a Betz-style logical space choose fixed argument strategies, with payoff w·v − d (true beliefs against changes of mind). At low and moderate truth weights the game is a cooperative dilemma: a prisoner’s dilemma, stag hunt or, most often, a snowdrift in which one debater argues boldly and the other free-rides. At low weight both exit. At high weight in short debates mutual boldness is the unique, truth-optimal equilibrium. In a narrow band of mixed equilibria, raising the truth weight slightly lowers collective accuracy. All exact results are for n = 3 propositions. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-795) in full; worth reading as a clean game-theoretic statement of epistemic free-riding in debate. Two deductive reasoners who value true beliefs but pay for each change of mind face a cooperative dilemma at low and moderate truth weights: typically one argues boldly and the other free-rides, and at low weights both exit. Read it knowing that it models two people and three propositions, that its outcome is collective accuracy and not a shared belief, and that the drop in accuracy as truth motivation rises is small and confined to a narrow band of mixed equilibria. Filed for QUESTION-047; THEORY-290 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-988 v2 | Scientific discovery in a model-centric framework: Reproducibility, innovation, and epistemic diversity | Devezer et al. (2019). Scientists drawn at random test a proposed linear model against the consensus by AIC or SC, and the winner becomes the consensus. Markov-chain analysis and an agent-based model show that replication cannot change the transition matrix, so reproducibility cannot cause convergence. A population of boundary testers reproduces almost perfectly while rarely holding the true model. Strategies that keep the model space connected speed discovery. An equal mix of strategies is never the worst on any property and varies least, but it is not the best on time at the truth, and under high noise it fails too. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-792) in full; worth reading for a formal model in which every inquiry step is a sound model comparison and the community’s consensus still sits on a false model, with results that reproduce almost perfectly, because of which alternatives its research strategies put up. It proves that replication cannot change where the consensus goes. Read it knowing that the consensus is memoryless and held by no one, that its scientists neither believe nor learn, and that its “epistemic diversity optimizes” means only that an equal strategy mix is never the worst and varies least. Filed for QUESTION-047; THEORY-295 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-999 v2 | Naïve Learning in Social Networks and the Wisdom of Crowds | Golub and Jackson (2010). Agents with independent noisy signals of a true value repeatedly average their neighbours’ beliefs with fixed weights, ignoring repeated information. The consensus is the signals weighted by the network’s left unit eigenvector, and in a growing society it converges to the truth if and only if the largest such influence weight vanishes; with reciprocal equal weights, if and only if no degree is a non-vanishing share of all links. A finite group everyone attends to prevents it; balance and dispersion conditions ensure it. Speed of consensus is unrelated to its correctness. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-840) in full; worth reading for QUESTION-047 as a proved case in which members share one updating rule and the network alone decides whether the group belief is right: a growing society of DeGroot averagers converges to the truth if and only if the largest influence weight vanishes. Read it knowing that its agents are naïve, not sound (they ignore repeated information), that weights are fixed and signals independent, and that the result is asymptotic and about a model, not data. |
| LIT-1004 v3 | Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing | Fricker (2007). Names two kinds of wrong done to someone in her capacity as a knower. Testimonial injustice: a hearer gives a speaker a prejudicially deflated degree of credibility. Hermeneutical injustice: someone is handicapped in making sense of a social experience by a gap in collective understanding that is owed to the relative powerlessness of a social group she belongs to. Proposes testimonial and hermeneutical justice as corrective virtues of the hearer, each at once intellectual and ethical. Checked against the author’s précis (2008), not the book. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 and read only in part: not the book but the author’s own three-page précis of it (Theoria 23(1), 2008, pp. 69–71, DOI 10.1387/theoria.7, open access under CC BY-NC-ND), read in full in NOTE-832 (Skimmed). The book itself was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report it closed, with no repository copy. Oxford Academic (academic.oup.com/book/32817, reached through the DOI) returned a bot check (403). PhilPapers returned 403, and no author-posted chapter was found. A full PDF on a Brazilian court library’s repository (bdjur.stj.jus.br) carries the publisher’s copyright notices and no sign of permission, so it was not used. The book’s cases and arguments are therefore known here only as the précis states them. It stays Unavailable until a full copy is supplied (ADR-041): the search for one is recorded, and only a précis was read. It is the reading QUESTION-072 was filed ahead of, and THEORY-317 is filed from the précis. |
| LIT-1007 v3 | The Ethics of Manipulation | Noggle, SEP (2018, revised 2026). A survey of ordinary manipulation. It sorts accounts of what manipulation is into bypassing reason (including the covert-influence view), trickery, pressure, and disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, and gives a familiar tactic that breaks each single account. It finds manipulation neither wrong by definition nor absolutely, and sets out harm, autonomy, using a person’s agency as a means, and infringed rights as candidate wrong-makers, each with its objection. It leaves open whether manipulation requires intent, including for algorithms that select their own means of influence. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-744) in full; worth reading as the map of the philosophy of ordinary manipulation: what it is (bypassing reason, trickery, pressure, disjunctive, hybrid and non-definitional views, each with the case that breaks it) and why it is wrong when it is (harm, autonomy, using a person’s agency as a means, rights). Its §4.2 states as open whether manipulation needs intent, with an algorithm that selects manipulative interface variants as its case, and lists five possible answers. Read it knowing that it is a survey that argues for little, that it is about ordinary rather than the free-will literature’s global manipulation, and that the version read is the 2026 revision, not the 2018 text that Susser, Roessler and Nissenbaum cite. |
