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.
Philosophy of science — what science is and what its theories say about the world — realism and structural realism, explanation, causation and evidence, the interpretation of physical theories (group: philosophy).
215 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-021 v3 | From the origin of life to pandemics: emergent phenomena in complex systems | Artime & De Domenico (2022), ARXIV-2205.11595. An editorial review with no new result. Its one formal item (§4, Eq. 4.1: x(t+1) = f[x(t)], x(0) = x₀) sorts phenomena three ways. Non-emergent: local rules plus initial conditions let you deduce the “expected” high-level pattern. Weakly emergent: they let you deduce an “unexpected” one by computation. Strongly emergent: no deduction is possible even in principle. “Unexpected” is never defined. The rest is a cross-domain survey (§3), a 16-paper map of the theme issue (§5), and an outlook (§6). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-007); worth reading as the table of contents and framing of the Phil. Trans. A theme issue that holds LIT-025 and LIT-027 (§5), and as a quick survey of emergence examples. Do not cite it for a definition of emergence, because its “mathematical” definition leaves the deciding criterion (“unexpected”) informal. |
| LIT-037 v3 | The Open Systems View | Cuffaro & Hartmann (2021), ARXIV-2112.11095. The paper argues philosophically, not formally, that the quantum theory of open systems “GT” is more fundamental than standard closed-system quantum theory “ST”. GT treats states as density operators that evolve, in general, non-unitarily, and it admits not-completely-positive maps. The ontic and epistemic cases each win only on a second, interpretation- or practice-laden criterion: OntFund-2 and EpFund-2. On the first, formal criteria (OntFund-1, EpFund-1) the two frameworks tie, and the authors say so because Stinespring dilation and dropping the Lindblad terms translate in both directions (§4.1, §4.2.1). Explanatory fundamentality is granted only deflationarily (ExFund-1), and the authors recommend dropping the notion (§4.2.2). The step from there to “the open systems view is fundamental tout court” (§4.3) rests on the special sciences and on “there are no other options”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-077); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “open systems view” and of the distinction between a view, a framework, a theory and a model (§2, §4.1, §5.2). Read it knowing that its fundamentality verdict is carried by interpretive premises (OntFund-2, EpFund-2) and a deflationary step, not by any formal asymmetry between the frameworks. |
| LIT-045 v5 | Structural Realism | Ladyman (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/. The entry presents structural realism (Worrall 1989) as the attempt to keep both the no-miracles argument and the lesson of theory change. What is retained, and what we are entitled to believe, is structure, understood by ontic structuralists as modal structure. It sorts the view into an epistemic form, which falls to the Newman/Demopoulos–Friedman triviality result when stated as a Ramsey sentence (§3.2), and an ontic form with seven distinguishable theses, from eliminativism about individuals to “objects are constructs” (§4). The ontic form is motivated by quantum non-individuality and entanglement, gauge symmetry and the hole argument. The entry closes with seven objections, each answered in the author’s own voice (§5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-038); the standard map of the structural-realism literature, written by the founder of OSR. Read §2 for the theory-change argument, §3.2 for the Newman problem and §4’s seven OSR theses. Treat §5’s rebuttals as the author’s position, not as the field’s settled view. |
| LIT-062 v3 | On the reality of the quantum state | Pusey et al. (2011), ARXIV-1111.3328. Take pure states |ψ0⟩, |ψ1⟩ with |⟨ψ0|ψ1⟩| = cos θ. Assume (a) a model assigns each preparation a distribution µ_i(λ) over physical states, (b) n independent preparations yield the product distribution µ_{x1}(λ1)⋯µ_{xn}(λn), and (c) outcome probabilities depend only on (λ1, …, λn). If the model’s predictions are within ε of quantum theory, then D(µ0, µ1) ≥ 1 − 2ε^{1/n} for any n with 2^{1/n} − 1 ≤ tan(θ/2) (Eq. 7, App. B). At ε = 0 the distributions for distinct pure states cannot overlap on a set of non-zero measure, so Harrigan–Spekkens ψ-epistemic models are ruled out. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-030); the founding ψ-ontology theorem. It is short, fully proved (App. A–B), and still the reference that every later ψ-epistemic/ψ-ontic argument, including LIT-007 §I.C and LIT-090, positions itself against. Read it with its assumption (b)–(c) in view, since that is where every response pushes. |
| LIT-077 v2 | What is quantum in quantum randomness? | Grangier & Auffèves (2018), ARXIV-1804.04807. The paper argues informally, with no equations anywhere in it, that an “elementary” system with a fixed finite number N of exclusive modalities, placed in contexts that can change, must behave unpredictably when the context changes: a return to C1 after C2 cannot be certain, or there would be N² > N joint modalities (p. 4). It asserts that adding one condition, that the context can change continuously, makes the N×N modality-transition matrix unistochastic, i.e. Born-rule, but defers that proof to refs [14, 15] (p. 5). The anti-reductionist conclusion follows from Postulate 0, which declares contexts non-contextual by definition, not from an argument against decoherence. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-044); a short, equation-free position paper whose one argument of its own is an informal N = 2 reductio; read it for the position, and read the derivation it cites — Auffèves & Grangier, Sci. Rep. 2017 (arXiv 1610.06164) and arXiv 1801.01398, neither held here — for the result. |
| LIT-079 v2 | Causal Claims in Economics | Garg & Fetzer (2024), ARXIV-2501.06873. GPT-4o-mini is run in nine passes per paper over the first 30 pages of 44,852 NBER/CEPR working papers. Edges kept in at least 4 of 9 passes, JEL-mapped, give “claim graphs” in which the share of edges backed by DiD/IV/RCT/RDD/synthetic control rises from 7.7% (1990) to 31.7% (2020). In year-fixed-effect-only regressions, doubling causal edges is associated with +1.36 pp top-five probability and +11.2% citations, while non-causal counterparts are flat or negative. The validation checks paper-level method labels, and only weakly: RCT and field labels have precision ≤ 0.10. It never checks the edges themselves against human labels. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-083); a promising, openly released claim-extraction infrastructure whose headline associations rest on edges never validated against human labels and on regressions with year fixed effects only. An edge-level human-annotated audit, and outcome regressions with field and method controls on a common sample, would settle it. |
| LIT-086 v2 | The Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence | Barandes (2023), ARXIV-2302.10778. Take any N×N stochastic transition matrix Γ(t←0) on a configuration space. Writing it entrywise as Γ_ij = |Θ_ij|² = tr(Θ†P_iΘP_j) (Eq. 15) is always possible, and the paper calls it the stochastic-quantum dictionary. Choosing Θ unitary (by Stinespring dilation to ≤N³ configurations, §3.4) makes Γ unistochastic. The Born rule in the configuration basis (Eq. 23), the Schrödinger equation (Eq. 35, with H ≡ iħ(∂U/∂t)U†) and interference (Eq. 43, the gap between Γ(t←0) and |U(t←t′)|²|U(t′←0)|²) then follow by definition or short algebra. The Born rule for non-diagonal observables (Eq. 78) is derived by reading a measuring device’s configuration, given a composite unitary that produces Eq. (73). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-080); the clearest single statement of the indivisible-stochastic-process reading of quantum theory, and its measurement model (§4) is worth reading. Discount its “new result” labels: the dictionary is an identity, the Schrödinger equation is the definition of H, and unitarity is a representational choice the paper’s own gauge footnote does not preserve. |
| LIT-090 v3 | Could wavefunctions simultaneously represent knowledge and reality? | Hance et al. (2021), ARXIV-2101.06436. The paper argues, informally and without formal results, that Harrigan–Spekkens’ ψ-ontic/ψ-epistemic are contradictories only by stipulation. On the informal senses, “represents reality” and “represents knowledge”, a wavefunction can be both. It offers a weaker sufficient condition for “epistemic” (Eq. 6: for some ψ, A, S, the response function A(S|λ) is not equal to the Born probability p^ψ_A(S) throughout Λψ), which non-overlapping models can meet. It concludes that PBR “shows that wavefunctions cannot overlap on state space, but it says nothing about whether they are epistemic in the broader sense”, so it “does not rule out all epistemic models” (§V). | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-072); a short, clear statement that ψ-epistemic in the Harrigan–Spekkens sense is narrower than “epistemic”, worth reading for §III–V as a terminological caution when citing PBR. Its positive criterion (Eq. 6) is weak, since it amounts to predictive incompleteness of ψ. Its Appendix A contains claims that the record’s own readings contradict. |
| LIT-096 | What Is It Like to Be a Bat? | Nagel (1974), DOI-10.2307/2183914. An organism has conscious states if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism. That subjective character belongs to a type of point of view, and it is left out by every functional, intentional or causal analysis, since each is compatible with its absence. Reduction elsewhere moves away from a point of view toward the objective; here that move leads away from the thing being explained. So physicalism may be true, but we have no conception of how it could be. Nagel proposes an “objective phenomenology” that would describe experience to beings who cannot have it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-089); the source of the “something it is like” criterion of consciousness that the record’s AI-consciousness work (LIT-056) adopts as its target, and of the argument that no functional analysis can settle whether that criterion is met. |
| LIT-098 v2 | Health and Disease Concepts Cannot Be Grounded in Social Justice Alone | Veit (2025), DOI-10.52685/cjp.25.73.7. Kukla’s “institutional definition” makes a condition a health condition iff medicalising it would be best for collective wellbeing. Veit argues that any purely normativist definition of this kind defeats itself for two reasons. First, leaving “social justice” undefined lets a majority with other values medicalise what Kukla wanted to protect. Second, unless the institution of medicine is fixed from outside, the medical toolkit co-evolves until “health would simply become justice” (p. 15). His remedy is pluralism: at least three separate accounts, with justice linked to health empirically, not conceptually. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-097); worth reading as a short, clearly structured critique of moral conceptual engineering applied to health, though its two objections rest on informal argument and a thought experiment, not on an engagement with Kukla’s replies. |
| LIT-100 v2 | Quantum States for Primitive Ontologists: A Case Study | Belot (2011), DOI-10.1007/s13194-011-0024-8. Inside primitive-ontology Bohmian mechanics, Belot compares four readings of the quantum state: a field on configuration space, a multi-field on 3-space, a law, and a history of velocity dispositions of the particle system. Every reading except the multi-field carries a hard open question: why the world looks 3-dimensional, whether laws can be time-indexed, and whether dispositions lose content. The last is shown by the particle in a box, where every energy eigenstate φn = sin(πnx) induces the same at-rest disposition. The orthodox should prefer the multi-field reading; Belot, on van Fraassen’s view of interpretation, prefers to keep the others alive. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-110); worth reading. It is short, it originated the dispositionalist reading, and the particle-in-a-box counterexample and the analysis of the costs of ψ-as-law are still the points the later literature (LIT-204, LIT-200, LIT-164) cites. |
| LIT-102 v2 | Pregeometry, Formal Language and Constructivist Foundations of Physics | Arsiwalla et al. (2023), ARXIV-2311.03973. A programmatic essay with no construction, theorem or model of its own. It argues that inferential justification in a materialist ontology regresses without end (§3), that a “coherentist” constructivism escapes the regress, and that Wheeler’s pregeometry is therefore best read as “structureless structure”: the types and compositional rules of a computational language such as homotopy type theory (§§4, 6). Every construction of space from such rules that it points to is in the authors’ own earlier papers ([13, 17, 18]) or is promised as “a forthcoming publication” (fn. 1, p. 3). | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-182); not worth a reader’s time as an argument for its thesis. The step from the regress problem to formal languages is asserted, not argued, and its one physics claim (that “widespread consensus” holds spacetime to be fundamentally discrete, p. 5) is overstated. A reader wanting pregeometry is better served by the sources it cites: Meschini, Lehto & Piilonen’s “Geometry, pregeometry and beyond” ([63]) for the history, and Döring & Isham’s topos programme ([36–40]) for a worked formal-language approach. |
| LIT-103 v3 | Closing the Cartesian Bureau de Change | Frankish (2025), DOI-10.1177/10597123251359198. An illusionist’s commentary on Veit’s A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness. Frankish places Veit’s function-first, evolutionary programme in a “post-Cartesian” (qualia-eliminativist) paradigm. He then argues that two things drag it back towards Cartesianism: Veit keeps the words “qualia” and “phenomenal”, and he writes as if hedonic valence motivates action “in virtue of its feel”. The second implies “a tiny one-dimensional Cartesian bureau de change” that leaves the hard problem “as hard as ever”. Because the two paradigms are “incommensurable” (p. 20), Frankish urges Veit to commit to a thoroughly functionalist account. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-143); worth reading as a five-page statement of the illusionist case against residual “feel” talk in evolutionary accounts of valence, and best read together with Veit’s reply (LIT-105), which answers it point by point. It argues rather than demonstrates: the central premise, that anything causally efficacious is functionally definable and so cannot be irreducibly subjective, is asserted in one paragraph (p. 18). |
| LIT-105 v3 | On the Evolution, Science, and Metaphysics of Consciousness | Veit (2025), DOI-10.1177/10597123251413204. Veit’s reply to five commentaries on A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (2023). Its main new content is the metaphysics the book left to one paragraph. He says hedonic “feel” is identical with a valence system: “a common currency of sharing evaluative information across multiple control systems”. The currency metaphor, he says, is “not Cartesian but cybernetic” (p. 10). He keeps the word “qualia”, arguing that Cartesians have no “definitional rights” (p. 9), and he insists the pathological complexity thesis (PCT) is compatible with any metaphysics, dualism and panpsychism included (p. 9). Against his other critics, he defends a bottom-up evolutionary method that uses human data (de Weerd); a naturalism that is neither autopoietic nor biopsychist (Sachs); evaluation-first over prediction-first, consciousness as an adaptation, and graded, partial unity (Suzuki); and the link to welfare science (Chincarini). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-187); worth reading as the only extended statement of the metaphysics behind the pathological complexity thesis, and as the direct answer to Frankish (LIT-103). The reply to Frankish is the substantive part. The replies to de Weerd and Suzuki mostly restate the book’s positions against objections quoted only in part, so read them alongside the commentaries. |
| LIT-108 v3 | Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science | Weyl (1949), DOI-10.1515/9781400833337. Philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics are intertwined, with advances in philosophy led by scientific discovery. Weyl’s two-part treatment (mathematics, then natural science), drawing on Descartes, Galileo, Hume, Kant, Leibniz and Newton, is a classic mathematician-physicist’s statement of that view. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the book in copyright with no open copy: every Internet Archive scan (the 1949, 1959 and 1963 printings) is lending-only, and the De Gruyter e-book is paywalled. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-110 v3 | Unknotting reciprocal causation between organism and environment | Baedke et al. (2021), DOI-10.1007/s10539-021-09815-0. The paper gives an epistemic, not a metaphysical, tool for organism–environment reciprocal causation. The loop is “unrolled” into two ordered series of states, O_n and E_n, joined by interventionist (Woodward) causal arrows, and an experienced-environment node Ex_n is added as the interface. Its authors argue that this one diagram keeps an epistemically set organism–environment boundary and maps constitutive, mediational, relational, relocational and physical niche construction onto shared causal patterns. They support this with worked cases, including two multi-species ones (bumblebee–eggplant; rumen microbes–ruminant host). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-111); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “keep the boundary, unroll the loop” position in the niche-construction reciprocity debate, and as the natural counterpart to Hazelwood (LIT-156); its model is illustrative, not formalized or tested, and the formalization it promises is deferred to later work. |
| LIT-111 v4 | AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto | Birch (2025), DOI-10.31234/osf.io/af7c9_v1. Birch argues that two challenges must be met together: users misattributing human-like consciousness to chatbots (Challenge One), and possible “profoundly alien” AI consciousness that current science cannot settle (Challenge Two). For Challenge One he offers a personal-identity argument that the chatbot “friend” is typically a character with no persisting bearer (the “persisting interlocutor illusion”, §4) and three nudges that are neither “brainwashing” nor “lobotomizing” (§7). For Challenge Two he argues that behavioural markers are “gamed” (§10), that architectural markers are “Janus-faced” (§11), and that the resulting “two-level deadlock” between computational functionalism and biological naturalism can be broken over the long run by comparative animal studies (§12, Fig. 4). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-183); worth reading as the clearest statement of the “centrist” position, and it coins four concepts the AI-consciousness literature now uses (persisting interlocutor illusion, gaming problem, Janus problem, two-level deadlock). It is a manifesto: its design nudges are untested proposals, and its way out of the deadlock is a research programme that has “barely begun” (§12). |
| LIT-113 v3 | Duality and ontology | Le Bihan & Read (2018), DOI-10.1111/phc3.12555. A survey that sorts realist responses to dualities along two axes. The first is which of the naively interpreted dual worlds count as candidates for actuality: all of them (underdetermination), one (discrimination) or none (nihilism), each with or without the common-core world. That gives options (1)–(6), with the common-core approach being (1), (3) and (5). The second axis is what replaces the common core: an overarching theory, or “pluralism”, on which all dual structures are co-instantiated as parts of one world. Its verdicts are conditional: no option breaks the underdetermination without a further metaphysical principle, such as the PII, for which the authors see no independent support. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-152); worth reading as the shortest clear map of the realist options for interpreting dualities. It is a nontechnical survey, not an argument for any option. Its original contributions (the discrimination/common-core overlap, a defence of discrimination for AdS/CFT, and pluralism) are presented as options, not established. |
| LIT-114 v2 | Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics | Frigg & Werndl (2023), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/statphys-statmech/. The entry argues that statistical mechanics has no canonical formalism but three umbrellas — Boltzmannian SM, the Boltzmann Equation and Gibbsian SM — and that every live account of the approach to equilibrium (ergodic, typicality, Mentaculus, long-run residence time, coarse-graining, interventionist, epistemic) survives Loschmidt’s and Zermelo’s objections only by giving up strict irreversibility or adding something outside the isolated dynamics; it closes on the unresolved “schism” that physicists compute in GSM while philosophers explain in BSM. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-103); worth reading as the current authoritative map of the foundations of SM, with the caveat that it is written by two partisans who present their own long-run residence time account (§4.7) and their “BSM fundamental, GSM effective” view (§6.7) alongside the rivals. |