| LIT-1021 v2 | Bayesian Persuasion | Kamenica & Gentzkow (2011), Am. Econ. Rev. 101(6): 2590–2615. With a common prior and a signal the receiver observes and the sender commits to, any distribution of posteriors that averages to the prior can be induced. The sender’s best value is the concave closure of its value over posteriors, at the prior. A Bayesian judge who knows the investigation was designed to convict convicts 60 percent of defendants when 70 percent are innocent. At the optimum the receiver is certain when she takes the sender’s worst action and indifferent otherwise. Blackwell is not cited and manipulation is not analysed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-717) from the published AER PDF posted on Gentzkow’s Stanford faculty page (web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/BayesianPersuasion.pdf); the online Appendix was not read. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for QUESTION-070 and QUESTION-071. Worth reading for the result that an overt, committed choice of experiment moves a fully informed Bayesian receiver, and for the optimum’s signature: certainty when she takes the sender’s worst action, indifference otherwise. It does not analyse manipulation and does not cite Blackwell. |
| LIT-1046 | Powerlessness and Social Interpretation | Fricker (2006), Episteme 3(1–2):96–108, drawn from the final chapter of Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization”. It is systematic when the marginalisation is persistent and wide-ranging, and incidental when it is a one-off, localised moment of powerlessness, as for a socially powerful man whose stalking the police cannot hear. A gap with no marginalisation behind it, such as an undiagnosed illness, is bad luck, not injustice. The primary harm is situated hermeneutical inequality. Secondary harms include lost epistemic confidence and, at worst, the social construction of who the subject is. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-859) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s full statement of hermeneutical injustice, drawn by her own note from the book’s final chapter: the definitions, systematic and incidental, the argument that a merely circumstantial gap is bad luck and not injustice, and the account of its primary and secondary harms. Its incidental case shows that, on her terms, hermeneutical injustice does not require membership of a powerless group, which the précis read for LIT-1004 does not say. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1048 | Evolving Concepts of Epistemic Injustice | Fricker (2017), Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, pp. 53–60. Her retrospective statement of the two concepts. Both are “discriminatory epistemic injustice”: testimonial injustice is caused by a prejudice through which the speaker is ingenuously misjudged as epistemically lesser, and hermeneutical injustice by “hermeneutical marginalisation in relation to some area of social experience”. She argues for keeping both strict about intention: a deliberate manipulation of credibility, or a hearer who pretends not to understand, is a related but different wrong. She accepts structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice, as when an un-refreshed list of expert witnesses means some speakers are never asked. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-853) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s own later statement of both concepts, ten years after the book: testimonial injustice is an ingenuous, prejudiced misjudgement of a speaker and never a deliberate manipulation of credibility; hermeneutical injustice is caused by hermeneutical marginalisation and persists however earnestly hearers try; and both are “discriminatory” epistemic injustice, kept apart from distributive kinds. It also accepts Anderson’s structural, pre-emptive testimonial injustice, in which a speaker’s word is never sought because of an un-refreshed list. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1049 | Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing | Fricker (2003), Metaphilosophy 34(1–2):154–173. A hearer can take someone’s word critically without inference, through a testimonial sensibility: a socially trained, self-correcting capacity, like an ethical sensibility, in which stereotypes of credibility are a legitimate and needed heuristic. Where they carry prejudice, a speaker receives the wrong degree of credibility “owing to a certain sort of unintended prejudice on the hearer’s part”: testimonial injustice, shown in Tom Robinson’s trial and in Greenleaf’s dismissal of Marge. The corrective virtue, reflexive critical openness, corrects for the relation between the hearer’s and the speaker’s social identities. Its availability depends on the critical concepts of the hearer’s time, so a hearer may be at fault before he is culpable. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-860) in full; worth reading as Fricker’s first statement of testimonial injustice and of the virtue that corrects it: a hearer’s credibility judgements come from a socially trained testimonial sensibility, which stereotypes properly inform and prejudice can corrupt, so that a speaker gets “the wrong degree of credibility” through “unintended prejudice”. It argues the corrective virtue is reflexive, and that whether a hearer can have it depends on the critical concepts available in their time. Filed as an alternative reading for LIT-1004, whose book is Unavailable here. |
| LIT-1050 | On the logic of theory change: Partial meet contraction and revision functions | Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Makinson (1985), JSL 50(2). The AGM theory: postulates for contracting and revising a logically closed belief set, and their characterization by partial meet contraction. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from a scan of the published article (JSL 50(2), pp. 510–530) that David Makinson posts on his own site (sites.google.com/site/davidcmakinson/, a Google Drive file linked from his publication list as item 23); Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed, Cambridge Core and JSTOR are subscription, and Project Euclid refused this environment. Worth reading as the source of the AGM postulates for contracting and revising a logically closed theory, of the Levi identity as the definition of revision, and of the two representation theorems: the six basic postulates characterize exactly the partial meet contractions (Observation 2.5), and with the two supplementary postulates exactly those generated by a transitive relation over the maximal non-implying subsets (Corollary 4.5). For CLAIM-294 it shows that in AGM the closed theory alone does not fix a revision, since a selection function or ordering must be added and different ones disagree on the same theory, but the added state is a preference over remainders, not a record of what a belief depended on; the paper does not discuss why beliefs are held or the belief-base point, which belongs to Hansson (LIT-1072). For QUESTION-105 it answers only a one-step version: a theory plus a transitive ordering suffices, with no redundancy in the finite case (Observation 4.6), and it says nothing about iterated revision. |