| LIT-115 v5 | Duality as a category-theoretic concept | Corfield (2015), DOI-10.1016/j.shpsb.2015.07.004. A short programmatic paper. Its thesis is that category theory, not set theory, is the framework in which the scattered instances of mathematical duality can be drawn together. The constructions in §3 (dual adjunctions restricting to dual equivalences on fixed points, truth-value-enriched Galois connections, Isbell conjugation, dualising objects “keeping summer and winter homes”) all “revolve around” adjunction, though Corfield expects no “single monolithic account” (p. 59–60). On his usage, ‘duality’ is reserved for “involution with some form of structural reversal” (p. 57), so several physicists’ dualities (homological mirror symmetry as an A∞-equivalence, mirror symmetry’s Z2 on the Hodge diamond, S-duality as a vestige of SL(2,Z)) are better called equivalences or symmetries. He proposes, without argument beyond the examples, that philosophers of physics will need homotopy type theory rather than predicate logic for the sameness questions dualities raise. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-141); worth reading, briefly, as the mathematician-philosopher’s counterweight to the physics-first accounts of duality this record holds: it is the clearest statement that what physicists call a duality is often what a mathematician calls an equivalence, and it is only seven pages. Its positive programme (HoTT for philosophy of physics) is announced, not carried out. |
| 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-121 v2 | The Meaning of the Wave Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics | Gao (2016), ARXIV-1611.02738. Gao argues first that ψ is real. His case uses protective measurements, which yield ⟨A⟩ on a single system with certainty, in three versions (ch. 4): one in the ontological-models framework using preparation non-contextuality, two he says need no auxiliary assumption, and one that uses a new criterion of reality. He then argues that ψ describes random discontinuous motion (RDM) of N point particles in 3-space: |ψ|² is the density with which each particle is present at each instant, and ψ is a single-case propensity. The main support is that the charge density |ψ|²Q, which protective measurement shows to exist, has no self-interaction (chs. 6–7). If the Born probabilities come from RDM, collapse is real. Gao proposes an energy-conserving, Planck-time-discrete collapse model: Pᵢ(t+t_P) = Pᵢ(t) + (ΔE/E_P)[δ_{EsEi} − Pᵢ(t)], giving τ_c ≈ ħE_P/(ΔE)² (ch. 8). Combined with relativity, it requires a detectable preferred Lorentz frame (ch. 9). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-140); worth reading as the fullest single statement of the protective-measurement argument for ψ-reality and of the RDM ontology. Its chapters 2, 3, 7.1 and 8.5 are also a well-referenced critical survey of ψ-epistemic, nomological, configuration-space-realist, Penrose and CSL views. Its central premises are contested (see Limitations), its collapse model is unconfirmed, and chapters 8–9 are openly speculative. |
| LIT-122 v2 | The Representation of Time and Change in Mechanics | Belot (2005), DOI-10.1016/B978-044451560-5/50005-1. For theories with ideal existence, uniqueness and a dynamical time-translation group, time is three intertwined ℝ-actions (on spacetime, on the symplectic space of solutions, and on the isomorphic space of initial data), and change is a slicing-indexed family of functions on those spaces. Singular dynamics, gauge freedom and time-dependence each damage this picture in a repairable way. Spatially compact vacuum GR breaks it, because the reduced Hamiltonian vanishes (h ≡ 0) and there is only one canonical isomorphism between the reduced spaces. That is the problem of time. It is not an artefact of the 3+1 split, it does not show change to be illusory, and it is absent from asymptotically flat GR and from artificially generally covariant theories. A parameterized “geometric time”, such as CMC, restores change and, in the CMC case, a time-dependent Hamiltonian flow. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-118); worth reading as the careful technical-philosophical statement of what the problem of time is and is not in classical GR. It is long and assumes graduate differential geometry, and it offers a diagnosis, not a solution. Its quantum-gravity motivations date from 2005 and are not updated here. |
| LIT-127 v2 | Hutchinson’s ecological niche for individuals | Takola & Schielzeth (2022), DOI-10.1007/s10539-022-09849-y. The paper defines the individualized (ecological) niche as the environmental conditions under which a particular individual has an expected lifetime reproductive success of ≥ 1, counting each offspring as 0.5 per parent in outcrossers. The authors split it into five sub-concepts: realized (A), potential (B), time-slice (C), prospective (D) and trajectory-based (E), plus a “fundamental individualized niche” set aside as practically interchangeable with the potential niche. The individual niche has n + s dimensions, adding intraspecific axes such as density and morph frequency. Its boundary is the expected-LRS isocline of 1, which is estimable only by marginalizing fitness functions across individuals. The authors themselves call the concept “mostly of a metaphorical value”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-170); worth reading as the clearest structuring of the “individualized niche” vocabulary, and as the individual-level complement to Trappes (LIT-169); it is a behavioural-ecology position essay, and its own admission that the potential niche is unobservable and estimable only from population-level marginalization limits it to a framework rather than a measurement result. |
| 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-132 v2 | Luck and Intentional Action: A Causal Account | Quillien (2026), DOI-10.1162/OPMI.a.361. Across three Prolific studies (N = 198, 673, 142; Likert 1–7), judgments that “X happened because the agent wanted X” track intentionality judgments under manipulations of luck. Causation is the strongest predictor of intentionality: standardized β = .46, .56, .53, against know-how β = .33, .20, .27 and probability-raising β = .14, .16, .10. Across the 12 condition means, r = .98. Causation only partly mediates the effect of luck (64%, 45% and 49%; exploratory analyses). As the causal account predicted, Study 3 found that the effect of Process (normal vs mix-up) on intentionality is larger when the agent knows how the buttons work (interaction F(1, 423) = 32). In the morally neutral Kraemer vignette, intentionality and causation came apart. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-092); Worth reading as the cleanest current statement and test of the causal (desire-causes-outcome) account of folk intentionality under luck. It has pre-registered designs, open data and an honest discussion of the half-mediation and the Kraemer divergence. Its evidence is correlational and its “model” is verbal, not computational. |
| LIT-133 v2 | Towards a Generalized Theory of Observers | Elshatlawy et al. (2025), ARXIV-2504.16225. The paper defines a “minimal observer” as a finite-state transducer with a boundary: a tuple O = (X, Y, Z, f, g, B) with |X| > 1, |Y| ≥ 1, |Z| ≥ 1 and feedback closure (Def. 4.1, p. 57). It then asserts, without derivation, that measurement outcomes, reference frames, coarse-graining and the quantum–classical cut are all defined by such observers. The paper’s only formal results are that isomorphism of these machines is an equivalence relation (“Theorem 2”, p. 93), and a complexity bound C(O) ≥ log 2 (Prop. 4.1, p. 94) whose correction term Λ is never defined and whose proof supports only C(O) ≥ 0. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-121); not worth a reader’s time as a theory of observers. Its one definition is a Moore machine with an unformalised boundary, its “theorems” are definitional, and its quantum claims are asserted, including the claim to identify “the exact moment and mechanism of quantum collapse” (p. 75). A reader wanting minimal observers or agents is better served by the sources it surveys: Ashby, Hartle’s IGUS, Fields, and Gielen & Wise’s observer space in §4.10.3. |
| LIT-135 v3 | Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism | Seth (2024), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X25000032. Seth argues that conscious AI needs computational functionalism and substrate flexibility extending to silicon, and that both are doubtful (§3.9). Against them he gives a positive, explicitly non-vitalist case, running from interoceptive predictive processing through the free energy principle to autopoiesis, that consciousness is a property “of only (but not necessarily all) living systems” (§4). He concludes that real artificial consciousness is “unlikely along current trajectories” and would need “living AI” (§5.8), while conscious-seeming AI is “almost certain” and may be “cognitively impenetrable” (§6.2). He concedes that “my case is not watertight” (§5.8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-169); worth reading as the leading statement of biological naturalism about AI, with a useful five-scenario map (Table 1) of what conscious AI would require. Its positive case rests on the free energy principle, which the paper itself calls “much debated” (§4.2), and it claims plausibility rather than necessity. The commentaries and the Author’s Response (BBS 49, 2026) are the next thing to read, and the response was not reached here. |
| 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-140 v2 | Large Language Models Are Stochastic Measuring Devices | Mallory (2025), DOI-10.1093/9780191998317.003.0003. The chapter argues by analogy that deep neural networks are “stochastic measuring devices”. Training alters the parameters in response to data, so that the resulting configuration carries information about the data (“training is measurement”). The trained weights are a model, and generation is simulation. DNNs are stochastic because random initialisation and non-convex loss mean runs need not converge to the same weights, failing Baird’s “regularity” condition. The problems of interpreting model states and generated text are therefore the familiar problems of instruments, models and simulations. The problem of interpretable AI is an instance of the coordination problem in the philosophy of measurement. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-090); worth reading as the most developed instrument-centred alternative to agentive framings of LLMs, and for its tidy division into model-interpretation, text-interpretation and linking problems; it offers an analogy, not a refutation (its own words, § Interpretation and Communication), and should be read in the published OUP version where possible. |
| LIT-141 v3 | Emergence: from physics to biology, sociology, and computer science | McKenzie (2025), ARXIV-2508.08548. Sole-authored survey by a condensed-matter physicist. It takes novelty (a property the parts lack) as the defining mark of emergence and sets it against twelve other characteristics in §2. The six “objective” ones are discontinuities, order, modification of parts, universality, diversity and mesoscale modularity. The six “subjective” ones are self-organisation, unpredictability, irreducibility, contextuality/downward causation, complexity and intra-stratum closure. Case studies from the Ising model to Schelling segregation and LLMs show that each can come apart from novelty: novelty without discontinuity (Kondo, Fermi liquids, spin ice), without unpredictability (BKT, spin ice), and with reduction (Butterfield). §22 sides with weak emergence and argues that strong-emergence claims from molecular structure are weak. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-124); worth reading as a hub reference and example catalogue on emergence from physics outward, with unusually concrete case studies and a sceptical physicist’s §15 on molecular structure. It is a survey and a position, not a proof. Its definitional framework is stipulated and its logical relations between characteristics are left open by its own account (§24). |
| LIT-143 v2 | What is a Mathematical Structure of Conscious Experience? | Kleiner & Ludwig (2023), ARXIV-2301.11812. The paper proposes a definition, (MSC). A mathematical structure S = ((A_i), (S_j)) is a structure of conscious experience iff (S1) its domains are sets of experiential aspects, and (S2) every relation or function S_j has an “S_j-aspect”. An S_j-aspect is an aspect that a variation of experience changes exactly when the variation fails to preserve S_j. The older condition (MDC), that a structure is “of” experience if its domains are aspects and its axioms hold, survives only as the necessary condition for describing experience, because as a sufficient condition it admits incompatible structures (discrete and non-discrete topologies on the same set), arbitrary re-definitions (every C·d for C > 0) and consciousness-indifferent structures. Worked examples: experienced relative similarity is a strict partial order that satisfies (MSC), given transitivity (assumed). Visual regions form a topology that satisfies (MSC), given Bayne and Chalmers’s subsumptive unity thesis. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-135); worth reading as the most explicit criterion for when a formal model is of experience rather than a convenient description of it. Its two positive results are conditional: transitivity of relative similarity is assumed, and the topology result assumes the subsumptive unity thesis. Cite the Synthese version, which has dropped v1’s argument against metric structure. |
| LIT-144 v3 | Causal Exclusion and Downward Counterfactuals | Pernu (2015), DOI-10.1007/s10670-015-9781-7. The counterfactual theory of causation can answer the causal exclusion problem without being committed to downward causation, provided the semantics of counterfactuals is handled carefully. The exclusion problem itself, however, comes in several distinct forms. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and no full text could be obtained (Springer paywalled on both hosts; OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list it closed; not among the articles of Pernu’s open 2013 dissertation in HELDA, though its §5.2 covers the counterfactual response at an earlier stage; PhilPapers, ResearchGate and Academia.edu refused). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-147 v3 | Mental causation via neuroprosthetics? A critical analysis | Pernu (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11229-018-1713-z. The interventionist/difference-making case for nonreductive mental causation from BCIs (List & Menzies 2009; Menzies 2015; Woodward 2008a,b, 2017) misplaces multiple realisation. What the ensemble recordings show is that one cortical-level variable N (the ensemble’s average firing) is realised by many single-neuron patterns N1, N2. Each intention M corresponds to one value of N. So the counterfactual contrast “∼M □→ ∼B true, ∼N □→ ∼B false” fails, and neuroprosthetics supports mental causation only by identifying M with N, not nonreductive physicalism. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-091); Worth reading as a short, precise diagnosis of a specific equivocation in the interventionist BCI argument (multiple realisation at the wrong level). Its scope is limited to difference-making with a proportionality constraint (fn 1), and its identity conclusion rests on a simplified picture of neural decoding that it asserts rather than argues. |
| LIT-148 v2 | Computational Functionalism for the Deep Learning Era | López-Rubio (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11023-018-9480-7. Deep networks’ success comes from extracting successively higher-level features across multiple layers. López-Rubio argues that this calls for a new version of computational functionalism, keyed to deep neural computation rather than to classic program-based functional organization. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the article paywalled, with no open copy (the Málaga repository has none, and PhilPapers refused the request). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-149 v2 | The information-processing perspective on representation | Martínez (2025), DOI-10.33735/phimisci.2025.11321. A position paper, not an argument to a conclusion. It proposes that representations are signals adapted to transmit information for its own sake (Transmission), and that the evidence for this is efficiency in trading off rate, distortion and coder complexity (RDC Trade-Off). It supports the proposal by showing that cognitive scientists already attribute representational status on those grounds: compression, error protection, and explicitness understood as ease of decoding. It proves no theorem and reports no data of its own. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-165); worth reading as the clearest short statement of a rate–distortion–complexity (teleo)semantics of representation, provided it is read as the position paper it says it is (§1: “comparatively light” on objections); the defence is in Martínez 2019b/2024 and in work the paper says is to come. |
| LIT-150 v3 | What is emergence, after all? | Rizi (2025), ARXIV-2507.04951. A perspective, not an argument with results. Rizi proposes that emergence is present when a many-to-one coarse-graining F (Eq. 1, N′ < N) keeps the macro description predictive after most micro detail is discarded. He says the onset of emergence is located by order parameters, diverging susceptibility and correlation length, and RG fixed points, and that dualities show macro behaviour is not dictated by micro “stuff”. Herd immunity on networks (percolation, the S–R interface density ρ_SR) is offered as a social case. The paper then asserts that science needs only weak emergence, and that invoking strong emergence “steps outside the scope of scientific method”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-153); worth reading as a compact, well-referenced statement of the physicist’s weak-emergence view and a reading list into it (Carroll & Parola, Hoel, Rosas, Witten, De Haro & Butterfield, Dennett). Its framework is stated, not developed: no distortion measure is given for F, and “predictive” is never quantified. |
| LIT-151 v2 | Stating Structural Realism: Mathematics-First Approaches to Physics and Metaphysics | Wallace (2021), DOI-10.1111/phpe.12172. Wallace argues that reading a physical theory “math-first”, as mathematical models plus representation rather than as sentences aiming at truth, already makes scientific realism structural. Math-first theoretical equivalence and reduction (as instantiation) are coarse-grained enough to dissolve the standard underdetermination and theory-change objections. On this footing epistemic and ontic structural realism differ only in whether metaphysics itself is language-first or math-first. On math-first OSR, objects are whatever the best “predicate precisification” of a theory quantifies over, real patterns are defined through instantiation plus best precisification, and ontology is scale-relative. At every non-fundamental level the two versions coincide. The paper is explicitly a statement of the position, not a defence of it. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-142); worth reading as the sharpest statement of what structural realism could mean once theories are taken math-first. It gives precise definitions of math-first ESR/OSR and of real patterns, its diagnosis of why priority-thesis OSR drifted is useful, and it is candid about the undeveloped notion of mathematical equivalence it relies on. |
| LIT-152 v2 | A defence of informational structural realism | Floridi (2007), DOI-10.1007/s11229-007-9163-z. Floridi argues informally in four steps. (1) ESR and (non-eliminativist) OSR are compatible once indexed to levels of abstraction. ESR’s minimal commitment to knowable relations holds at a first-order LoA. At a reflective (“transcendental”) second-order LoA, a second Ockham principle licenses taking the relata to be structural objects. (2) The relata-need-relations regress is blocked by Eddington’s “package hypothesis”: not all relata are logically prior to relations. (3) Structural objects are informational objects, clusters of data understood as concrete “differentiae de re”, made scalable by the object-oriented-programming model. (4) Together these give “informational structural realism”, on which “the ultimate nature of reality is informational” (p. 32). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-099); worth reading as the source statement of informational structural realism, which the literature cites and builds on (Karpenko LIT-215, Bynum, Beni, Long, Wheeler). Read §§2.4, 3 and 5 for the position and §6.9 for what “informational” does and does not mean. The LoA reconciliation is a proposal, not a result. |
| LIT-153 v2 | Making sense of transformer success | Angius et al. (2025), DOI-10.3389/frai.2025.1509338. Current attempts to explain transformer language models’ competence fall into three kinds, and the paper maps each onto an explanatory form from philosophy of cognitive science: machine psychology is Cummins-style functional analysis, induction-head work is Machamer–Darden–Craver mechanistic explanation, and NLM–fMRI brain-score studies are a bidirectional “co-simulation”. Its only thesis is that these do not differ from how cognitive science explains humans. Functional analyses are to be reduced to mechanisms as “mechanism sketches”. The paper rests on existing literature and adds no new analysis or data. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-106); worth reading only as a philosopher’s map of interpretability methods sorted by explanation type, and for the “co-simulation” label; the argument is thin, the Transformer primer contains a technical error, and a reader wanting the underlying results should go to the cited primary work (Elhage et al. 2021, Olsson et al. 2022, Caucheteux et al.). |
| LIT-156 v4 | An Emerging Dilemma for Reciprocal Causation | Hazelwood (2023), DOI-10.1017/psa.2023.124. Hazelwood defines RC as “the process of natural selection is both a cause and effect of processes such as niche construction” and EC as “natural selection is an emergent causal process”. He argues they are incompatible. Emergence here is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus autonomy, cashed out as Pence’s composition. If EC holds, niche construction partly composes selection, so the two fail Woodward’s independent-fixability condition and cannot stand in a causal relation. If EC fails, selection is either non-causal (statisticalism) or individual-level, which is incoherent because relative fitness needs a population (Millstein, Sober). EES proponents should drop RC but can keep niche construction as a genuine cause of the evolutionary product. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-137); worth reading as a tight, well-sourced argument that brings the reciprocal-causation debate into the composition, exclusion and interventionism literature. Its force depends on accepting a process/product split for selection and a compositional reading of realization, both argued briefly and flagged as contestable. |
| LIT-157 v3 | Reproducees, reproducers, and Darwinian individuals | Bourrat (2025), DOI-10.1007/s11229-024-04880-w. Bourrat builds a nested vocabulary. A reproducee is a B that comes after A, is caused by A, and is of A’s relevant class. A reproducer is a reproducee with reproductive autonomy, meaning it can reproduce across a range of backgrounds. A Darwinian individual is a reproducer with high reproductive causal control, meaning heredity survives as the parent’s description is made finer. On that vocabulary, genes of multicellular organisms are, like hearts, mere reproducees, but with high control. Material overlap is necessary for reproducers, which are whole life cycles, and unnecessary for reproducees, so Griesemer and Godfrey-Smith partly talk past each other. Both quantities get an information-theoretic recipe (conditional MI after Bertschinger et al. 2008 for autonomy; interventional MI across grains, Griffiths et al.’s INF, for control), and neither is computed. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-100); worth reading as the clearest statement of the reproduced/reproducing distinction and a tidy, well-scoped settlement of the material-overlap dispute. Its value is conceptual. Its two measures are recipes that are never computed, and the autonomy recipe does not match its own verbal definition. |
| 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-160 v2 | Units and Levels of Selection | Lloyd (2005), https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/selection-units/. Lloyd’s own four-question anatomy of “unit of selection”: interactor, reproducer (formerly replicator), manifestor of adaptation, and beneficiary. She combines it with a split between two multilevel schools, Wrightian “Evolutionary Change” and Fisherian “Adaptationist/KS”. She uses the two to argue for a verdict, not merely to map the debates. The verdict is that most rejections of group, species and holobiont selection come from demanding that an interactor also be a manifestor of engineering adaptation. By her account, genic pluralism, the ETI models and Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian populations each fuse roles that should be kept apart. The support is argument plus citation of Wade, Goodnight and others. The entry reports no new results of its own. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-184); worth reading as the authoritative statement of the interactor / reproducer / manifestor / beneficiary distinction and as a dense map of the units-of-selection literature to 2023. It has to be read as one side’s case. It is not a neutral survey: it argues for the Evolutionary Change school, and it criticises by name several authors this record holds or cites. |
| 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-164 v3 | Wave-Function Realism and the Scope of Physical Causal Closure | Poltorak (2026), https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/30720/. A closure principle has two tacit parameters, its domain and its completeness relation (causal, dynamical or explanatory). Wave-function realism falsifies spatiotemporal-domain closure (STC) but is compatible with fundamental-physical closure (FPC), so there is no “trans-domain causal breach”. The physicalist is left with a dilemma: STC is too narrow, and FPC needs an independent criterion of physicality plus a dynamical-to-causal bridge. The paper tests this across primitive-ontology, spacetime-state, multi-field, Everettian, nomological and dispositional readings. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-112); worth reading as the clearest statement of what quantum ontology does and does not do to causal-closure arguments. Its conclusions are modest, and it concedes that its main target is a picture rather than a published argument. Unrefereed. |
| 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-167 v3 | The Organism | Baedke (2025), DOI-10.1017/9781009495035. Baedke treats “organism” as a nexus concept with an organizational dimension and a relational dimension, joined by the various kinds of biological individuality. He argues that the standard “persister” (self-maintenance, closure) criterion cannot single organisms out, because colonies, holobionts and ecosystems meet it too, and that organisms are also “overcomers”, able to destabilize and reorganize their own closure. Organisms are then individuated relationally by tracing diachronic causal paths in the unrolled O/E model of Baedke et al. 2021 (LIT-110). The overcomer claim rests on three illustrative cases, anglerfish, sea slug and jumping ant, and is asserted, not shown, to hold of organisms only (p. 40). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-148); worth reading as a compact, open-access and historically well-informed synthesis of the organism/individuality debate, and as the clearest statement of the persister-vs-overcomer distinction. Its positive account is, in the author’s words, drawn “with rough brushstrokes” (p. 51), so cite it for the problem statement and the distinction, not as having settled organism individuation. |
| LIT-168 v3 | Biological Individuals | Wilson & Barker (2007), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-individual/. A survey that maps biological individuals by crossing two axes: organism / some parts of organisms / some groups of organisms, against living agent (physiological) / Darwinian (evolutionary) individual. The result is nine regions, each given one example (fruit fly, gene, eusocial colony, lysosome, clade, heart, coral reef, virus, squid+Vibrio). “Part” is never defined, and the entry gives no criterion for which parts or groups count: the placements are the authors’ tentative judgements, “moving from less contentious to more contentious examples” (§7). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-114); worth reading as the standard map of the biological-individuality literature up to 2023 and the hub for this record’s cluster (LIT-049, LIT-157, LIT-188, LIT-142, LIT-210); it is a survey with one tentative framework of its own, not an argument for a thesis, and for parthood it only supplies examples. |
| LIT-169 v2 | Defining the niche for niche construction: evolutionary and ecological niches | Trappes (2021), DOI-10.1007/s10539-021-09805-2. Trappes compares NCT’s evolutionary niche with the ecological niche. The evolutionary niche is the sum of selection pressures on a population (Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman 2003), read “externally” as the environmental factors that produce fitness differences. The ecological niche is the conditions that permit continued existence; for a population, mean absolute fitness ≥ 1. Even at their closest, against the realized population niche, the two differ in extension. Habitat degradation is in the evolutionary niche but not the ecological one, and commensalism and non-limiting resources are in the ecological niche but not the evolutionary one. So NCT’s niche is not the “simple translation” of Hutchinson’s niche its proponents claim, and the evolutionary significance of niche construction must be shown case by case rather than following from the definition. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-155); worth reading as a short, clean conceptual analysis that turns “persistence versus fitness differences” into a precise wedge between two fields’ uses of “niche”; its empirical cases are admittedly thin (the CO2 case is offered as “possible”), and it analyses only the 2003 book’s niche concept. |
| LIT-170 v2 | Unitary inequivalence as a problem for structural realism | French (2010), DOI-10.1016/j.shpsb.2011.09.001. French answers Howard’s objection that QFT’s unitarily inequivalent representations leave the structural realist with non-isomorphic, competing structures. He offers two routes. The first is to adopt cut-off “conventional” QFT with Wallace, on which the inequivalence is an artefact or harmless. The second is to follow Ruetsche’s Swiss Army Knife and treat the algebra as a modal structure spanning all representations. On that reading spontaneous symmetry breaking preserves the symmetry across the degenerate vacua, and the DHR analysis derives quantum statistics from the algebra. Adding Baker’s criterion, on which a symmetry mapping between representations suffices for intertranslatability, removes the assumption behind the objection, and French ends with a third option that combines the two routes. Every step is an informal argument layered on others’ technical results; the paper proves nothing itself. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-162); worth reading as a leading ontic structural realist’s worked response to the strongest physics-based objection to OSR beyond finite-dimensional QM, and for its clear staging of the Wallace–Fraser and algebraic versus Hilbert-space debates. A reader should cite the 2012 journal version; this note reads the 2010 draft. |
| 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-173 v2 | From ontic structural realism to metaphysical coherentism | Morganti (2018), DOI-10.1007/s13194-018-0233-5. Morganti argues from a survey rather than proving anything. Strong, moderate and contextualist OSR each fail as metaphysics: particle kinds have intrinsic features no group-theoretic analysis reduces, and the argument from permutation invariance is inconclusive. What OSR gets right about symmetry, entanglement and particle kinds is better captured by “metaphysical coherentism”: object-like entities (in one domain) stand in symmetric partial ontological dependence on one another. Cycles of such dependence can be kept irreflexive, and so explanatorily non-trivial, by relaxing transitivity (quasi-transitivity) or by making only partial dependence symmetric. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-095); worth reading as the clearest statement of a dependence-based, object-friendly alternative to relation-first OSR, and a hub for the grounding, holism and OSR literatures; its physics applications are programmatic, and he says so himself (pp. 18–19). |
| 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-176 v2 | Events and the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics | Dorato (2015), ARXIV-1503.01140. Dorato argues, without formal results, that events are the metaphysical category best suited to quantum mechanics. An event reading fits GRW flashes, GRW matter density and Bohmian worldlines, and also the antirealist views of ψ held by Bohr, Rovelli, Haag and Pashby. Because it is the same across interpretations, he calls it “interpretation-independent” (p. 12). Where ψ needs a realist reading, it should be read as intrinsic dispositions of events. Esfeld et al.’s view has the opposite structure: bare matter points plus a single holistic power of the universal configuration. Dorato argues that view is unintelligible, and that it must change its ontology when it passes from the universal wave function to the effective one (pp. 13–15). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-105); worth reading as a short, clear statement of event-primitivism for primitive-ontology theories, and of intrinsic (not holistic) dispositions against Esfeld et al. It is programmatic. By Dorato’s own account (p. 15) the relation between events and powers is left for future work, and without that the event reading does little work beyond relabelling. |
| LIT-177 v2 | The Relational Interpretation of Quantum Physics | Rovelli (2021), ARXIV-2109.09170. Rovelli restates RQM as an ontology of sparse relative facts, which arise in interactions and are labelled by the interacting systems. Its one technical rule is that an amplitude W(b,a) gives the probability P = |W|² only when a and b are relative to the same system. That rule removes the clash between P_collapse = Σᵢ|W(c,bᵢ)|²|W(bᵢ,a)|² and P_unitary = |ΣᵢW(c,bᵢ)W(bᵢ,a)|² (eqs. 2–4). Decoherence makes some facts approximately label-independent (“stable”). ψ is a relative-state bookkeeping device, like a Hamilton–Jacobi function S. The price, which Rovelli states, is giving up “strong realism”: values are not held at all times, may be held at different times for different systems, and there is no coherent global view and no quantum state of the universe. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-174); worth reading as the author’s own compact, current statement of RQM, and a good anchor citation for relational and perspectival readings. It is expository, not argumentative. It does not engage the inter-observer consistency objections in any depth, and the main technical rule is postulated, not derived. |
| LIT-179 v2 | Algorithmic Nudging: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Oversight | Schmauder et al. (2023), DOI-10.1007/s11245-023-09907-4. A short position paper: two case studies show AI agents learning to exploit documented biases (in Dezfouli et al. 2020 an RL agent moved choices of a target lottery from 50% to 70%). Against a Friedman-style judgement of AI nudges by outcome alone, the authors extend Hausman’s “look under the hood” rejoinder and propose obliging developers to consult cognitive scientists, because an AI system may exploit biases that are not yet known. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-171); worth a short read as a clear, citable statement of the case for mechanism-level oversight of AI nudging, but it adds no new evidence: its empirical content is second-hand, and its central worry (AI exploiting undocumented biases) is argued, not shown. |
| LIT-180 v3 | Symmetry and Conservation Laws | Wigner (1964), DOI-10.1073/pnas.51.5.956. Wigner argues that invariance principles stand to the laws of nature as laws stand to events — they give structure to the laws — and distinguishes geometrical invariances (formulated on events; yielding energy/momentum/angular-momentum conservation, most directly in quantum kinematics) from dynamical ones such as gauge invariance and, he holds, general covariance, which are tied to specific interactions. | Unfetched — seeded from the abstract and a skim on 2026-09-26 (the skim read a Wayback copy of the PNAS scan); a close reading was attempted the same day and could not fetch the paper: the Wayback Machine reset its connections, Europe PMC refused the PDF, and PMC returned a challenge page. The paper is open in the PNAS archive, so this is an access failure, not a paywall. It stays Unfetched until it can be fetched. Free copy: doi:10.1073/pnas.51.5.956 (the PNAS open archive; also PMC300191). |
| LIT-184 v2 | Effective Ontic Structural Realism | Ladyman & Lorenzetti (2023), DOI-10.1086/729061. Ladyman and Lorenzetti argue that three recent “effective realisms” lack a metaphysics that makes them realist rather than constructive-empiricist, and that the Ladyman–Ross OSR package supplies one: realism about modal structure, “to be is to be a real pattern”, and scale-relative ontology. The three are Fraser & Vickers (and Egg) on non-relativistic QM, Williams and Fraser on QFT, and Robertson & Wilson on “theoretical relicts”. Scale relativity also dissolves Saatsi’s inconsistency objection, so Newtonian gravitational forces and GR gravitation “both exist at different scales”. Egg’s 2019 anthropocentrism objection is answered by grounding measurement in decoherence. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-129); worth reading as a short, clear map tying the effective-realism literature to OSR’s modal-structure and real-patterns ontology; its arguments are programmatic, and each step leans on Ladyman & Ross (2007) rather than new argument. |
| 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-188 v5 | Scaffolding individuality: coordination, cooperation, collaboration and community | Griesemer & Shavit (2023), DOI-10.1098/rstb.2021.0398. The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-173); a short programmatic sketch, and the authors call it one. It is worth knowing as the compact statement of Griesemer’s scaffolding, reproducer and generative-entrenchment view applied to human social transitions. Its headline claims (non-circularity; individuality as a special case of collectivity) appear only in the abstract. Two things would settle it: the model of community “reliability” and endogenization the authors promise in §2 (“We hope to explore such models in future work”), or an application of the 3Cs to a worked case, such as the companion Neolithic paper (LIT-1935, registered unread), that separates collection, conexus and community by measurable criteria. Re-read 2026-11-01 (NOTE-173, version 3). |
| 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-192 v2 | What’s at stake in the debate over naturalizing teleology? An overlooked metatheoretical debate | Nahas & Sachs (2023), DOI-10.1007/s11229-023-04147-w. The paper argues that “naturalizing teleology” serves at least two relatively autonomous projects with different success criteria. One is scientific: whether an organism-centred account improves biology, which requires operationalisable models that may trade truth for usefulness. The other is philosophical: whether organismal teleology reshapes the liberal-versus-scientific naturalism debate about mind in nature, which requires truth but no operationalisation. It applies the distinction to one recurring dispute, the demarcation of teleological systems from dissipative structures. In the scientific context, models “cannot and need not” demarcate (§4.1: Cusimano & Sterner; McShea & Babcock). In the philosophical context, preferences between accounts turn on unstated commitments (§4.2: García-Valdecasas’s Aristotelian case for Deacon over the Organizational Approach). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-094); worth reading as a compact map of organism-centred teleology (the Organizational Approach, Deacon, Walsh, McShea) and for one reusable move, asking which problem an account of goal-directedness is meant to solve. Its positive pluralism is only suggested (“tempting to suggest”, §5), and it is shown on a single dispute. |
| LIT-194 v3 | Religion and Science | De Cruz (2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religion-science/. A survey, not an argument. It reports that the scholarly field rejects the conflict model the public holds, and it finds Barbour’s four-way taxonomy (conflict, independence, dialogue, integration) influential but neither exhaustive nor exclusive. Its survey of five traditions shows the relation varies with creed and colonial history, and it describes the field fragmenting into claim-by-claim “science engaged theology”. Its metaphysical content is concentrated in §1.2 (methodological vs ontological naturalism) and §3.1 (divine action under deterministic, chaotic and quantum physics; primary vs secondary causation; chance and providence). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-107); worth reading as the standard orientation to the science–religion literature and as a map of the divine-action and naturalism debates; it is a survey, so its claims are only as strong as the works it cites, and it is written from within the (largely Christian) field it describes. |
| LIT-196 v3 | Ontological Priority: The Conceptual Basis of Non-eliminative, Ontic Structural Realism | Chakravartty (2011), DOI-10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_10. Non-eliminative OSR needs relations to be prior to their relata in the determination of their identity. Chakravartty argues that every available account of objects (substance, bundle theory, bundles of dispositionally individuated properties) leaves identity-fixing intrinsic features, and that stripping all of them away is just eliminativism. So OSR faces an exclusive disjunction: eliminativism, or a role for the intrinsic in identity. The graph-theory analogy and the physics cases (entanglement, spacetime points) do not escape the dilemma. The argument is conceptual throughout, and it explicitly leaves eliminative OSR untouched. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-149); worth reading as the clearest statement of the dilemma facing relation-priority versions of OSR. Its §10.3 explication of “ontological priority” as a dependence claim is reused widely, and it names its own soft spot: the intrinsic/extrinsic asymmetry argument in §10.5. |
| LIT-199 v3 | The Philosophy and Physics of Duality | De Haro & Butterfield (2025), ARXIV-2508.01616. The book gives a formal Schema: a duality is an isomorphism between the “model roots” (state space, quantities, dynamics) of two models of a common-core bare theory, with values and dynamics matching. It pairs this with an interpretative condition: duals are physically equivalent iff (A) they are duals and (B) i1 = i2∘d. On that basis it argues four things. First, there are no genuine cases of in-principle underdetermination in the examples, and a cautious realist can commit to the common core. Second, dualities do not favour structural realism. Third, duality is formally incompatible with ontological emergence, except “beside” it (AdS/CFT’s RG direction), via effective dualities, or epistemically. Fourth, quasi-dualities motivate a “geometric view” on which models are charts on a successor theory’s moduli space. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-178); worth reading as the reference treatment of dualities in philosophy of physics. It supplies definitions (the Schema, §3.1, and physical equivalence, §12.1.2, p. 402) and a common vocabulary (internal/external interpretation, common core, quasi-duality) that the rest of the record’s duality works either use or argue against. Its physics examples are admittedly partly conjectural (AdS/CFT, Montonen–Olive and M-theory are unproven), and its realism is a stated position, not a derivation. |