| LIT-1072 | Logic of Belief Revision | Hansson’s Stanford Encyclopedia survey of the logic of belief revision: AGM and its alternatives, and the contrast between revising logically closed belief sets and revising belief bases, which keep the beliefs held in their own right apart from their consequences. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the Stanford Encyclopedia’s own page (plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-belief-revision/), the revision it dates “substantive revision Wed Jul 29, 2026”, also served as the Fall 2026 archive edition. Worth reading as a compact, current survey of AGM belief revision and its rivals, and as the standard statement of why a belief base is not its closure: two bases with the same consequences are “statically equivalent” but not “dynamically equivalent”, bases escape the Recovery postulate, and they keep inconsistent states apart where every closed set collapses to one. For QUESTION-105 and CLAIM-294 it shows the full-belief form of the claim that current conclusions are not a sufficient state for revision (the Abe and Bob example), and also that belief-set models carry the missing difference in a selection mechanism or entrenchment ordering instead of a base; for CLAIM-295 its bases widen the operations that stay well defined but record only which beliefs are basic, not reasons, sources or defeated alternatives. Truth maintenance appears once, as history. The phrases “between belief states represented as closed sets” and “belief bases retaining additional structure” that the filing attributes via A10 are not in this revision. |
| LIT-1182 v2 | An Introduction to QBism with an Application to the Locality of Quantum Mechanics | Fuchs, Mermin & Schack (2014). QBism: quantum states and all probabilities, 0 and 1 included, are an agent’s personal judgements. A measurement is “any action an agent takes to elicit a set of possible experiences”, and the outcome is the experience it elicits; it does not reveal a pre-existing state of affairs. The agent models everything external with quantum mechanics, other agents’ reports included, and only her own awareness of her own experience is exempt. Quantum correlations are between one agent’s time-like separated experiences, so the theory is local. | Active — read 2026-10-16 in full (NOTE-955), from the arXiv v1 PDF. Worth reading as the shortest authoritative statement of QBism: states and all probabilities, 1 included, are an agent’s judgements, a measurement is an action the agent takes to elicit experience, and the outcome is that experience. Read it knowing that it keeps judgement (a state assignment) and measurement (an action on an external system) apart, so its loop is judgement, action, experience, update; and that the agent’s own awareness is the one thing it does not model, so it has no measurement of the self. |
| LIT-1207 v2 | Scientific Perspectivism | Giere (2006). Scientific claims, from colour vision to instrument-based observation and theoretical models, are made from within a perspective, and a realism about science survives once claims are indexed to the perspective they are made from. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not reached. OpenAlex reports the book closed; its other locations are a Library of Congress table of contents and an EBSCO e-book that needs a licence. The University of Chicago Press sells it and Chicago Scholarship Online offers it only to subscribers; web searches found only catalogue, bookseller and review pages, and no author or repository copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1213 v2 | Knowledge and common knowledge in a distributed environment | Halpern & Moses (1990; first at PODC 1984). With knowledge defined as truth at every point a processor cannot distinguish from the present one, a guaranteed simultaneous coordinated attack makes the attack common knowledge; over a channel that can lose any message nothing becomes common knowledge that would not with no messages delivered, so no correct protocol ever attacks, and not even eventual coordination can be guaranteed. Uncertain start and delivery times alone make common knowledge unattainable; ε-, eventual and timestamped common knowledge are attainable in many systems. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1381) in full, from the authors’ arXiv deposit of the JACM version; worth reading as the paper that makes “knowing” precise for processors in a system of runs and proves that guaranteed coordinated action needs common knowledge, that a channel which can lose any message cannot create it, and that any uncertainty in timing already rules it out, with weaker ε-, eventual and timestamped variants that are attainable. Read it knowing that the protocols are deterministic, that several results (the S5 properties, Theorems 11–12) are proved elsewhere or left to the reader, and that it credits the coordinated attack problem to Gray (1978) without citing Akkoyunlu et al. (1975). |
| LIT-1228 v2 | Perspectival Realism | Massimi (2022). Scientific knowledge is perspectival, historically and culturally situated, and still realist: realism about phenomena rather than theories, with models as inferential blueprints and reliability secured by the intersection of many situated perspectives. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text; the book is open access (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) but this client could not fetch any copy, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Tried on 2026-10-29: the University of Edinburgh’s Research Explorer PDF, https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/files /286709293/Massimi2022PerspectivalRealism.pdf, a Cloudflare challenge to curl and a 403 to WebFetch; the OAPEN record, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/114781, a bot check to curl and a time-out to WebFetch, with the OAPEN and DOAB APIs refusing the client’s address; and Oxford Academic, a 403. The failure is on access, not availability. A browser fetch of the Edinburgh PDF is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1269 | Intuitions about personal identity: An empirical study | Nichols & Bruno (2010), Philosophical Psychology 23:293–312. Survey studies of University of Arizona introductory philosophy students on Williams’s (1970) personal-identity cases. A replication of Blok et al.’s brain-transplant vignette finds the person judged “still Jim” when memories survive and not when they are erased, in first- and third-person versions alike. A stripped-down version of Williams’s Pain case (a brain infection treated by a procedure that eliminates “distinctive mental states”) gets 68% (N = 50) saying “you will feel the pain” of later injections, and 72% (N = 54) in the third person, with no difference between the two. An open-ended abstract question draws psychological answers from over 70% (N = 53), and over 80% (N = 54) deny that a future person with none of their memories could be them. Given both and told they conflict, 64% (N = 45, p = 0.053) side with memory. The authors read the psychological intuitions as the more robust, and so as support for a psychological criterion “insofar as” intuitions should guide the theory. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-996) in full, from the published PDF linked from the first author’s own publications page; worth reading as the first survey test of Williams’s two tellings of the body-exchange case and of his two explanations of why they diverge. Undergraduates mostly say a brain-transplant patient whose memories are erased is no longer the same person, and mostly say that a patient whose distinctive mental states are wiped will still feel the pain of later injections; neither result moves with first- against third-person telling. Asked abstractly, about 70% name psychological factors and more than 80% deny that someone without any of their memories could be them; made to choose, 64% side with memory (p = 0.053). Read it as evidence about how a concept of personal persistence responds to framing in one student population, not about what persistence is: the authors make the bearing conditional on intuitions informing the theory, test only necessity of psychology, and leave unseparated whether the Pain vignette asks about identity or about bare sentience. |
| LIT-1308 | Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno | Berniūnas & Dranseika (2016), Philosophical Psychology 29:96–122, from the abstract only. A reply to Nichols & Bruno (2010). The authors argue that in transformation cases the folk do not use one concept of personal identity but separate concepts of “person”, “identity” and “individual”, so that identity can be ascribed to a post-transformation individual no longer categorized as a person. They report new survey evidence that the folk do not treat psychological continuity as necessary either for being categorized as a person or for identity over time, reading identity judgements off the use of proper names, as Nichols & Bruno did. They doubt current designs can tell qualitative from numerical identity judgements, and conclude for scepticism about folk intuitions in theorizing about personal identity. Samples, vignettes and effect sizes are not known here. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21 from the abstract only; no lawful full text was reached on 2026-10-21, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Where the reader looked: OpenAlex and Unpaywall (both “closed”, no repository copy); Semantic Scholar (openAccessPdf “CLOSED”); Europe PMC (no record); tandfonline.com (403 to this client, and paywalled); PhilPapers and PhilArchive (record BERFCO, 403 to this client, so whether PhilArchive holds an archived copy is unsettled); PhilPeople profiles of both authors (403); the second author’s personal site, www.dranseika.lt, linked from his Jagiellonian University (INCET) staff page (the publications page lists the paper with no link to a copy); the INCET staff page itself (no copy); the Lituanistika database record (content/101037: abstract and keywords, no file); web and Google Scholar searches for a PDF, a preprint or an accepted manuscript in the Vilnius University repository (none found; Scholar returned no version of the paper itself). ResearchGate was not relied on. A failure of access for PhilArchive, which should be rechecked from a client it does not refuse, and of availability elsewhere. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1311 v2 | Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful Hermeneutical Ignorance | Pohlhaus (2012). Distinguishes two senses in which the knower is social, situated and interdependent, and shows how together they produce willful hermeneutical ignorance, a kind of epistemic injustice absent from Fricker’s account: dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experience of those situated marginally, and so misunderstand what those tools reveal. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21; a lawful full text was sought the same day and none was reached. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list it as closed; Cambridge Core, which now holds Hypatia, redirects the article and its PDF link to the paywalled abstract; web searches for an author-posted, repository or course copy found only syllabi that assign it (University of Victoria) and citations; CORE refused the query (rate limit) and PhilPapers returned a bot check. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Kay, Kasirzadeh and Mohamed (NOTE-1049) restate its term secondhand, which is not a reading. |
| LIT-1312 v2 | Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought | Collins (1986). Black women intellectuals occupy an “outsider within” position in sociology, inside its institutions but marginal to them, and from it can see anomalies its insiders do not; three themes of Black feminist thought (self-definition and self-valuation, interlocking oppression, the importance of Black women’s culture) show what that standpoint contributes. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1042) in full, in the authorized Portuguese translation in Sociedade e Estado 31(1), 2016 (doi:10.1590/S0102-69922016000100006, open on Redalyc), published with Collins’s and Oxford University Press’s permission; the English original was not reached. Worth reading for the outsider-within argument, that a member trained into a discipline but rooted in experience its paradigms omit or distort sees anomalies insiders are not placed to see and outsiders lack the authority to press (THEORY-834), and for its early statement of a self-confirming status: a group assigned an inferior status, and that status used as proof of its inferiority. Read it knowing that it is an argued essay with no comparison of who detects what, and that every quotation in the record but the English abstract is the translator’s. |
| LIT-1320 v2 | Algorithmic Empowerment: The Fair Allocation of Visibility in Platformized Publics | Kwok (2026). Platforms do not distort a neutral flow of communication but produce and allocate visibility, the institutionally produced probability that a communicative act reaches an audience; the Algorithmic Empowerment Principle holds that platforms with gatekeeping power owe structurally disadvantaged groups a fair opportunity for epistemic participation, with duties of epistemic redress in ranking design and visibility audits. | Unavailable — sought 2026-10-21 and no lawful full text reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report it closed; Crossref lists SAGE’s text-mining licence only, with no open-access licence, and carries the abstract, which agrees with the summary. The SAGE article page and PDF (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29777984261494012) returned 403 to curl and to the WebFetch tool. A web search for the title found no preprint or author copy. Online first ten days before this search, so a repository copy may appear. |