| LIT-200 v2 | Wave-functionalism | Allori (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-021-03332-z. Allori proposes that the wave function be defined by three roles — empirical, nomological and explanatory. On this view it is an ingredient that “partially realizes” the law, not a law and not a material field. So its time-dependence and non-uniqueness (a phase shift, a density matrix) are harmless, it counts as non-epistemic and ontic, and it can take part in constructive explanation. Each of these is argued informally, and the escape from PBR is by relabelling the ontic/epistemic distinction, not by engaging the theorem. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-154); a distinct and clearly placed option in the ψ-as-law family (LIT-204 §4.2). It is unproven until “part of the law” and “non-representational yet ontic” are given content that separates the view from Humean nomologism, and until it answers the “too cheap” objection it invites. |
| LIT-201 v2 | Alternative formulations of multilevel selection | Damuth & Heisler (1988), DOI-10.1007/BF00647962. Multilevel selection comes in two formulations — MLS1, the effects of group membership on individual fitness, and MLS2, groups’ own tendencies to go extinct or found new groups — which answer different questions about one process, and much of the group-selection and species-selection dispute comes from running them together. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the article paywalled at Springer, with no open, repository or author copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| 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-204 v2 | Realism about the Wave Function | Chen (2018), ARXIV-1810.07010. A survey that sorts realist readings of the non-relativistic universal wave function into four ontological readings (a field on 3N-dimensional space, a multi-field on 3-space, properties of systems as in spacetime state realism, a Hilbert-space vector), two nomological ones (strong: time-independent and simple like the classical Hamiltonian; weak: a Humean best-system variable) and Maudlin’s sui generis option. It tabulates their compatibility with BM, GRW0/m/f and S0/Sm and with high- versus low-dimensional fundamental space (Table 1, 10 of 56 cells ”?”), and declares no winner. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-175); worth reading as the compact map of the realist options and the hub for the wave-function cluster (LIT-200, LIT-100, LIT-164, LIT-121, LIT-176), with the caution that Table 1 is asserted, not derived, and is uneven in places. |
| LIT-205 v2 | One equation to rule them all: a philosophical analysis of the Price equation | Luque (2016), DOI-10.1007/s10539-016-9538-y. Luque argues that the Price equation, Δz̄ = Cov(w, z) + E(wΔz) (eq. 1, p. 7), is a Kuhnian “generalization-sketch”, like f = ma. It is not a model, has no predictive power on its own, and becomes empirical only when a specific model interprets it. On that reading the critics’ charges (van Veelen 2005; van Veelen et al. 2012; Nowak & Highfield 2011) that it is “a tautology” and “lacks predictive power” are either false or ask too much, and he recommends that evolutionary biologists adopt it as their unifying framework. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-101); worth reading as a clear statement of the generalization-sketch reading of the Price equation and as a map of its extensions up to 2015 (Tables 2–3). The philosophical argument is thin in places, notably the Gödel-based case that it is “not a tautology”, so it should be read as one side of the dispute and not as a settlement of it. |
| LIT-210 v2 | Philosophy of Microbiology | O’Malley & Parke (2020), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/microbiology/. O’Malley & Parke argue in four steps that philosophy should attend to microbes. Microbes do most of the planet’s biological work and underlie every major transition. Microbiology founded medicine, molecular biology and genomics. Microbes are unusually good material models, including for phenomena once defined by animals (predation, ageing, kin recognition, cognition). Microbiome research bears on individuality and causation. They are sceptical about the strongest microbiome claims. Whether host and microbiome form one unit of selection is “still disputed”. Claims that microbiomes change the “self” are “usually expressed in very vague language”. The 2026 revision adds that Asgard-archaea phylogenies may make eukaryogenesis “first and foremost a story about diversification within Archaea” rather than a transition in individuality. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-159); worth reading as a short, current (April 2026) orientation to where microbes change philosophy of biology, with a useful deflationary check on microbiome-and-self claims. It is a survey with no thesis beyond “pay attention to microbes”; for individuality it points onward to the Biological Individuals (LIT-168) and Units and Levels of Selection (LIT-160) entries. |
| LIT-211 v3 | What Lives? A meta-analysis of diverse opinions on the definition of life | Bender et al. (2025), ARXIV-2505.15849. Three LLMs (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3 70B), each run 3 times on both orderings of every pair, rated 68 hand-solicited definitions of life on a −1 to 1 “correlation” rubric. The averaged matrix, cut by complete-linkage clustering at an elbow, gives 8 clusters, 45/68 of them (66%) in “Cognitive Autonomy” (n=24) and “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” (n=21). The clusters are weak: the repo’s own saved statistics give an overall silhouette of 0.079, and cross-model agreement is an unadjusted Rand index of 71–79% against a chance level of about 62–74%. The headline that life is “a continuous semantic landscape” is not tested against any alternative. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-109); worth reading as a dataset: 68 signed, three-sentence definitions of life from named researchers, with a manual thematic coding (Table 1). Its computational conclusions are weakly supported and are better read as illustrations than as findings. |
| 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-215 v2 | Defending Informational Structural Realism: The View of Alternatives | Karpenko (2025), DOI-10.5840/eps202562230. Karpenko argues against V.E. Terekhovich’s non-eliminative OSR, which holds that entities and structures exist but “objects do not exist”. He extends Floridi’s informational structural realism with one thesis: empirically equivalent but structurally different models (wave/particle/field descriptions, superstring dualities, AdS/CFT holography, equivalent programs in digital physics) have equal ontological standing. Since nothing stands “behind” them with a privileged configuration, the descriptions, i.e. information, are themselves fundamental, and theoretical objects exist as ontological primitives. There is no formal argument, and the physics is presented by assertion, with several errors. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-096); not worth a reader’s time on this topic. It misreports its source (Floridi, LIT-152) on the points it builds on, and it states contested or wrong physics as established. Its one novel move, reading dualities as equal-status alternatives rather than underdetermination, is asserted, not argued, and is done properly in the duality literature (LIT-113, LIT-199). |
| LIT-217 v3 | Science, Metaphysics and Structural Realism | Ladyman (2001), DOI-10.21825/philosophica.82261. Ladyman argues that structural realism should be metaphysically, not epistemically, revisionary. He gives three grounds. Quantum statistics leaves the individuality of particles underdetermined: permutation invariance gives 3 two-particle states, not 4, so probabilities are 1/3 rather than 1/4 (p. 62). Entangled states give non-supervenient relations that refute Humean supervenience (pp. 71–73). The hole argument blocks point-based substantivalism (pp. 68–69). He proposes that science describes “the modal structure of the phenomena” (p. 73), with modal realism supplying the no-miracles intuition. The paper ends non-eliminatively: “the phenomena have structure but they are not structure” (p. 74). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-192); Worth reading as the earliest freely available statement of ontic structural realism by its originator. It argues the Humean-supervenience and quantum-individuality points more fully than the SEP survey (LIT-045). It also shows that the 2001 view was a modest one, realism about modal structure with no eliminativism, before Every Thing Must Go. Its positive proposal takes two paragraphs (pp. 73–74) and is programmatic. |
| LIT-218 v2 | Ontic Structural Realism and Economics | Ross (2008), DOI-10.1086/594518. Ross argues that OSR, usually motivated only by fundamental physics, is also the right ontology for a mature special science, economics. The progress of economic theory from Jevons through Hicks–Allen (1934), Samuelson (1947), Debreu (1959) and Arrow (1965) consists in steadily removing psychological, individual-level hypotheses. Its basic objects are optimisation problems, above all games, which are “mathematical structures … whose relata are distinguished as such by the mathematical representations … just like quarks and bosons” (§3). So OSR, joined with an assumption that science is unified, gets consilient support from outside physics. Individuals, in physics and in economics, are “book-keeping devices”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-189); Worth reading as Ross’s own short statement of what OSR says outside physics. It argues that individuals are bookkeeping heuristics while “tables and rocks” and people still exist, and that consilience across the sciences, not physics alone, can support OSR. Its history of economics is a sketch, and its central claims are asserted from the formalism rather than argued against a worked alternative. Cite the 2008 Philosophy of Science version. This note reads the 2006 preprint. |
| LIT-219 v2 | Patterns All the Way Up: Prolegomena to a Future Naturalized Metaphysics | Ladyman (2026), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/15550.003.0006. Ladyman restates the Ladyman–Ross metaphysics as fifteen theses drawn from scientific practice. The existence criterion is “to be is to be a real pattern”, a pattern that “indispensibly figures in projectible generalisations” (p. 2). Realism is realism about natural modal structure, which is “absolute” in formal mode but “domain and scale-dependent” in material mode (thesis 4). There is no single hierarchy of levels and no assumed fundamental level (theses 10–11, fn. 9). Ontology is effective and scale-relative (thesis 12). Scientific real patterns are lossy compressions, unlike the Game of Life’s; the ideal gas laws use 3 degrees of freedom for ~10²³ (thesis 14). He quotes ETMG’s Principle of Naturalistic Closure verbatim and calls it “problematic” because it refers to fundamental physics (p. 8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-191); Worth reading as the most recent and most compact statement of rainforest realism by one of its two authors, and the one that explicitly revises Every Thing Must Go. It weakens the PNC, denies that “relational structure is fundamental” was meant as fundamentalism, and recasts real patterns modally and statistically as well as information-theoretically. Its fifteen theses are asserted and illustrated, not argued. It presupposes the book’s definitions, which it does not restate. |
| LIT-220 v2 | Real Patterns | Dennett (1991), DOI-10.2307/2027085. A pattern is real in some data “if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it” (p. 34). This is Chaitin’s incompressibility definition of randomness turned around (p. 32). Dennett uses the criterion, with the Game of Life’s gliders and eaters as the stepping stone (pp. 37–42), to defend “mild realism” about beliefs. Folk psychology tracks a real, noisy pattern of enormous predictive leverage. Two rival interpretations can be “different, but equally real, patterns” with no deeper fact to settle between them (p. 49). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-190); Worth reading as the source of the real-patterns criterion that rainforest realism generalises into a theory of existence, and as the paper whose exact definition the later literature modifies. It has a lossless-compression criterion, observer-relativity through “perspectives”, and trade-offs between noise and simplicity. Its target is beliefs, not ontology in general. Dennett explicitly declines the label question (“I think that the view itself is clearer than either of the labels”, p. 51). |
| LIT-222 v2 | No categorial support for radical ontic structural realism | Lam & Wüthrich (2015), DOI-10.1093/bjps/axt053. Lam and Wüthrich argue that category theory gives radical OSR no support. Identifying objects with identity arrows is relabelling (§3). Generalized elements X → A exist in every category, so elements are not eliminated (§4). Categories without products also lose set-style relations, “throwing out the relations with the relata” (§4). Morphisms relate C-objects, not the elements that stand for physical relata, and they “only distinguish isomorphism classes of structures” (§5). Bain’s GR and TQFT cases eliminate at most spacetime points, not relata tout court (§§6–7). They conclude that category theory “offers little if any comfort to ROSR” (abstract) and favour “balanced” OSR. The Yoneda lemma is not named, although §§4–5 state two of its consequences. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-194); Worth reading as the most careful direct refutation of Bain (yo2). Its main points (generalized elements, morphisms relate C-objects, determination only up to isomorphism, sections are not maximal ideals) are correct and are exactly what the Yoneda reading needs. It has a few category-theoretic slips of its own: Hilb said to lack products, a mis-definition of topos, and the claim that non-commutative algebras have no maximal ideals. |
| LIT-223 v2 | Category-theoretic structure and radical ontic structural realism | Bain (2013), DOI-10.1007/s11229-011-9896-6. Bain argues that the “relations without relata” objection to radical OSR depends on defining structure set-theoretically, where a relation is a subset of X × X. If a structure is instead “an object in a category”, its elements (arrows 1 → A) are “not essential”, because category-theoretic objects need not be structured sets. His examples are sheaves of Einstein algebras for GR with asymptotic boundary conditions, which may lack global sections (§3), and nCob and Hilb (§4). He concludes that ROSR “avoids the charge that it rests on an incoherent claim” (p. 1634). The paper never mentions the Yoneda lemma, representable functors or universal properties by name. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-193); Worth reading as the short, canonical statement of the category-theoretic defence of radical OSR, which the later literature (yo3; Lal & Teh; Eva 2016) responds to. Read it with yo3. Its central inference is overstated, and its GR section contains technical errors that yo3 documents. |
| 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-276 v2 | Measurement as Sheafification: Context, Logic, and Truth after Quantum Mechanics | Ghose (2025), ARXIV-2512.12249. A programmatic essay, with no theorem, model or computation of its own. It restates Abramsky & Brandenburger’s criterion (contextuality and non-locality as the absence of a global section of a presheaf over measurement contexts) and adds three things. It declares measurement to be “sheafification” of that presheaf, without specifying a site, a topology or any sheafified object. It asserts that the Ghose–Patra seven-valued logic is a finite Heyting algebra, without giving an order or operations. It proposes that a quantum potential scaled by 0 ≤ λ ≤ 1 (λ = 1 quantum, λ = 0 classical Hamilton–Jacobi) carries the presheaf continuously to a sheaf, which is asserted, not modelled. Its one worked formula, v2’s Čech “obstruction class” [δs], is a coboundary and so is zero by construction. | Rejected — read in full 2026-09-27 (NOTE-249); not worth a reader’s time for its formal claims. Every correct formal ingredient is Abramsky & Brandenburger’s (LIT-016) or Abramsky, Mansfield & Barbosa’s, and both are better read in the original. What the essay adds is either unconstructed (the sheafification, the site, the seven-element Heyting algebra, the link from λ to cohomology) or wrong as stated: v2’s obstruction class is zero by construction, a sheaf topos is not in general Boolean, and classical distributions do not form a sheaf. Its only value is as a record of a position, the Bohrian reading of contextuality plus the Jaina analogy. |
| LIT-301 v3 | Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized | Ladyman et al. (2007), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276196.001.0001. Argues for a naturalized metaphysics constrained by physics, defending ontic structural realism and a ‘rainforest realism’ of real patterns (building on Dennett 1991) with no self-subsistent individuals (per standard description). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-302 v2 | The Platonic Representation Hypothesis | Huh et al. (2024), ARXIV-2405.07987. A position paper with one argument and three measurements. Measured with mutual 10-nearest-neighbour overlap, vision models that solve more VTAB tasks agree more with each other (78 models). Language models with lower bits-per-byte agree more with DINOv2, CLIP and others on Wikipedia image–caption pairs, and this alignment tracks HellaSwag and GSM8K scores. The cross-modal score “only reaches 0.16” out of a maximum of 1 (§6), and a CKA version “revealed a very weak trend” (App. A). The formal argument (§4.2, App. F) shows only this: in an idealised world of discrete events seen through bijective observations, the Bayes-optimal NCE critic is the pointwise-mutual-information kernel plus a constant, and that kernel is representable as an inner product under a sufficient smoothness condition (Prop. F.1). So every such modality shares one kernel, up to an additive constant. | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-286); worth reading as the source of the “Platonic representation hypothesis” and of the one clean formal statement behind it (Bayes-optimal NCE critics equal the PMI kernel, so bijective modalities share a kernel). Read the empirical case as local nearest-neighbour agreement of modest size, chosen after CKA showed little. Read the endpoint, “a statistical model of reality”, as a conjecture that the paper’s own §6 bounds by the mutual information between modalities. |
| LIT-310 v2 | A topos foundation for theories of physics: IV. Categories of systems | Döring & Isham (2008), DOI-10.1063/1.2883826. Proposes axioms for a category Sys of physical systems, symmetric-monoidal under composite ⋄ and under disjoint sum ⊔, whose arrows are translations of local languages. Each arrow j : S₁ → S is realised by a left-exact functor τ(j) between the systems’ topoi, together with arrows φ(j) : Σ_{S₁} → τ(j)Σ_S and β(j) : τ(j)R_S → R_{S₁}. Classical physics satisfies the scheme exactly. In quantum theory the disjoint sum H₁⊕H₂ satisfies it (the pulled-back arrow of Â₁⊕Â₂ is δ̆(A₁)), but the composite H₁⊗H₂ does not: the natural pull-back of δ̆(A₁) differs from δ̆(A₁⊗1̂) off the image of V(H₁), which the authors attribute to “operator entanglement”. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-285); promising and unproven. The rules are explicitly “experimental”, the quantum composite fails the commutativity condition the rules state, and the key negative claims ((4.46), and that no operator B̂ gives the pulled-back arrow) are asserted, not shown. What would settle it is a proof of (4.46) and of the non-existence of B̂, plus a variant of the rules (or of the context category) under which tensor-product composites satisfy (3.18). |
| 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-336 v3 | Universals and Scientific Realism (Vol. I: Nominalism and Realism; Vol. II: A Theory of Universals) | Armstrong (1978), https://archive.org/details/universalsscient0000arms. Vol. I argues against the varieties of nominalism (including resemblance nominalism) and against transcendent universals; Vol. II develops a theory of immanent universals whose identity is settled a posteriori by science (per standard description). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-342 v3 | What is Structural Realism? | Ladyman (1998), DOI-10.1016/S0039-3681(98)80129-5. Distinguishes epistemic from metaphysical (ontic) structural realism and argues that structural realism should be a revision of ontology, not only of what we can know, drawing on quantum physics (per standard description; abstract not retrieved). | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 from metadata and published descriptions, not read: registered because the owner’s prior-art novelty map cites it. A close reading was attempted on 2026-09-29 and no legitimate full text could be reached; it stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-343 v2 | A topos foundation for theories of physics: I. Formal languages for physics | Döring & Isham (2008), DOI-10.1063/1.2883740. The programme paper. Its contention is that a theory of a physical system S is a representation of a typed “local language” L(S) (ground types Σ and R, function symbols A : Σ → R) in a topos. Physical quantities become arrows Σ_φ → R_φ, and propositions become sub-objects of Σ_φ, which form a Heyting algebra. Classical physics is the representation in Sets. The paper proves nothing. Its one argument is that the axiom ¬(A ε Δ) ⇔ A ε ℝ∖Δ is not validated by non-Boolean Heyting representations (§3.2.1). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-277); worth reading as the statement and vocabulary of the Döring–Isham programme (neo-realism, PL(S) and L(S), state object and quantity-value object, representation in a topos). It is discursive and contains no results, and every piece of quantum mathematics is deferred to papers II–III (LIT-335, LIT-299). |