| LIT-1322 v3 | Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’? | Harding (1992). Standpoint epistemology demands a stronger objectivity than neutrality does: inquiry should critically examine the social positions and background assumptions shaping it, including those of the inquirers, and starting from marginalized lives is a resource for doing so. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-21; a lawful full text was sought the same day and failed on access, not availability. The 1996 Oxford reprint’s chapter is closed (Unpaywall, OpenAlex); the Centennial Review article has no DOI. A copy of the 1993 Feminist Epistemologies reprint is posted on a Waseda University faculty page (sidoli.w.waseda.jp/Harding_1993_Rethinking_Standpoint_Epistemology.pdf), in the way course pages this record has read from before, but it returned a Cloudflare 403 to both script and fetch, and the Wayback Machine could not be reached through this client’s proxy. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1329 v2 | Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression | Dotson (2014). Epistemic oppression is persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders a person’s contribution to knowledge production; distinguishes three orders of it by what would be needed to change it, the third being irreducible exclusion that is supported by the resilience of the epistemological system itself and cannot be corrected from within it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-21; a lawful full text was sought the same day and failed on access, not availability. The English original is closed (Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar; Taylor & Francis), and PhilArchive’s record holds no copy. A lawful French translation exists, “Conceptualiser l’oppression épistémique”, Recherches féministes 31(1), 2018 (doi:10.7202/1056239ar), open on Érudit, but Érudit returned a bot check to both script and fetch, and the Wayback Machine could not be reached through this client’s proxy. CORE refused the query (rate limit). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied or Érudit can be reached. |
| LIT-1331 v2 | Epistemic welfare and algorithmic recommender systems: overcoming the epistemic crisis in the digitalized public sphere | Hyzen, Van den Bulck, Puppis, Kulig & Paulussen (2025). Defines epistemic welfare as creating and maintaining the conditions and capabilities for individuals’ epistemic agency in the public sphere, and combines social epistemology, welfare studies and communication research into a framework for judging how well practices and institutions meet epistemic standards. It applies Goldman’s five (reliability, power, fecundity, speed, efficiency) to news organizations’ recommender systems. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1035): every section was covered, but through a fetch tool that returned section-by-section accounts with short quotes, not a verbatim copy, so the quotes are unchecked; the article is open access (CC BY) and the publisher refused direct fetches. Worth reading for its definition of epistemic welfare as the conditions and capabilities for epistemic agency in the public sphere, for its staging of capabilities (literacy turning availability into access, critical skills turning access into knowledge), and for Goldman’s five standards applied to news recommenders. Read it knowing that it is a theory paper with no data, that it treats legacy media rather than platforms, and that a first-hand reading has not been made. |
| LIT-1338 v2 | Epistemic Injustice in Generative AI | Kay, Kasirzadeh & Mohamed (2024). Introduces generative algorithmic epistemic injustice, with four dimensions: amplified and manipulative testimonial injustice, hermeneutical ignorance and access injustice; illustrates each with examples, particularly multilingual ones, and proposes strategies of resistance and design principles. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1049) in full, from the publisher’s free PDF of the AIES 2024 proceedings; worth reading for its four-way taxonomy of how generative models take part in epistemic injustice, and for the point that amplified testimonial injustice runs through a credibility excess assigned to the model (THEORY-864). Read it knowing that it is conceptual and measures nothing, that its examples are others’ reports, that its “manipulative” configuration counts deliberate fabrication as testimonial injustice although Fricker sets deliberate manipulation apart, and that its access injustice stretches the hermeneutical category. |
| LIT-1341 v2 | How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policymakers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks | Weatherall, O’Connor & Bruner (2020; arXiv 2018). In network-epistemology models of scientists and policymakers, a propagandist who only selects and shares real, unbiased results that favour one side, without fabricating any, can lead policymakers to the false belief while the scientific community converges on the truth; so can one who runs honest studies and publishes only the favourable ones, best with the smallest studies; and a journalist who reports both sides equally slows policymakers’ learning. | Active — read 2026-10-21 (NOTE-1038) in full, from the authors’ arXiv manuscript (1801.01239v2); worth reading for its model of the tobacco strategy, in which selective sharing of genuine results and honest research published selectively mislead a Bayesian audience while the scientists converge on the truth (THEORY-855), for the conditions under which this works, and for the finding that ‘fair’ reporting slows the audience. Read it knowing that its policy makers update on forwarded results as if they were unselected, that every result is a simulation of a stylized bandit model averaged over runs in which the scientists reached the truth, and that why the smallest studies serve biased production best is a sufficient-statistic fact the paper does not state (THEORY-845). |
| LIT-1343 v2 | Brains in a vat | Putnam (1981). Argues that the hypothesis that we are, and always have been, brains in a vat is self-refuting: if reference needs a causal connection to what is referred to, an envatted brain’s words “brain” and “vat” do not refer to brains and vats, so it cannot truly think that it is a brain in a vat. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on access. The book is in copyright and not open access (Unpaywall and OpenAlex: closed). Cambridge Core offers the chapter only behind “Get access”. The Internet Archive’s lending library holds the book (reasontruthhisto0000putn, access-restricted, borrowable with an account), which this client cannot borrow. PhilPapers returned 403. Two other Internet Archive items of the whole book sit in its user-upload “opensource” collection with no sign of the publisher’s permission, and were not used. The summary is the chapter’s standard reading, unchecked. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-21, “Experience and interpretation”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1360 v2 | Real patterns, the predictive mind, and the cognitive construction of the manifest image | Gładziejewski (2025), Synthese 206:225. Dennett’s compression criterion for real patterns is carried through minimum description length, Bayesian inference and variational free energy, so learning a generative model is real-pattern extraction from sensory data. The manifest image is then a structural description of the sensory signal, equally veridical for an envatted twin with matched input. Applied to selves: a self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, real as a pattern, not as a substance, and the realism dispute is over criteria. Applied to objects: compression-based composition (Bird 2023) favours cats over arbitrary sums. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1056) from the publisher’s open-access PDF (Springer, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0); worth reading as a clear derivation of Dennett’s real patterns into predictive processing, through minimum description length and the complexity–accuracy split of free energy, and as a short diagnosis of the realism dispute about selves: a self-model compresses self-generated regularities by positing one common cause, so the self is real as a pattern and not as a substance, and the dispute is over criteria. The structural, Kantian realism it draws (the manifest image is veridical in a matched vat) needs manifest content to be wholly structural, which it assumes. It says nothing about consciousness, and it does not say a self-model exaggerates the self’s unity. |
| LIT-1376 v2 | The Ledger of Will: Evidence, Revaluation, and the Preservation of Revisable Agency | Aevyra (2026). A formal account of memory for persistent agents whose central requirement is “revision sufficiency”: retained state must support a declared family of future questions, interventions and changes of evaluative law. It characterizes exact revision sufficiency for finite histories by a factorization condition, derives a lower bound on representation size, and proposes an architecture that keeps grounds and counterevidence with each commitment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1091) from the web page, version 4.0 of 25 September 2026, with its PDF and reproducibility archive, whose checks were run and reproduce; worth reading as a careful, self-limiting formal statement of what a reduced memory must keep for an agent to stay able to revise: exact sufficiency for a declared family of future demands is factorization through the retained state (the record’s CLAIM-350), and under repeated declared revisions it is the coarsest revision-invariant refinement (Moore–Nerode), filed as THEORY-884. Elementary and, by its authors’ account, a synthesis; its architecture and experiment are proposals, unexecuted. It is the closest outside statement of CLAIM-295 and answers QUESTION-112 only for a revision family declared in advance. Despite its title it has nothing on will-organization in the record’s sense. |
| LIT-1393 v2 | Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident | Rogers Commission (1986). The presidential commission’s report on the loss of Challenger on 28 January 1986. It traces the O-ring failure to a history of erosion that had been accepted flight by flight, recounts Morton Thiokol’s reversal of its engineers’ recommendation against launch on 27 January “at the urging of Marshall”, and finds the safety, reliability and quality-assurance program ineffective, understaffed and absent from the decision (chapter VII, “The Silent Safety Program”). | Active — skimmed 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1090) from the NASA History Office’s HTML edition of volume 1 (a U.S. government work): chapters V–VIII and the Recommendations in full, chapters III, IV and IX in part, volumes 2–5 not read. Worth holding as the primary source for the Challenger half of THEORY-140: it documents, in 1986, the accepted-erosion trajectory, a launch constraint waived six times without Levels I and II knowing, the deliberate decision not to escalate Thiokol’s objection, a problem record marked “closed” with no correction behind it, and a safety organization subordinate to the offices it checked. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. |
| LIT-1396 v3 | Hyperstition: An Introduction | Carstens and Land (2009). Land defines the CCRU’s term: “Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality.” His example is cyberspace, whose fictional idea drew the investment that made it real; market confidence works the same way, “and inversely”. Under “favorable” circumstances, which he leaves for further investigation, hyperstition can “transmute lies into truths”. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1378) in full, from the Orphan Drift Archive’s page; worth reading as the short, quotable definition of the CCRU’s term by its leading user: a positive feedback circuit through culture, “the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies”, with cyberspace, market confidence and Jerusalem as examples. Read it knowing that it is an interview of about 850 words, mostly occult and apocalyptic; that Land leaves the conditions under which the loop works “for further investigation”; and that he says a hyperstition can “transmute lies into truths”, so it need not begin as a fiction that is merely not yet true. |
| LIT-1397 v2 | Fallibility, reflexivity, and the human uncertainty principle | Soros (2013). States his theory of reflexivity: participants’ views of a social situation are fallible, and acting on them changes the situation they are views of, through a cognitive function (understanding the situation) and a manipulative one (changing it) that interfere with each other, so that neither has an independent variable. Fallibility and reflexivity together he calls the human uncertainty principle, and he says fallibility is the key source of the Knightian uncertainty of human affairs. Feedback can be negative (self-correcting) or positive (boom–bust). A postscript withdraws the sharp demarcation of social from natural science that the essay argues for. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1362) in full, from the copy on the author’s own site; worth reading as Soros’s fullest short statement of reflexivity: a participant’s view both tracks and changes its situation, so facts stop being an independent test of it, and the loop can run toward the view or away from it. Read it knowing that it is argued from experience and not tested; that it calls fallibility, not reflexivity, the key source of the uncertainty; that its postscript withdraws the sharp line between natural and social science that its middle section is built on; and that the figures are not in the web copy. |