| LIT-360 v2 | Notes on Landauer’s principle, reversible computation, and Maxwell’s Demon | Bennett (2002), arXiv:physics/0210005. Bennett states Landauer’s principle as a consequence of the Second Law. A logically irreversible step, meaning erasure or a merge of control flow, must export at least the lost entropy (k ln 2 per bit) to non-information-bearing degrees of freedom. That export need not take the form of heat (p. 1). Logically reversible operations, including copying onto a blank register and measurement, have no minimum cost. He calls “an intrinsic cost of order kT for every elementary act of information processing” a 20th-century “misconception” (pp. 5–6). Erasing random data can itself be thermodynamically reversible; the waste comes from applying a many-to-one operation to known data (pp. 1, 4). | Active — read in full 2026-09-29 (NOTE-310); Worth reading as a short, first-hand statement, by the principle’s main defender, of what Landauer’s principle requires (logical irreversibility) and what it does not (any cost for acquiring, copying or evaluating information). It is the best reachable stand-in for the unreachable LIT-328. Read it knowing that it is an argued position paper, not a derivation. On the Earman–Norton “unnecessary or insufficient” dilemma Bennett concedes the point “with some justice” (p. 5) and defends the principle only as pedagogy. |
| LIT-361 v2 | Superselection Rules for Philosophers | Earman (2008), DOI-10.1007/s10670-008-9124-z. A supplemental reading for the owner’s prior-art novelty map, where an earlier reading found the map’s citation wrong or unreachable. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-29 as a supplemental reading for the owner’s prior-art novelty map; a close reading was attempted and no legitimate full text could be reached |
| LIT-365 v2 | On the Problem of the Most Efficient Tests of Statistical Hypotheses | Neyman & Pearson (1933), DOI-10.1098/rsta.1933.0009. Registered to cover signal detection theory, which the record lacked. | Unavailable — seeded 2026-09-30 at the owner’s request to cover signal detection theory; a close reading was attempted and no legitimate full text could be reached |
| LIT-378 | ’What is a Thing?’: Topos Theory in the Foundations of Physics | Döring & Isham (2008), arXiv:0803.0417. A 212-page restatement of the topos programme of papers I–IV. A theory of a system S is a representation of a typed language L(S) in a topos. In quantum theory the topos is presheaves on the poset V(H) of abelian von Neumann subalgebras, propositions are clopen sub-objects of the spectral presheaf Σ via daseinisation, a pure state gives sieve-valued truth values ν(A ε Δ; ψ)V = {V′ ⊆ V | ⟨ψ|δ(Ê[A∈Δ]){V′}|ψ⟩ = 1}, and each bounded self-adjoint  becomes an arrow Σ → ℝ^↔ whose values are monotone intervals over subcontexts. Classical physics fits its axioms for composite systems exactly; quantum theory fits the disjoint sum but not the tensor-product composite. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-326); worth reading as the one-volume statement of the Döring–Isham topos programme. It is, by the authors’ own account (p. 14), “partly an amalgam” of papers I–IV (LIT-343, LIT-335, LIT-299, LIT-310), with corrections and some new material. The new material is the value of a quantity in a pseudo-state and the inverse-image link between L(S) and PL(S) (§§8.5–8.8, Thm 8.6), the algebra of the candidate quantity-value objects (§9.3), the Boolean-subalgebra base category (§5.5.3), Kochen–Specker as a lifting obstruction (§6.6), and a long speculative §14–15. It adds no new no-go result. Its proofs are as sketchy as the series’ at the same places: Sub_cl(Σ) is Heyting (Thm 16.1) with ⇒ left unwritten, and ι : O → P_clΣ natural and monic is left to the reader. A reader who has read I–IV gains only §§8.5–8.8, 9.3 and 14; a reader new to the programme should start here. |
| LIT-381 v2 | A Topos Perspective on the Kochen-Specker Theorem: II. Conceptual Aspects, and Classical Analogues | Butterfield & Isham (1998), arXiv:quant-ph/9808067. Butterfield & Isham argue that the sieve-valued “generalised valuations” of part I are not a quantum peculiarity but the natural valuations for any presheaf of propositions on any small category. Three supports are offered. (1) Classical physics: the value presheaf Υ(Ā) = Ā(S) on the category M of measurable functions has global sections (one per microstate, eq. 3.7), yet a macrostate R ⊆ S yields a sieve-valued valuation ν^R(A ∈ Δ) = {f_M | B̄(R) ⊆ f(Δ)} (eq. 3.10) with the same FUNC property as the quantum ν^ρ. (2) A proof that a sieve-valued valuation on any presheaf G obeys generalised FUNC, ν(B, G(f)(d)) = f*(ν(A, d)), iff it is a natural transformation G → Ω, i.e. a subobject of G (Theorem 4.1). (3) An informal argument, explicitly “not a genuine deduction” (§5.2), that if partial truth is fixed by which weakenings of a proposition are totally true, the truth value is a sieve. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-329); worth reading as the series’ conceptual companion and the only place it states the classical analogue and the partial-truth motivation; the mathematics is light (one short theorem), and the sieve semantics it motivates is carried on in part III, part IV and Döring–Isham (LIT-343, LIT-335). |
| LIT-389 v2 | Some Possible Roles for Topos Theory in Quantum Theory and Quantum Gravity | Isham & Butterfield (1999), arXiv:gr-qc/9910005. Isham & Butterfield argue, without proving anything new, that presheaf toposes over a base of “contexts” suit physics because the subobject classifier Ω is fixed by the base. They say this answers the objection that many-valued logics are arbitrary (§2.2), and that it keeps the logic distributive (§1.1). They then sketch seven applications. Five are speculative one-paragraph proposals (frames, observers, causal sets, TQFT, synthetic-differential-geometry time in continuous histories). One (§3.7) recaps their Kochen–Specker results: KS ⇔ the dual presheaf D(Â) = Hom(W_A, {0,1}) on the operator category O has no global sections (dim H > 2), and every state ψ gives a FUNC-obeying sieve-valued valuation ν^ψ(A ∈ Δ) = {f_O : Â → B̂ | Ê[B ∈ f(Δ)]ψ = ψ}. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-334); worth reading only as the programme’s short, informal manifesto as of 1999, written before parts III–IV appeared. It joins the Kochen–Specker valuations to the continuum scepticism (real-valued quantities, space and probabilities) that the Döring–Isham programme later develops, and the Literalism/Extra-Values framing appears nowhere else in the record. Its one technical section is a recap of KS I–II, and a reader of LIT-325, LIT-381 and LIT-378 loses little by skipping it. |
| LIT-390 v2 | Topos Theory and Consistent Histories: The Internal Logic of the Set of All Consistent Sets | Isham (1996), arXiv:gr-qc/9607069. Isham takes the poset B of all Boolean subalgebras (“windows”) of the history orthoalgebra UP, ordered by coarse-graining, and shows that the presheaf A_d(W) = {α | some d-consistent W′ ⊇ W contains α} is a subobject of the constant presheaf ΔUP, whereas the naive “realisable in W” assignment is not a presheaf at all (§4.1–4.2). The probability claim ⟨α, p⟩ then gets the sieve-valued semantic value {W ⊆ W₀ | ∃ d-consistent W′ ⊇ W with α ∈ W′} if d(α, α) = p and ∅ otherwise (4.16), a global element 1 → Ω in Set^B, so the logic of “all consistent sets at once” is the distributive but non-Boolean Heyting algebra of sieves on B. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-333); worth reading as the origin of the Isham school’s sieve-valued, coarse-graining truth values, which the Kochen–Specker series names as its motivation (KS I, ref. [13]); it is the only place the construction is applied to consistent histories, it is short and elementary, and its constructions are correct as stated, but read it knowing that the Heyting values measure only whether α can be embedded in a consistent set (the probability d(α, α) is the same in every window), so it says nothing about the conflicts between consistent sets that motivate it. |
| LIT-393 v2 | Artificial Intelligence as Philosophy and as Psychology | Dennett (1978), ch. 7 of Brainstorms; also in Ringle (ed.) 1979. Unread here. By Stich’s 1980 summary, which Dennett accepted: the worry that internal representations need a homunculus to read them (“Hume’s Problem”) is unfounded, because homunculi are harmless if they are stupider than the whole. A “team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi” can produce intelligent behaviour, each explained by stupider ones, until they can be “replaced by a machine”; AI organises “armies of such idiots”. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from catalogue records and a contemporary summary, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. Brainstorms (1978) is lending-only at the Internet Archive, the MIT Press and Project MUSE chapters are paywalled (MUSE: “Open Access: No”), the Tufts Digital Library holds Dennett’s papers but not this essay, and PhilPapers was blocked. What the essay says about homunculi is known here only through Stich’s 1980 critical notice of Brainstorms, which quotes it with page numbers and which Dennett, replying in the same issue, said he had “no quarrel with”. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-397 | Facing Backwards on the Problem of Consciousness | Dennett (1996), Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1):4–6, a reply to Chalmers’s “Facing Up”. The easy/hard split is “a major misdirector of attention, an illusion-generator”. A vitalist could pose the same “hard problem” of life, and a neuroscientist who set perception aside as hard would have misdescribed vision. Chalmers’s reason why consciousness is different repeats the claim. Subtract every function from one’s own consciousness and nothing is left but a conviction. Positing experience as fundamental, like mass and charge, needs independent evidence, which is not given (“cutism”). | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-346); worth reading as the three-page statement of the deflationary reply to the hard problem, and as the source of the vitalism, “Crock” and “cutism” analogies. Its one argued point is a challenge, not a refutation: Chalmers owes independent evidence for experience as a fundamental property, the way physics has for mass and charge, and without it the posit does no explanatory work. Its central premise, that once every function is subtracted from one’s own consciousness “there is nothing left”, is asserted from the author’s introspective catalogue. |
| 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-406 | Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness | Chalmers (1995), Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3):200–219. The “easy” problems of consciousness (discrimination, integration, report, access, attention, control, wakefulness) are problems of explaining functions, and a mechanism that performs a function explains it. The hard problem is that after every such function is explained, “why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” stays open, so reductive methods cannot answer it. Experience should be taken as fundamental, linked to the physical by psychophysical laws. Two nonbasic candidates are offered, structural coherence (the structure of experience mirrors the structure of awareness) and organizational invariance (fine-grained functional isomorphs have the same experiences), with a speculative double-aspect theory of information as the basic law. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-336); worth reading as the source of the easy/hard distinction, and short. Cite it for three separable things: the hard problem as the claim that explaining every function near experience leaves “why is this accompanied by experience?” open (§§2–3); the outline of a nonreductive theory built from two nonbasic principles, structural coherence and organizational invariance (§7); and the double-aspect theory of information, which the author calls “more of an idea than a theory” (§8). The organizational-invariance argument here is a one-page sketch; the full version is LIT-392. |
| LIT-414 | High-level perception, representation, and analogy: A critique of artificial intelligence methodology | Chalmers, French & Hofstadter (1992), DOI-10.1080/09528139208953747. Traditional AI hands its programs representations built by people who already know the answer, so models like BACON (Kepler’s third law) and the Structure-Mapping Engine (atom and solar system) skip the hard part, high-level perception: deciding what is relevant and how to organise it. Nor can the gap be filled later by a separate “representation module”, because analogy shapes perception and the task decides which representation is right. Copycat, in a microdomain of letter strings, is offered as an architecture that builds representations and mappings together. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-359), from the authors’ preprint (CRCC Technical Report 49, March 1991) that Chalmers posts; the published text was not seen. Worth reading as the clearest short statement of the Fluid Analogies Research Group’s case against hand-coded representations, and as the most accessible description of Copycat. It is an argument, not a result: its two arguments against a separate “representation module” are informal and good, its case studies (BACON, SME) are fair as far as they go, and the evidence it offers for Copycat is a description of the architecture and one worked problem, with nothing measured in the paper itself. |
| LIT-420 v3 | Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking | Hofstadter & Sander (2013), Basic Books. The book defends “the simple but unorthodox premise” that “analogy is the core of all thinking”: analogy operates at every moment, from the choice of a word to the insights of physics, and is not a rare tool for hard problems. Its ten contents entries run from the evocation of words and phrases, through abstraction, “inter-category sliding” and naïve analogies, to “Analogies that shook the world” and a closing debate on the core of cognition. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the catalogue’s contents note. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-01 from the publisher’s description and the Library of Congress catalogue record with its contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan is lending-only, and the full texts circulating online are not the publisher’s or the authors’. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-422 | Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition | Rupert (2004), DOI-10.5840/jphil2004101826. The embedded hypothesis (HEMC: cognition leans heavily on external props, but is the organism’s) competes with the extended one (HEC), and conservatism favours HEMC unless HEC buys explanatory power. It does not. LIT-097’s criteria either make phone directories into beliefs or privilege the organism, and memory research (interference, the generation effect, conversation) shows internal and external storage are different kinds. A generic kind covering both does no work. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-343), in the author’s pre-publication version; worth reading as the case that a conservative “embedded” hypothesis explains everything the extended hypothesis does, and as the empirical version of the critique. Its two arguments: a dilemma on LIT-097’s past-endorsement criterion (keep it and the organism is privileged after all; drop it and directory assistance gives Otto beliefs about every listed phone number), and memory research (interference, the generation effect, conversation) showing internal and external storage behave as different kinds, so that a kind covering both does no explanatory work. Its strength is that it argues from cognitive science rather than intuition; its limit is that the empirical differences are about fine-grained profiles, which a defender can accept and still claim a coarse kind. |
| 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-438 | The bounds of cognition | Adams & Aizawa (2001), DOI-10.1080/09515080120033571. Against LIT-097, Dennett, Donald and Hutchins: cognition has two necessary marks, non-derived content and a kind of causal processing found in brains. Notebooks, screens and tools have only derived content and work by different processes, so actual cognition is brain-bound as a contingent fact. Causal coupling does not extend a process, and brain-plus-tool systems are too motley for a science. They grant the parity principle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-368); worth reading as the first sustained reply to LIT-097 and the source of the “mark of the cognitive” line of criticism. It grants parity and argues that cognition has two necessary marks, non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal process, which notebooks, screens and tools lack as a matter of contingent fact; and that brain-plus-tool systems are too motley to support a science. Read it for that structure, not for proofs: both marks are assumed (“we assume without argument”), and the processing differences it lists are asserted from common knowledge, not measured. The phrase “coupling-constitution fallacy” is not in this paper; it comes from the authors’ later work. |
| 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-441 v2 | The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory | Chalmers (1996), Oxford University Press. Per its introduction, the book argues that consciousness cannot be reductively explained and that materialism is false, and then moves toward a nonreductive theory with fundamental psychophysical laws. Its contents run from supervenience and explanation through the irreducibility argument, naturalistic dualism and the paradox of phenomenal judgment, to coherence principles, absent, fading and dancing qualia, and information. It ends with a defence of strong AI and a no-collapse reading of quantum mechanics. Unread: registered from the author’s posted contents, introduction and jacket copy. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the author’s posted table of contents, introduction and jacket copy, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The author posts only those three, not draft chapters. Its two central arguments for this record are readable in their paper versions, LIT-406 (the hard problem and naturalistic dualism) and LIT-392 (chapter 7’s organizational invariance). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-455 | Defending the Bounds of Cognition | Adams & Aizawa (2010), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/9780262014038.003.0004, read from the pre-publication draft. A reply to a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge”. It names the “coupling-constitution fallacy”: that X is coupled to a cognitive agent does not make X part of its cognition. It restates the 2001 marks of the cognitive, non-derived content and a distinctive causal process, and defends them: a mental image of Euler circles need not get its content by convention, and a “brain-tool science” would have to cover an open-ended motley of artifacts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-380), from a pre-publication draft, not the published chapter; worth reading as the shortest statement of Adams and Aizawa’s case after LIT-438, and as the earliest text the record holds that names the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. It answers a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge” (the chapter before it in the same volume), restating the two marks of the cognitive and defending them against Clark’s Euler-circle and “brain-tool science” objections. It adds no new argument for either mark: the fallacy is shown by one analogy (nerve and muscle), and the intracranial processing differences are asserted from consumer electronics, not measured. |
| LIT-457 | Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: A Review | Burns (1995), DOI-10.1609/aimag.v16i3.1155. A review of Hofstadter and FARG’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (LIT-428). It finds two ideas under the book: cognition modelled by a parallel terraced scan of probabilistic codelets, and cognition as high-level perception. It asks why the work has had little impact on AI, and answers: microdomains, and critiques of rival programs that rest on analogy and intuition, applied to others but not to Copycat. It recommends the book. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-375); worth reading as the one contemporary account the record holds of what is in LIT-428, which is unread, and as a short, fair statement of the two standing complaints against the Fluid Analogies programme: every model lives in a microdomain, and rival programs are dismissed by analogy and intuition while the same tests are waved off for Copycat. It is a three-page book review. Its account of the parallel terraced scan is clear and checkable; its verdict is the reviewer’s opinion, argued with one worked example (symbol grounding in SME versus Copycat). |
| 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-472 v2 | Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together | Guala (2016), DOI-10.1515/9781400880911. Per its publisher, a unified theory of institutions combining three views (equilibria of strategic games, regulative rules, constitutive rules), applied to money, private property and marriage. It then addresses reflexivity, realism, Verstehen and fallibilism in the social sciences, criticises Hacking’s looping effects and interactive kinds, and asks whether causal and ontological dependence can demarcate social from natural science. Only the sample chapter 1 was read: it restates Hindriks & Guala’s case against a rules-only account. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, table of contents, sample chapter and index, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (De Gruyter and Princeton are paywalled, and the Internet Archive has no copy). Only chapter 1, Rules, the publisher’s free sample, was read; it is a lightly expanded version of the first section of Hindriks & Guala (LIT-481). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-475 v2 | The Social Construction of What? | Hacking (1999), Harvard University Press. A book on social-construction claims whose title asks what they are claims about. By its chapter titles: why ask what; too many metaphors; the natural sciences; madness; kind-making; weapons research; rocks; the end of Captain Cook. Unread: filed from bibliographic records and the table of contents only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the Crossref records for the book and its chapters and the Open Library records of its editions; no lawful full text was reachable (Harvard University Press and JSTOR pages did not load, the e-book is licensed through JSTOR, and there is no author-posted draft), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. Its title asks of social-construction claims what they are claims about; what its answer is, beyond its chapter titles, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-478 v2 | The Ant Trap: Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences | Epstein (2015), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199381104.001.0001. Social science works with an “anthropocentric” picture on which the social world is built out of people, as an ant colony is built out of ants. Part One separates the facts that ground a social fact from the facts that anchor the frame principle saying how such facts are grounded, and argues ontological individualism false. Part Two argues that even facts about groups, including group action and intention, are grounded in more than the members. Unread: filed from the introduction, the author’s précis and the publisher’s description. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the author’s own posted introduction and table of contents, not read: the book is not lawfully readable in full online (Oxford Academic is paywalled; the author posts only the introduction). The introduction and the author’s open-access précis were read. Its framework, grounding versus anchoring, is stated in the record from the précis and from the author’s SEP entry (LIT-487, read). Part Two argues that facts about groups, including their actions and intentions, are grounded in more than their members, which bears directly on THEORY-043. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-481 | Institutions, rules, and equilibria: a unified theory | Hindriks & Guala (2015, online 2014), DOI-10.1017/S1744137414000496. Institutions are rules in equilibrium: correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria, which the players represent to themselves as rules. Searle’s constitutive rules (“X counts as Y in C”) are obtained from a regulative rule by splitting it with a new term, a base rule (X is Y) and a status rule (if Y then Z). The new term is conservative and eliminable, so the constitutive-rules account reduces to the rules-in-equilibrium account, and Lewis’s theory of theoretical terms says the term refers if the rules are true. Shown on one toy institution (first-occupancy property); general reduction asserted. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-395), with the authors’ reply to their six commentators in the same issue; worth reading as the shortest statement of the rules-in-equilibrium theory of institutions and of the claim that Searle’s constitutive rules are regulative rules with a name added. The equilibrium half is a clear synthesis of Lewis, Aumann, Aoki and Greif. The reduction of constitutive rules is shown on one toy institution and asserted in general, and it leans on a reading of “collective acceptance” loose enough to make it hard to fail. |
| LIT-484 | Qu’est-ce qu’un fait social ? | Durkheim (1894; book 1895), ch. I of Les Règles de la méthode sociologique. A social fact is “toute manière de faire, fixée ou non, susceptible d’exercer sur l’individu une contrainte extérieure”, or equivalently one general in a society while existing independently of its individual manifestations. Such facts are neither organic nor individual-psychic, so their substrate is society. They are general because collective, not collective because general: “il est dans chaque partie parce qu’il est dans le tout”. Ways of being (morphology) are consolidated ways of doing. A definition argued from examples, not proved. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-391); worth reading as the founding definition of a social fact, and as a short text later social ontology still cites (Ritchie 2018 does, for the group as more than a sum). Fifteen pages define the object of sociology by two marks, exteriority to individual consciousness and external constraint, with diffusion plus independent existence as an equivalent second test. It is a definition, not an argument: Durkheim calls it “un simple résumé des données immédiates de lobservation” (n. 3), and its two load-bearing steps (that what is neither organic nor individual-psychic must have society as its substrate, and that constraint is present even where nobody feels it) are asserted from examples. Read for the vocabulary and the part-whole thesis (“il est dans chaque partie parce qu’il est dans le tout”), not for a proof. |
| LIT-529 v2 | Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter | Deacon (2011), W. W. Norton. An account of how life, mind and purpose (“ententional” phenomena) emerged from physics, built on constraint and absence rather than on added stuff. Its contents run from absence, homunculi and teleonomy through emergence and constraint to a hierarchy of dynamics (homeodynamics, morphodynamics, teleodynamics), a minimal self-producing system (autogenesis), and then work, information, significance, evolution, self, sentience and consciousness. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and the contents; the text was not reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and a library contents note, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The Internet Archive scan of the Norton printing is lending-only, and no author-posted draft was found. The companion chapter the record already cites, Deacon & Cashman (2013), “Teleology versus mechanism in biology: beyond self-organization”, is identified below but was not reachable either and is not filed. |
| LIT-530 v2 | What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell | Schrödinger (1944), Cambridge University Press. Lectures given at Trinity College Dublin in February 1943, published as a short book for the lay reader. It asks how events inside a living organism can be accounted for by physics and chemistry. It treats the gene as an “aperiodic crystal” carrying a code-script, defended through the Delbrück model, and in chapter 6 says an organism keeps its order by drawing “order from order” and by feeding on negative entropy from its surroundings. Unread: registered from the publisher’s description and contents; the text itself was not reached. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description, the Cambridge Core contents and chapter excerpts, and library catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. The book is in copyright with Cambridge University Press. Every Internet Archive scan of a Cambridge or Macmillan printing is lending-only, and the freely downloadable PDFs that turn up (course sites, personal uploads, Internet Archive “opensource” uploads) are unauthorized copies of the Canto edition, so I did not open them. Chapter 6, the negative-entropy chapter, is unread beyond the publisher’s one-paragraph excerpt. |
| LIT-534 v2 | Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature | Prigogine & Stengers (1984), Bantam; based on their La nouvelle alliance. A book for general readers that sets the science of complexity and irreversibility against classical dynamics. By its contents: the rise and limits of Newtonian science and its philosophical reception (Diderot, Kant, Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead); thermodynamics from Carnot to Boltzmann’s order principle; linear and far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, bifurcations and order through fluctuations; and the rediscovery of time in physics. Unread: filed from catalogue records only. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-02 from library catalogue records and a partial contents note; no lawful full text was reachable (the book is in copyright, the Internet Archive scans of the Bantam and Flamingo printings are lending-only, HathiTrust is search-only), so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. It is the popular and philosophical statement of the programme whose technical core is the Nobel lecture (LIT-516); what it argues, beyond its contents, is not recorded here. |
| LIT-536 v4 | Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry | Moreno & Mossio (2015), Springer, History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 12. The book argues that biology should revolve around autonomy, not only natural selection: organisms are organized systems that self-produce and self-maintain as integrated wholes, set their own goals and norms, and promote the conditions of their existence through interaction with their environment. Chapters treat constraints and organisational closure, emergence and inter-level causation, teleology and function, agency, evolution, organisms and levels of autonomy, and cognition. Only the Introduction is read (NOTE-1437): there the authors make closure of constraints the core of biological organisation, say it differs fundamentally from the self-organisation of dissipative structures, and announce that it grounds teleology, normativity and function; the chapters that argue this are unread. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list. The book is not open access at Springer. Its only free copy, the authors’ HAL deposit (hal-01151449, hal.science/hal-01151449/document, CC BY-NC 4.0, deposited 13 May 2015), is not the whole book, as this note earlier said: it holds the front matter (Hooker’s Foreword and the contents), the Introduction (pp. xix–xxxiv), the references and the index, and no chapter. The Introduction was read in full on 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1437, Skimmed, because only the Introduction was read). For chapters 1–8 no fuller lawful copy was found: on 2026-10-30 OpenAlex listed the HAL deposit as the book’s only open copy, and the publisher’s chapters are paywalled. HAL also served its anti-bot page to a direct fetch on 2026-10-02 and again on 2026-10-30; the deposit was read from a copy retrieved earlier the same day. It stays Unfetched for the chapters. |
| LIT-538 | How effective psychological treatments work: mechanisms of change in cognitive behavioural therapy and beyond | Salkovskis, Sighvatsson & Sigurdsson, Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy 51(6):595–615, in the special issue “Disseminating CBT: 50 years and beyond” (issue dated November 2023, first published online 5 January 2024). A history of behaviour therapy and CBT as empirically grounded treatment development, an argument that common factors are not mechanisms of change, and a proposal: the mechanism of all effective therapies is a shift from a stuck, threat-laden meaning (“Theory A”) to a collaboratively built and tested alternative (“Theory B”), which the authors call a type of psychological flexibility. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-428), from the open-access (CC BY 4.0) publisher PDF; worth reading as a senior Beckian’s statement of a single mechanism of change for all effective psychological therapy, and for its clear separation of “common factors” from “mechanisms of change”. Its thesis is a proposal argued from the history of CBT and clinical examples, not a tested result: people are “stuck” in an exaggerated negative or threatening meaning (Theory A) kept alive by what it makes them do, and any effective therapy works by helping them build and test a less threatening alternative (Theory B). The paper calls this a particular type of psychological flexibility, without citing the ACT literature that uses that name. |
| LIT-539 | Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness | Kendler (2008), American Journal of Psychiatry 165(6):695–702. Psychiatry should explain by mechanisms, not laws. Psychiatric causes act at many levels, within and outside the person, and are non-aggregative and loop-ridden, as an alcohol-dependence sketch shows (gene–environment interaction, tolerance feedback, niche selection, aversive cultural transmission). So “hard reductionism” and “hard emergentism” both fail, but locally decomposable subsystems can still be studied and then reassembled. After Marr, biology will implement psychological functions, not replace them. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-432), from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central; filed as the readable substitute for Kendler’s 2005 “Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry” (LIT-552), which has no lawful open copy. It opens by citing the 2005 paper for its premise that etiological models must be pluralistic, and develops two of the 2005 abstract’s propositions at length: piecemeal integration becomes “decomposition and reassembly” of multilevel mechanisms, and the mind–brain question becomes Marr-style implementation, in which “biology will implement but not replace psychology”. It does not restate the 2005 paper’s arguments against dualism and epiphenomenalism, so it stands in for the pluralism, not for the whole of the earlier paper. |
| LIT-542 | The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization | Barrett (2017), SCAN 12(1):1–23. The brain runs an internal model of the body in the world for allostasis. Its predictions are “concepts” issued from agranular limbic cortex and refined by prediction error. Interoceptive predictions are felt as affect (valence, arousal). An emotion is an instance of categorizing sensation with an emotion concept, built the same way as any perception. Since instances of an emotion are “created by multiple spatiotemporal patterns” (degeneracy), the categories have no neural essences, and the classical view, basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories included, is rejected. Emotions are “constructions of the world, not reactions to it.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-434); worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the theory of constructed emotion and of its link to predictive processing. The brain’s core task is allostasis, run through an internal model whose predictions are “concepts”. An instance of emotion is what happens when the brain categorizes predicted interoceptive and exteroceptive sensation with an emotion concept. On this account emotion categories have no neural “essences”, and causal appraisal theories are “highly doubtful”. The paper is a theoretical synthesis: its own data are a few figures, and the rest is cited evidence and explicitly labelled hypotheses. |
| LIT-544 | The Future of Intervention Science: Process-Based Therapy | Hofmann & Hayes (2019; online 2018), Clinical Psychological Science 7(1):37–50. The era of “protocols for syndromes” is over: thirty years of DSM-defined randomised trials never found the diseases the syndromes were meant to reveal. Evidence-based therapy should be redefined as process-based therapy, “evidence-based processes linked to evidence-based procedures”, with mediation and moderation as the evidence, functional analysis and idiographic networks as diagnosis, and named therapies and broad schools in decline. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-437), from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central; worth reading as the programme statement of process-based therapy by the leading figures of the two camps of CBT it reconciles. It replaces “protocols for syndromes” with one question: “What core biopsychosocial processes should be targeted with this client given this goal in this situation, and how can they most efficiently and effectively be changed?” It is a position paper with predictions, not a result. Its sharpest commitment is a falsification rule: an intervention whose specified process of change “cannot be shown to be consistently applicable” has an incorrect model, however well it works. |
| LIT-547 | A Network Theory of Mental Disorders | Borsboom (2017), World Psychiatry 16(1):5–13. Mental disorders are not common causes of their symptoms but states of networks of symptoms that cause one another, through “myriads of biological, psychological and societal mechanisms”. Five principles; the dynamic one is hysteresis: a strongly connected network, once activated by an external trigger, can sustain itself after the trigger is gone. Disorder is an alternative stable state of a strongly connected network, mental health the stable state of a weakly connected one. Comorbidity follows from bridge symptoms. Treatments are symptom, external-field or network interventions. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-435); worth reading as the short, citable statement of the network theory of mental disorders by its main author. Five principles: disorders are complex systems of interacting components, the components are the symptoms of the diagnostic manuals, the network comes from direct causal connections between symptoms, disorders are the tightly connected clusters, and disorders arise through hysteresis, so a strongly connected network can stay “stuck” after its trigger is gone. Mental health, disorder, resilience and vulnerability are redefined as stable states and dispositions of weakly or strongly connected networks. Its evidence is indirect and it says so: the theory is offered as an “organizing framework” and a deliberate simplification, and the strict symptom-component correspondence of principle 2 is its own flagged weak point. |
| LIT-548 v2 | The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine | Engel (1977), Science 196(4286):129–136. The paper that named the biopsychosocial model. Its abstract says the dominant biomedical model of disease “leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioral dimensions of illness”, and proposes a biopsychosocial model as “a blueprint for research, a framework for teaching, and a design for action in the real world of health care”. Unread: registered from its PubMed abstract and Crossref; no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from its PubMed record and Crossref, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall lists no open copy of the Science article or of any of its five reprints (Dimensions of Behavior 1978, Holistic Medicine 1989, Family Systems Medicine 1992, The Health Psychology Reader 2002, Psychodynamic Psychiatry 2012), and Europe PMC holds the abstract only. science.org answered both the article page and the PDF with a Cloudflare “Just a moment” challenge, which I did not try to get past. The copies a web search turns up are on a private practitioner’s site and on document-sharing sites, neither an author nor an institutional deposit, so I did not open them. A reader with Science or AAAS access, or a library copy of any reprint, can read it lawfully; a reading would move this to Active. No shorter open work by Engel stating the same model was found (his 1980 American Journal of Psychiatry follow-up, “The clinical application of the biopsychosocial model”, DOI 10.1176/ajp.137.5.535, is closed in Unpaywall, and psychiatryonline.org answered it with HTTP 403 and a challenge page). |
| LIT-552 v2 | Toward a Philosophical Structure for Psychiatry | Kendler (2005), American Journal of Psychiatry 162(3):433–440. Eight propositions for a philosophical frame for psychiatry, per the abstract: psychiatry is grounded in first-person experience; Cartesian substance dualism and epiphenomenalism are false; brain→mind and mind→brain causation are both real; psychiatric disorders are etiologically complex, with no more “spirochete-like” discoveries to come; explanatory pluralism beats monism, especially biological reductionism; and the goal is “patchy reductionism” and “piecemeal integration”. Unread: registered from its PubMed abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from its PubMed abstract and Crossref, not read. Not open access: Unpaywall lists no open copy, Europe PMC and PubMed Central hold no full text, and psychiatryonline.org answered both the full-text page and the PDF with HTTP 403 and a Cloudflare “Just a moment” challenge, which I did not try to get past. A web search finds it only on a document-sharing site, which is not an author or institutional deposit. A reader with American Journal of Psychiatry access can read it lawfully; a reading would move this to Active. Its readable substitute is Kendler’s “Explanatory models for psychiatric illness” (Am J Psychiatry 165(6):695–702, 2008), filed and read in full as LIT-539. That paper cites this one for its pluralist premise and develops its piecemeal integration and its mind–brain propositions, but not its arguments against dualism and epiphenomenalism. A later open paper, “The dappled nature of causes of psychiatric illness” (Mol Psychiatry 17(4):377–388, 2012, PMC3312951), was not read or filed. |
| LIT-557 v2 | A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation | Deci, Koestner & Ryan (1999), Psychological Bulletin 125(6):627–668. A hierarchical meta-analysis of 128 experiments (101 with free-choice, 84 with self-report measures) on interesting tasks. Tangible rewards undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation (d = −0.34) and self-reported interest (−0.07); expected rewards did, by every task-related contingency; unexpected and task-noncontingent rewards did not; positive feedback enhanced both measures, but not children’s free choice. Read as strong support for cognitive evaluation theory and against Eisenberger and Cameron’s behavioural account. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-438), from an OCR of the scanned published article the authors post on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the largest meta-analysis of the reward-undermining effect and the evidential base SDT cites for it. Across 128 experiments on interesting tasks, expected tangible rewards undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation (d = −0.36), engagement-, completion- and performance-contingent rewards all did (−0.40, −0.36, −0.28), unexpected and task-noncontingent rewards did not, and positive feedback enhanced it (0.33), though not for children’s free choice. It reanalyses Cameron and Pierce (LIT-556) study by study. Its categories are CET’s, and the rival authors reply, by the abstract of Cameron, Banko and Pierce (LIT-562, unread), that the negative effects are circumscribed, not pervasive. |