| LIT-1403 | Knowing others’ preferences degrades the quality of group decisions | Mojzisch & Schulz-Hardt (2010), JPSP 98(5): 794–808. By its abstract: in four experiments, learning the other members’ preferences at the start of a discussion made hidden profiles less likely to be solved, through less attention to the information exchanged, not through bolstering or information load; it held even when another member favoured the correct option, and Experiment 4 replicated it in face-to-face three-person groups. Unread: no lawful copy reached. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-23; failed on availability as far as this client could tell. The article is closed (APA; Unpaywall and OpenAlex: closed, no repository full text). Göttingen Research Online, the one repository OpenAlex lists, sits behind a bot check, so whether it holds a file is unknown; the Hildesheim repository holds the record with no file; the authors’ Göttingen publications page has no file; a web search found no author-posted copy. Only the abstract was read (PubMed 20438225). Registered for QUESTION-089 and CASE-108 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request”. No NOTE, CASE or THEORY is filed. It returns to reading when a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1409 v2 | Group decision making in hidden profile situations: Dissent as a facilitator for decision quality | Schulz-Hardt, Brodbeck, Mojzisch, Kerschreiter & Frey (2006), JPSP 91(6). By its abstract: in 135 three-person groups solving a personnel-selection hidden profile, groups whose members agreed on a wrong option before discussion “hardly ever solved” it, while groups with prediscussion dissent did so significantly more often, even when no member favoured the correct option. The size of the dissent did not matter; the benefit ran mainly through greater discussion intensity. Unread: no lawful copy reached. | Unfetched — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-23; failed on access. A lawful copy exists: the authors’ working paper (LMU Munich, Wirtschaftspsychologie working paper WOP 2006/3) was posted on the department’s site and is captured by the Internet Archive, but the live file now returns 404 and this client cannot reach web.archive.org. The journal version is closed (APA). mediaTUM, which Unpaywall and OpenAlex list as green open access, holds metadata and the abstract only; Göttingen Research Online sits behind a bot check; the Hildesheim repository and the Aston portal hold no file; ResearchGate returned 403. Only the abstract was read (PubMed 17144766, the same text on mediaTUM). Registered for QUESTION-089 and CASE-108 from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-23, “Framework Overview Request”. No NOTE, CASE or THEORY is filed. It returns to reading when a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: the Wayback Machine’s capture of 2023-11-18 of psy.lmu.de/wirtschaftspsychologie/forschung/working_paper/wop_2006_3.pdf. |
| LIT-1502 v2 | A Bayesian Truth Serum for Subjective Data | Prelec (2004). A scoring method for subjective reports where objective truth is unknowable: each respondent gives an answer and a prediction of how others will answer, and answers score high not for being common but for being more common than the same population collectively predicted. By the abstract, this removes the bias toward consensus, so that a truthful answer maximizes expected score even for a respondent who believes hers is a minority view. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-24 for the owner’s question of how the record stands on multi-agent learning, as the second founding scoring rule for subjective reports without ground truth; a reading was attempted the same day and failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, Europe PMC holds the abstract only (not open access, no PMC copy), science.org returned 403 for the PDF, and no author or repository copy was found at MIT (DSpace search for the title and author returns later BTS papers and a thesis, not this one; Prelec’s MIT Sloan page links none). A copy on a third party’s personal site was found by web search and not used, as it is not a lawful public copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1518 | Eliciting Informative Feedback: The Peer-Prediction Method | Miller, Resnick & Zeckhauser (2005). A center with no independent information scores each rater by applying a strictly proper scoring rule to the distribution of a reference rater’s report that her own report implies, given a common prior and signal model. Truthful reporting is a strict Nash equilibrium; scaling the scores induces costly effort and can outweigh bribes; three or more raters allow budget balance. Uninformative equilibria also exist, and collusion, risk aversion, unmodelled private signals and trust in the center are named limits. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1139) from the authors’ final pre-publication draft of 26 January 2005, on Paul Resnick’s University of Michigan page; worth reading as the founding scoring rule for evaluators when there is no ground truth. Each rater reports a signal, the center turns it into a posterior over a reference rater’s report, and the rater is paid a strictly proper scoring rule on that posterior against what the reference rater actually reported. Truth-telling is then a strict Nash equilibrium (Proposition 1), and scaling the payments buys effort. It is not the only equilibrium: everyone always reporting h, or always l, is an equilibrium too, and collusion is named as a limit the paper does not settle. The mechanism needs a common prior and a signal model the center knows. |
| LIT-1631 v2 | Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences | Bowker & Star (1999). Classification systems are infrastructure: once routine they become invisible, and what they make visible, actionable and countable, and what they leave residual, has material and moral consequences for the people and things classified; cases include the ICD, nursing classifications and racial classification under apartheid. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (MIT Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1634 v2 | The structure of ill structured problems | Simon (1973), Artificial Intelligence 4. There is no sharp boundary between well and ill structured problems: the conditions for a well structured one relate a problem to the power of a bounded solver, read as practicable computation, and on that reading even theorem proving and chess fail some of them. Problems from the world “become WSPs only in the process of being prepared for the problem solvers” (p. 186). House design, a battleship’s design by an organization and a robot are handled by alternating a solver on a locally well structured problem with a recognition system that keeps modifying the problem space: “well structured in the small, but ill structured in the large”. Simon suggests that only the size of the knowledge base separates the two, so no qualitatively new mechanisms are needed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1232), from a scan of the published article; worth reading as the classic argument that well-structuredness is relative to a bounded solver and that problems from the world become well structured only by being prepared, and for its model of design as an alternation between local problem solving and retrieval that modifies the problem space. Its conclusion that no new mechanisms are needed is a suggestion, not a result. |