| LIT-560 | Self-Regulation and the Problem of Human Autonomy: Does Psychology Need Choice, Self-Determination, and Will? | Ryan & Deci (2006), Journal of Personality 74(6):1557–1586. SDT’s defence of autonomy as a psychological construct. Philosophers (phenomenologists from Pfänder and Ricoeur; hierarchical accounts from Frankfurt and Dworkin) agree that autonomy is self-endorsement, not independence. On that definition, the critiques fail: behaviourists and Bandura define autonomy as independence from the environment; reductive neuroscience mistakes levels of explanation; nonconscious priming shows autonomy can be compromised, not that it is illusory; too many options is not self-determination; and autonomy matters across cultures. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-441), from the authors’ own deposit of the published article on selfdeterminationtheory.org; worth reading as the place where SDT states its concept of autonomy against both philosophy and psychology. Autonomy is “regulation by the self”, its opposite “heteronomy”, regulation “without self-endorsement” (abstract). It is “a matter of degree” (p. 1562), compatible with dependence and with having one option, and lies “not in being independent causes but in exercising their capacity to reflectively endorse or reject prompted actions” (p. 1573). It answers Skinner, Bandura, Pinker, Bargh, Wegner, Schwartz and Iyengar. Its engagement with Frankfurt is thin: two citations of the 1971 paper inside one paragraph on hierarchical accounts, with the analytic detail taken from Dworkin. |
| LIT-570 | An Organizational Account of Biological Functions | Mossio, Saborido & Moreno (2009), BJPS 60(4):813–841. A trait has a function iff it contributes to the maintenance of a self-maintaining organization, is produced and maintained under that organization’s constraints, and the organization is differentiated. Closure grounds teleology and normativity in the current system, unifying etiological and dispositional accounts. Flames, Bénard cells and hurricanes have closure but no functions, because each makes a single undifferentiated contribution to its own maintenance. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-444), from the HAL deposit of the submitted version. Worth reading as the organizational account of function and as the place where the organizational school says plainly that a candle flame has closure. Functions are contributions to a differentiated self-maintaining organization by traits that organization produces and maintains. Closure alone grounds teleology and norms but is shared by flames, Bénard cells and hurricanes; organizational differentiation is what functions need. Reproduction is admitted to be a problem and left to a sketch. |
| LIT-582 | Biological organisation as closure of constraints | Montévil & Mossio (2015), J. Theor. Biol. 372:179–191. Two causal regimes act in organisms: processes (thermodynamic changes) and constraints, which act on processes while being conserved at the relevant time scale. Closure is mutual dependence among constraints: each is produced by a process another constraint constrains, and each helps produce another. Closure mixes slow and fast dependence, grounds functions, and is proposed as a boundary criterion. A volume-sweeping count of dependencies, the tendency to closure, separates symbionts that share an encompassing closure, and separated nested closures mark levels of organisation. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-468), from the authors’ HAL deposit of the accepted text. Worth reading as the paper statement of the central claim of Biological Autonomy (LIT-536): biological organisation is closure of constraints. A constraint is defined by a symmetry: it acts on a process at a time scale at which it is itself conserved. Closure is a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and generates another, and cannot be split into two closed sets. The paper offers closure as a boundary criterion and gives a preliminary measure, the tendency to closure, for drawing boundaries between interacting organisms. It does not claim closure defines an organism. |
| LIT-598 | The Markov blanket trick: On the scope of the free energy principle and active inference | Raja, Valluri, Baggs, Chemero & Anderson (2021), Physics of Life Reviews 39:49–72. Restating the FEP’s derivation (Langevin dynamics, NESS, Helmholtz decomposition, Markov blanket, variational bound), the authors grant that it is true of things so defined. But blankets apply to every “thing”, not everything (the candle flame is excluded); the partition is placed by modelling convenience; relational properties (heading, affordances) and constitutive self-organization (a membrane the cell makes) fall outside it. The blanket’s real role is to supply the partition variational Bayes needs. Active inference presupposes perception and action in its generative models. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-450), from the authors’ PhilSci-Archive preprint (March 2021); the Physics of Life Reviews version was not seen. Worth reading as the scope critique of the free energy principle: granted its premises the principle is true, but it applies only to “things” already given a Markov-blanket partition, the partition is placed where the model needs it, and relational properties and constitutive self-organization fall outside it. The blanket is a “trick” that lets any thing be modelled as a variational autoencoder. Active inference, as a process theory, presupposes perception and action in the generative model it is handed. |
| LIT-601 | The Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model: from matter to movement to mind | Kelso (2021), Biological Cybernetics 115(4):305–322, a 60th-anniversary retrospective. HKB models bimanual coordination by the relative phase φ, with dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ and potential V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ: both in-phase and anti-phase are stable for b/a > 1/4, and anti-phase loses stability below it, as observed when movement frequency rises. Noise, symmetry breaking (Δω) and metastability extend it; with Kuramoto’s model it becomes a generalized HKB for many agents. The same dynamics is reported within a body, between people and with machines, and in brain activity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-467), from the free-to-read publisher PDF. Filed in place of Kelso’s book Dynamic Patterns (LIT-578) and as the read account of the paywalled Haken–Kelso–Bunz paper (LIT-588), both Deferred. Worth reading as Kelso’s own short statement of coordination dynamics: the HKB order-parameter equation for relative phase, its stochastic and symmetry-breaking extensions, metastability as relative coordination, the generalized HKB–Kuramoto model, and the claim that one coordination dynamics holds within and between people. It is a retrospective by an author of the model, not a review, and it says so. |
| LIT-603 v2 | The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets | Bruineberg, Dołęga, Dewhurst & Baltieri (2020 preprint; BBS 45:e183, 2022). Markov blankets entered variational inference as Pearl’s conditional-independence shields, tools on a scientist’s map. In the free-energy literature since Friston 2013 they became boundaries in the world between agent and environment: “Friston blankets”. The two are different constructs; Friston blankets need extra assumptions (a chosen internal node, sensorimotor labels, steady state, sparse coupling) that the formalism does not supply. Using them for metaphysical conclusions (“inference within a model”) requires metaphysical premises; used instrumentally (“inference with a model”) they are innocent but philosophically idle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-447), but in its December 2020 PhilSci-Archive version; the Behavioral and Brain Sciences target article of 2021–2022 is, by the authors’ own note, “heavily rewritten” and could not be read lawfully beyond its abstract. Worth reading as the critique that names the problem: “Pearl blankets”, the conditional-independence tool of graphical models, are conflated with “Friston blankets”, a realist construct meant to be the boundary between an agent and its world. The second cannot be read off the mathematics of the first, and its use to settle questions about life and mind needs metaphysical premises of its own. It re-runs the primordial-soup simulation of LIT-526 and shows how the blanket found there depends on modelling choices. |
| LIT-637 | What Is Wrong with the No-Report Paradigm and How to Fix It | Block (2019), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23(12):1003–1013. Whether perceptual consciousness needs prefrontal circuits cannot be settled by no-report paradigms, because subjects not asked to report may still think about what they see, and that thought tracks the percept. A no-post-perceptual-cognition paradigm is needed. Brascamp et al.’s rivalry with inconspicuous switches is one, and it found no detectable prefrontal difference. Box 2 argues that binocular rivalry is driven by local features, against the predictive-processing account. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-495); worth reading as the argument that removing report does not isolate the neural basis of conscious perception, because subjects, monkeys included, can still think about what they see (“the bored monkey problem”). What is needed is a paradigm with no post-perceptual cognition that differs between percepts. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous binocular rivalry, whose switches subjects could not tell from constant random changes, is offered as one, and found no prefrontal difference by fMRI. Block flags that fMRI may be too coarse, and that ECoG could still favour prefrontalism. |
| 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-646 | Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience | Block (2007), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30(5–6):481–499, with open peer commentary. To find the neural basis of experience we must decide whether it includes the machinery of cognitive access, and reports seem unable to decide that. Inference to the best explanation can. Sperling, Landman et al. and Sligte et al. show phenomenology overflowing a working memory of about four items. If the workspace is not part of the basis of phenomenology, strong losing coalitions in sensory cortex realise that overflow; the mesh between psychology and neuroscience favours that assumption. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-497); worth reading as the overflow argument and the paper that framed the methodological problem the no-report paradigm was built to solve. Phenomenology overflows cognitive access: in Sperling, Landman et al. and Sligte et al. subjects see 8–32 items and can access about 4. If the neural basis of phenomenology excludes the frontal workspace, strong but losing recurrent coalitions in the back of the head explain that overflow, and a better mesh between psychology and neuroscience is reason to accept the assumption. The target article was read; the 32 commentaries and the response were not. |
| LIT-702 | Genuinely collective emotions | Huebner (2010), European Journal for Philosophy of Science 1(1):89–118. Against the received view that only individuals have emotions, it argues that some groups have the computational complexity and informational integration that emotion requires. Emotions are integrated, action- oriented representations built from subpersonal routines; a distributed system can integrate routines the same way. It answers the objection from consciousness (some individual emotions are non-conscious, so collective ones need not be felt) and from homology (emotion kinds are functional, “like vodka”, not “like bourbon”). A navy crew turns out to detect danger without fear; a failing election campaign is offered instead. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-553); worth reading as the distributed, computational case for collective emotion, and the clearest statement of what it would take. An emotion is an integrated representation with indicative content and imperative force, built from subpersonal routines; a group whose routines are integrated the same way can be in one, without feeling it. The test case fails on the author’s own terms (the USS Palau crew detects danger without fear) and the replacement (a 2008 presidential campaign) is offered as intuitively plausible pending anthropology, so the paper establishes a possibility and a research programme, not an instance. |
| LIT-707 v2 | Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence | Wimsatt (1997), Philosophy of Science 64(S4):S372–S384. Unread. Per its abstract: most scientists call a system property emergent if it depends on the parts’ mode of organisation, a view consistent with reduction. Emergence is the failure of aggregativity, the state in which “the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts”. Aggregativity needs four conditions; met differently for different decompositions and in degrees, they give criteria for choosing decompositions and heuristics for detecting the biases of “vulgar reductionisms”. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-04, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. Philosophy of Science’s PSA supplement is paywalled at Cambridge Core and JSTOR, Unpaywall finds no open copy, and neither the 1997 paper nor its 2000 expansion is posted on Wimsatt’s department pages. Content here is the publisher’s abstract and Wimsatt’s own summary in “Reductionism and its heuristics” (Synthese 2006), which his department posts and which was read in part. A person with library access could supply it; a reading would move this to Active and should state the four conditions exactly. |
| LIT-713 | Causation and Manipulability | Woodward, “Causation and Manipulability”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001; revised 2023). Causes are handles for manipulation: X causes Y iff some intervention on X, an exogenous change meeting conditions M1–M4 relative to Y, would change Y. The account is non-reductive but not viciously circular, needs no human agent, and distinguishes total, direct and contributing causes by combining interventions. Invariance and levels are not treated here. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-585): in full, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s own open page (2023 revision). Worth reading as Woodward’s compact statement of the interventionist account: X causes Y when an intervention on X, a surgical exogenous change defined by conditions M1–M4, would change Y. It answers the circularity and anthropocentrism objections and separates total, direct and contributing causes. Limits: it is a survey, and this version does not treat invariance, proportionality or levels of causation; for those the book (LIT-723, unread) is needed. |
| 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-721 v2 | Multilevel Selection and the Major Transitions in Evolution | Okasha (2005), Philosophy of Science 72:1013–1025. On how multilevel selection bears on the major transitions in evolution. Unread: the 2022 overview LIT-749 cites it for the two levels at which selection can act during a transition and for the point that the traditional debate set aside the origin of the biological hierarchy. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. PhilSci-Archive, which holds the author’s preprint, refused every request and was not bypassed; the journal copy is paywalled; a course copy on an instructor’s personal domain was found and not used. Okasha’s 2022 overview “The Major Transitions in Evolution—A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective” (LIT-749), read in full, cites it for the two-level view of transitions and restates its point that the traditional levels-of-selection debate set aside the origin of the hierarchy. Filed because it is the paper usually cited for multilevel selection in the major transitions. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-722 | Nonreductive Physicalism and the Limits of the Exclusion Principle | List & Menzies (2009), Journal of Philosophy 106:475–502. On a difference-making account of causation, Kim’s exclusion principle is false. A revised principle (a property and its realizer never both cause the same effect) holds or fails system by system. The higher-level property is the cause, and excludes its realizer, exactly when the relation is realization-insensitive: the effect would still follow under nearby alternative realizations. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-560): in full, from the authors’ accepted manuscript on List’s LSE page. Worth reading for a test of when a higher-level property is a cause in its own right. On a difference-making account, a higher-level property excludes its own realizer as the cause exactly when the effect would still follow had the property been realized differently (realization-insensitivity). Whether that holds is a fact about each causal system, not an a priori truth. Pernu (LIT-147) argues the neuroprosthetic example cannot carry it. |
| LIT-723 v2 | Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation | Woodward (2003; Crossref print date 2004), Oxford University Press. A non-reductive, non-circular account of causation and explanation built on interventions; relationships that are stable under interventions are invariant, and invariance rather than lawhood explains causal explanation in the special sciences (per the publisher’s abstract). Unread: the account of intervention is read in his SEP entry LIT-713; chapter 6 on invariance is not. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-05 from Crossref, not read: no lawful full text could be reached (the Oxford Academic page returned HTTP 403, and it is a subscription product). Its interventionist account is read first-hand in Woodward’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry “Causation and Manipulability” (LIT-713). The entry does not treat invariance, so chapter 6, “Invariance” (pp. 239–314), is the part the owner’s essay needs and has not read. 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-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-749 | The Major Transitions in Evolution—A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective | Okasha (2022), Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10:793824. A major transition is the evolution of a higher-level unit from formerly free-living units. For one to succeed, higher-level selection must trump selection within the collective, typically through policing or aligned interests. The transitions turn the biological hierarchy from explanans into explanandum, vindicate multi-level selection, and leave the highest occupied level privileged as that of organisms. | Active — read 2026-10-05 (NOTE-586): in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF (CC BY). Worth reading as a philosopher’s map of the major evolutionary transitions. A transition is the evolution of a higher-level unit from formerly free-living ones; for it to succeed, selection between collectives must come to trump selection within them, typically through policing, kinship or division of labour. The transitions make the biological hierarchy something to be explained rather than assumed, and leave the highest occupied level privileged as the level of organisms. Limits: a review with no model or data, provisional by its own account; it cautions that general principles may explain each transition only coarsely. It stands in for the unread 2005 paper LIT-721. |
| 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-802 v2 | Le structuralisme | Piaget (1968), Presses Universitaires de France, Que sais-je? no. 1311; English as Structuralism (1970), Basic Books. By its catalogue description, an attempt at a synthesis of the senses structuralism has taken in the contemporary sciences, finding a common ideal of intelligibility beneath variable critical intentions. Not read: no lawful full text was reachable. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-09 from catalogue records, not read: no lawful full text was reachable. The Internet Archive holds the 1968 PUF edition and the 1970–1973 English editions only as access-restricted lending items, and HathiTrust holds the 1970 Basic Books translation as Limited (search-only); the book is in copyright and the publishers offer no open access. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-817 v3 | On the Normal and the Pathological | Canguilhem (1943; expanded 1966; English 1978, reissued 1989), DOI-10.1007/978-94-009-9853-7. Against the nineteenth-century view that disease is a quantitative deviation from a normal state, it argues that the normal is normative: health is an organism’s capacity to institute new norms in a changed environment, and disease a narrowed capacity to do so. Unread: registered from metadata and secondary accounts. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-07 from metadata and secondary accounts, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex and Unpaywall report the English edition closed. SpringerLink (link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-009-9853-7) serves the front matter and the two section title pages free; the seventeen chapters are subscription content. The front matter was read: the table of contents (which confirms the chapter list in the body), the translators’ note (the translation follows the 1972 PUF edition) and Michel Foucault’s introduction (pp. ix–xx). Foucault’s introduction is an essay on Canguilhem as a philosopher of error and concept, not a summary of the book’s argument, so no NOTE is filed from it. It does not state what CLAIM-018 cites it for, health as a capacity to institute new norms. The French editions are in copyright, and no author-sanctioned copy was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-822 | Transformation transformed | Descola (2016), HAU 6(3):33–44. A keynote on structuralism as method: meaning lies in contrasts within a set of variants, and a structure is the set of invariant relations that orders transformations between them. Lévi-Strauss used transformation in two regimes, Goethean development of an initial form (kinship) and Thompsonian deformation between given forms (myth, where the analyst chooses the cuts). Descola’s fourfold ontology is a Goethean group; structural comparison is anthropology’s fairest symmetrization. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-641), in full, from the PDF on the journal’s own site (haujournal.org); worth reading as a short statement, by Lévi-Strauss’s student, of what structural analysis is when separated from Lévi-Strauss’s philosophy: no phenomenon has meaning in itself, only in contrast with others of its kind, and a structure, unlike a system, is the set of invariant relations that lets one move from one variant to another by transformation. Descola distinguishes two regimes of transformation in Lévi-Strauss: a Goethean one, the development of an initial form into its possible variants (kinship in Les structures élémentaires, and Descola’s own four ontologies), and a Thompsonian one, continuous deformation between given forms (myth). In myth, he notes, the group of transformations is a virtual continuum on which the analyst makes the cuts, so the path between variants is the analyst’s choice. A keynote lecture; argued, not demonstrated. |