| LIT-1637 v2 | The Scientific Image | van Fraassen (1980). Constructive empiricism: science aims at theories that are empirically adequate, true about what is observable, and accepting a theory involves only the belief that it is; commitment to the theory’s unobservable entities or structure is not required, and explanation is a pragmatic virtue, not evidence of truth. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (Oxford Academic), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1641 v2 | Realism for Realistic People: A New Pragmatist Philosophy of Science | Chang (2022). A pragmatist realism built on epistemic activities rather than propositions: knowledge is the ability to carry out coherent activities, operational coherence is the mark of success, and realism is a commitment to keep inquiry open to what resists it. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: Unpaywall and OpenAlex list chapter 1 as free to read on Cambridge Core (bronze), but the listed PDF address returned the chapter’s landing page, which offers the chapter behind “Get access” and shows only its summary; no other open copy is known. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1643 v2 | Belief, awareness, and limited reasoning | Fagin & Halpern (1987). Logics of explicit and implicit belief that avoid logical omniscience by adding an awareness operator: an agent explicitly believes only what it implicitly believes and is aware of, so a proposition built from concepts the agent lacks cannot be explicitly entertained. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: Unpaywall and OpenAlex both give the article as closed, and the only other location OpenAlex lists is a CiteSeerX cache, which is not the authors’ or the publisher’s copy, so it was not used. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1645 v2 | Logic: The Theory of Inquiry | Dewey (1938). Inquiry is “the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its constituent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole”; recognizing that a situation is problematic and formulating the problem are themselves stages of inquiry, and hypotheses are operational proposals tested by the changes they make. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book has no DOI to look up on Unpaywall, and the Internet Archive records found are controlled-lending copies or a Digital Library of India scan whose copyright status was not established, so none was used. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1651 v2 | An Autobiography | Collingwood (1939). Chapter V sets out a “logic of question and answer”: a proposition cannot be understood, or judged true or false, apart from the question it was meant to answer, and every question rests on presuppositions; what one inquiry establishes as an answer can become a presupposition of the next. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book has no DOI to look up on Unpaywall, and the Internet Archive records found are controlled-lending copies, so none was used. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1657 v2 | Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning | Barad (2007). The full development of agential realism from Bohr’s philosophy-physics: the inseparability of object and agencies of observation read as ontological, not epistemic; phenomena as the primary units; apparatuses as boundary-making practices that are themselves phenomena; agential separability as exteriority within phenomena; and ethico-onto-epistem-ology, on which practices of knowing are part of the world’s becoming and carry responsibility for the cuts they enact. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (Duke University Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1662 v2 | Inquiry Under Bounds | Thorstad (2024). A theory of rational inquiry for bounded agents: rationality is assessed in the processes by which beliefs are formed and inquiry is conducted, given real limits on time and computation, not only in the finished beliefs; heuristics can be rational for such agents. | Unfetched — searched 2026-10-27 for a lawful full text; one exists but this client could not fetch it, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed (ADR-053). Unpaywall lists the book as gold open access on Oxford Academic (doi 10.1093/oso/9780198886143.001.0001); academic.oup.com answered curl with a bot challenge (“Just a moment…”), and a headless-browser fetch was not attempted, since it would be working around the challenge. The failure is on access, not availability. A browser fetch of that copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1665 v2 | Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube | Rheinberger (1997). Research proceeds through experimental systems in which epistemic things, the still-vague objects under investigation, are made accessible by technical objects, the stabilized instruments and procedures; the two roles are not fixed, so an epistemic thing can become a technical object and a technical object can become an epistemic thing again. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book has no DOI to look up on Unpaywall, OpenAlex’s title search was out of its daily budget for this client, and the publisher sells it; no open copy is known. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1667 v2 | Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism | Brandom (2000). The short introduction to inferentialism: conceptual content is explained by the inferences a claim figures in, what would entitle one to it, what it commits one to and what it is incompatible with; asserting is a move in a game of giving and asking for reasons, tracked by deontic scorekeeping; logical vocabulary makes those inferential commitments explicit. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the book is closed on Unpaywall (Harvard University Press, De Gruyter), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1852 | The Nature of Epistemic Injustice | Maitra (2010), Philosophical Books 51(4), a critical study of Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. It reports the book’s definitions with its pages: testimonial injustice is a credibility deficit owed to the hearer’s identity prejudice (pp. 19, 28, 35), and hermeneutical injustice is having a significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding by hermeneutical marginalization, systematic or incidental (pp. 153, 155, 158). It argues the testimonial account is too broad, since a hearer owes a speaker a matched credibility judgement only in some relationships, and too narrow, since epistemic bad luck and stereotypes held through careless evidence-gathering can also wrong a speaker; and that both kinds of injustice mix individual and structural prejudice. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1428) in full, from the author’s draft of 14 July 2010 on her University of Michigan page (https://public.websites.umich.edu/~imaitra/Research/NEI0710.pdf), which the owner ruled a lawful copy on 2026-10-30. The draft is marked “Draft – Please do not cite without author’s permission”, so the record cites the published version (Philosophical Books 51(4), 195–211) and treats the draft only as the copy read. Worth reading as a secondary report of Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice (LIT-1004, unread), with page references to the book for its definitions and central cases, and as an argument that testimonial injustice needs a hearer’s obligation to the speaker and can occur without individual identity prejudice. |