| LIT-832 v2 | Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience | Craver (2007), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299317.001.0001. Good explanations in neuroscience describe mechanisms; a component is constitutively relevant to a mechanism’s behaviour when it is a part of the mechanism and the two are mutually manipulable, which is distinct from causal relevance between events; neuroscience is unified as a mosaic of constraints across levels, not by reduction. Unread: registered from metadata and reviews. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-07 from Crossref’s records (monograph and chapter list) and published reviews, not read: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic. Filed because the owner’s essay “The Organization of Will” cites it for mechanistic explanation and for the difference between constitutive and causal relevance. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex lists only the paywalled Oxford Academic record and a bookseller; web searches for an author copy, chapter preprints or a copy on Craver’s Washington University pages found none, so it remains unread. |
| LIT-837 v2 | Structuralism | Piaget (1970), Structuralism, trans. and ed. Chaninah Maschler, Basic Books (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971; reissued 2015). The English edition of Le structuralisme (1968), held as LIT-802. Skimmed thinly from a publisher’s preview (17 pages of chs. I–IV): a structure is a whole under laws of composition, a system of transformations and self-regulating. Logico-mathematical structures are fully reversible (groups); linguistic and social ones are regulated in time but not fully reversible; and a structure is real only if governed from within. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-09 (NOTE-618), thinly: the publisher’s Google Books preview of the 2015 reissue served only 17 pages of text, pp. 3–63 at one page in four and p. 69, all in chs. I–IV, and none of the chapters on linguistics, the social sciences or philosophy, nor the conclusion. Worth reading as Piaget’s definition of structure by wholeness, transformation and self-regulation, and for his distinction between logico-mathematical structures, whose operations all have inverses (groups), and linguistic, social and psychological structures, whose transformations unfold in time under regulations that are “not entirely reversible”. He argues that a structure must be “governed from within” to be real, and defines the subject as “the center of functional activity”. Read it with the caveat that the skim saw the argument in fragments. |
| LIT-894 v2 | Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference | Pearl (2009), second edition, Cambridge University Press. Skimmed in four excerpts the author posts: an intervention do(X = x) deletes X’s structural equation and solves the rest, while observing X = x violates no equation and is ordinary conditioning, so P(y | do(x)) and P(y | x) differ in general. A structural equation is a claim about Y under ideal control (Definition 5.4.1), and its coefficient is ∂E[Y | do(x)]/∂x, not a regression slope. The rest of the book was not read. | Active — read in part 2026-10-10 (NOTE-696); skimmed in four excerpts the author posts, the contents, the Preface to the Second Edition, §§5.3.2–5.4.1 (pp. 154–163) and the Epilogue (pp. 401–428), and nothing else. Worth reading for its operational meaning of a structural equation (Definition 5.4.1: a claim about Y under ideal control of X, not an algebraic or regression equation), for the coefficient as ∂E[Y | do(x)]/∂x, and for the Epilogue’s plain statement of intervention as surgery on autonomous mechanisms, against observation as conditioning, “given that we see”. These excerpts confirm the record’s gloss of do(). Not read: chapters 1–4 and 6–11, so not the identification results, the derivation of the do-calculus, the counterfactual semantics, the treatment of sequential plans (§4.4) or the chapter 11 discussions of whether do(x) represents practical experiments. |
| LIT-895 v2 | Moderate structural realism about space-time | Esfeld & Lam (2008), DOI-10.1007/s11229-006-9076-2, Synthese 160. Moderate structural realism accepts that relations require relata. It denies that the relata need intrinsic properties beyond their relations. Objects and relations are mutually dependent, with no priority either way, and relations supply identity conditions wherever intrinsic properties would. Where nothing discerns the relata (entangled quantum systems of one kind, points of a symmetric space-time), it takes numerical diversity as primitive, and denies that this is a thisness. In general relativity the relata are space-time points, not bare manifold points. They get a “structural identity” from the metric, or from a section of the orthonormal frame bundle. The hole argument counts against epistemic structural realism, and the question of what space-time relations relate counts against the radical version. The case is interpretive fit, not entailment. | Active — read in full 2026-10-10 (NOTE-695); worth reading as the founding statement of the no-priority, non-eliminative structural realism that Chakravartty’s dilemma targets and that the owner’s individuation thesis was placed beside. It says exactly what that position does with relata no relation discerns: entangled quantum systems of one kind and space-time points in symmetric space-times get a primitive numerical diversity, which the authors deny is a thisness or any kind of identity (pp. 33–34). The GR sections show that the tensor and fibre-bundle formulations fit the view, not that they require it. The one concrete construction of a point’s “structural identity” they cite works only for space-times without symmetries, and it breaks the covariance the view rests on. |
| 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-969 v2 | Agency Is Frame-Dependent | Abel et al. (2025), a four-page position paper from reinforcement learning. It argues informally that whether a system has agency depends on a reference frame: commitments on a boundary, on which causal variables are modelled, on what makes a goal meaningful and on which behaviour changes count as adaptation. Each of the four conditions of agency, in an account adapted from Barandiaran et al., is shown to come out either way under two plausible choices, by citing an earlier result. It offers no definition of a frame, no proof and no principle for choosing one, though it floats Dennett’s predictive power. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-793) in full; worth reading as the shortest statement of the thesis that agency is relative to a reference frame: a boundary, a choice of causal variables, a principle for meaningful goals and a class of meaningful adaptations. Read it knowing that it is a four-page position paper with no definition or proof, that each step is borrowed from a cited result, that its premises are existential while its conclusion is universal, and that it does not engage the observer-free individuality of the Barandiaran account it builds on. Filed for QUESTION-032; the thesis is held as THEORY-249. |
| LIT-982 v2 | Theories of consciousness | Seth and Bayne (2022). A review of higher-order, global workspace, integrated information, and reentry and predictive processing theories, sorted by which aspects of consciousness each explains, where in the brain each locates it and what evidence each cites. Many apparent rivalries are differences of target. The front-versus-back dispute is about consciousness and cognitive access, and posterior-sufficiency predictions cannot now be tested because verification relies on report, which needs anterior activity. It asks for precise, comprehensive theories and a solution to the measurement problem. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-849) in full; worth reading for QUESTION-048 as a map of four families of theory by what each explains and what evidence each cites, and for its argument that report-based evidence cannot test posterior sufficiency, since report needs anterior activity, while no non-report marker has a validation independent of introspection and contested theory. Read it knowing that it is a review, read from the accepted manuscript, which argues these limits rather than demonstrating them. |
| 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-1030 v2 | Experimental probes of autopoietic self-maintenance | Segura (2026), BioSystems 268. Unread. The SSRN abstract recorded in Crossref describes a topos-theoretic formalization of probing an autopoietic system (Yoneda lemma, probe profiles, sheaf cohomology) that separates the system’s organization from models of it and from the responses experiments elicit. An earlier description, that assay agreement fixes organization only for assay sets conservative for a class of models, and the exchange’s gloss, that resilience does not show closure, are not in that abstract and are unconfirmed. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-13, not read. Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29), for QUESTION-086. No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unfetched until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-13 and found none that could be fetched: the Elsevier version of record is paywalled; OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar and Unpaywall give one open copy, the SSRN preprint (doi:10.2139/ssrn.6864481, ssrn.com/abstract=6864481), but SSRN answered every request, the abstract page and the delivery links, with a Cloudflare challenge (HTTP 403, cf-mitigated: challenge) that needs a browser running JavaScript, so it was not tried further; Europe PMC (PMID 42637075) has no full text; arXiv, Zenodo and a web search for the title found no other copy; the author’s ORCID record lists the work by its two DOIs and links no other copy. A human reader can likely open the SSRN copy. The SSRN abstract, in its Crossref record, describes a Yoneda-lemma formalization in a topos: an organization is identified by its profile of admissible experimental probes, self-maintenance is invariance of that profile under a production functor, viability is an internal modality, and sheaf cohomology diagnoses whether local responses glue into a whole. The filing’s summary (model-relative assay sets, and the warning that resilience does not show closure) is not in that abstract and is unchecked. |
| 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-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-1264 | No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Ehrsson, Fotopoulou, Radziun, Longo & Tsakiris (2022), Nat Commun 13:564, a Matters Arising on Lush et al. (2020). Reanalysing the open data of all 353 participants, they find no relationship between hypnotisability and the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7) or in proprioceptive drift (rho = 0.047, BF01 = 1.7), a significant synchrony effect in every hypnotisability quartile, and no effect of explicit suggestions about which condition should work. The correlations Lush et al. report hold as much for the asynchronous condition and for an “impossible” visual hallucination item, so they read hypnotisability as a general influence on report, not a driver of the illusion. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-997) in full with its supplementary figure; worth reading as the case for the rubber hand illusion surviving trait suggestibility, made from Lush et al.’s own open data (n = 353): the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings does not vary with hypnotisability (Bayes factor 5.7 for the null), is significant in every quartile of it including the least suggestible, and is unmoved by explicit instructions about which condition should work. Read it as a reanalysis and an argument, not new data: it treats the asynchronous condition as a valid control, which is exactly what the reply (Lush & Seth 2022) disputes, and its drift analysis is inconclusive by its own Bayes factor. |
| LIT-1267 | Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Lush & Seth (2022), Nat Commun 13:563, replying to Ehrsson et al. (2022). They accept the reanalyses and dispute the reading: an asynchronous condition is no control for demand characteristics, because expectancies are higher for the synchronous condition, and in their sample the expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07). Highly hypnotisable participants may meet those expectancies by generating the experience, less hypnotisable ones by response bias. Agreement with “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand” rose with hypnotisability (b = 0.76, rs = 0.27) and averaged 0.7 on a seven-point scale whose maximum is 3. Whether multisensory integration plays a significant role in RHI measures awaits experiments with adequate controls. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1003) in full; worth reading as the clearest short statement of why a synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference cannot by itself show that the rubber hand illusion is multisensory: participants expect more from the synchronous condition, and in Lush et al.’s sample (n = 353) that expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability, so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict too. It adds that agreement with the ownership item rises steeply with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Read it as a reply: the expectancy and ownership regressions are post hoc, as the authors grant of both sides, and its alternative for low-suggestible participants, response bias, is asserted and not measured. |
| LIT-1280 | Serious Problems With Interpreting Rubber Hand “Illusion” Experiments | Roseboom & Lush (2022), Collabra: Psychology 8(1):32274. A resampling study of the synchronous-condition reports of 351 participants from Lush et al. 2020, run as 10,000 simulated experiments of 20 participants each. Unselected samples found mean agreement with the three standard statements significantly above zero in 83% of experiments; samples from above the median of hypnotisability (subjective SWASH) in 99%; from below it in 51%. For the ownership statement alone the lower half gave significant agreement in about 4% of experiments, and the upper half in 74% (supplement). The authors argue that the relationship is not too small to matter, that the synchronous–asynchronous difference cannot be interpreted because of Lush (2020), and that implicit, neuroimaging and animal measures are tied to ownership only through these reports. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1001) from the accepted manuscript on PsyArXiv, with the authors’ analysis notebooks for 10, 20 and 50 participants; worth reading as the clearest demonstration of what a modest correlation between hypnotisability and rubber hand report does to a field of small studies. Resampling the 351 synchronous-condition reports of Lush et al. 2020 in simulated experiments of 20, samples drawn from the upper half of the hypnotisability scale found significant agreement with the three illusion statements 99% of the time and samples from the lower half 51%; for the one ownership statement, “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand”, the figures were 74% and 4%. Read it as a reanalysis of one dataset, with no new data and no asynchronous or drift analysis. Its headline numbers depend on n = 20: at n = 50 the lower half finds the averaged illusion statements in 95% of experiments, though the ownership statement still only in 6%. The authors themselves leave open that the same people may have the illusion for other reasons. |
| 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-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-1344 v2 | Neurophenomenal structuralism. A philosophical agenda for a structuralist neuroscience of consciousness | Lyre (2022), Neuroscience of Consciousness niac012. A programmatic paper. Only relational properties cross the neural/non-neural boundary, and spatiotemporal relations, by acquaintance, answer the Newman problem for the brain. Two assumptions: any phenomenal experience is fully individuated, in its specificity, by its place in a quality space (Q-structure); and Q-structure is mirrored by a surjective homomorphism from neural feature maps. With metaphysically necessary supervenience assumed, it argues for reductive physicalism, an instrumentalist structural representationalism, holism about experience (dichromats experience every colour differently) and the actual and nomological impossibility of spectrum inversion. It concerns specific, not generic, consciousness, and denies being a structural realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1060) from the version of record deposited in PubMed Central (PMC9396309, JATS full text via Europe PMC; the OUP PDF returned 403); worth reading as the most explicit statement of phenomenal structuralism as an ontology: each specific phenomenal character is fully individuated by its place in a quality space, that space is mirrored by a surjective homomorphism from neural feature maps, and holism and the impossibility of nomological spectrum inversion follow. It is the statement Negro and Aldé quote as their target. It is programmatic: nothing is tested, the neural half rests on one cited V4 study, it addresses only which experience a conscious state is and not whether it is conscious, and its reduction rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience that the author says he cannot argue for. |
| LIT-1395 v3 | An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets | MacKenzie (2006). Argues that modern financial economics did not only describe markets but changed them: an authoritative theory of option pricing gave derivatives legitimacy and was used to trade, so that prices came to fit the model. Standardly cited for its kinds of performativity, from generic (a model is used) through Barnesian (its use makes it truer) to counterperformativity (its use makes it less true), and for the 1987 crash as a case of the last. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-23, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-29 and not found. OpenAlex reports the book closed, with the MIT Press eBook at its DOI as its only location and no repository copy. A web search for an open-access edition, a chapter on the author’s pages or a deposit found catalogue entries and paywalled reviews only. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied; a library copy of the 2006 hardback or the 2008 paperback would do. The summary is still the publisher’s abstract and the standard reading. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1433 | Demystifying Emotions: A Typology of Theories in Psychology and Philosophy | Moors (2022), Cambridge University Press. A typology of emotion theories in psychology (evolutionary, network, appraisal, goal-directed, psychological constructionist, social) and philosophy (feeling, judgmental, quasi-judgmental, perceptual, embodied, motivational), compared with tools from the philosophy of science. It also proposes Moors’s own skeptical “goal-directed theory”, “based on the central idea that all kinds of behaviors and feelings are grounded in goal-striving”. Unread beyond the front matter: the theory is read in her 2017 article LIT-1434. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-23 from Crossref and the publisher’s free front matter, not read: no lawful full text could be reached. OpenAlex lists the book as closed, with no repository copy; Cambridge Core offers no open chapter; no Lirias or author-posted copy was found. The front matter and table of contents, which Cambridge hosts openly, were read. Filed as the book-length statement of Moors’s goal-directed theory of emotion, the theory whose 2017 article (LIT-1434) is the nearest prior statement of the record’s reading of appraisal as negotiation. Its Chapter 7, on response evaluation theories and her goal-directed theory, is the part to read first. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1543 v2 | Zoom In: An Introduction to Circuits | Olah et al. (2020), Distill, doi:10.23915/distill.00024.001. The essay that opened the Circuits thread. It offers three “speculative claims” about neural networks: features, which are directions in a layer’s activation space, are their fundamental unit; features connected by weights form circuits that can be studied rigorously, and meaningful algorithms can be read off the weights; and analogous features and circuits form across models and tasks. The examples are from InceptionV1: curve and high-low frequency detectors, a pose-invariant dog head detector, and a car feature spread across dog neurons, which the authors call superposition. For universality the authors call their own evidence anecdotal. | Active — read 2026-10-26 (NOTE-1182) in full, from the Distill article; worth reading as the programme statement of circuits research: features as the unit, circuits as weighted subgraphs between them that can be read off the weights, and universality across models, each offered by the authors as a deliberately speculative claim. Read it knowing that the examples are from one vision model, InceptionV1, that the detailed evidence was promised to later articles of the thread, and that the universality claim rests, in the authors’ word, on anecdote (THEORY-1013, THEORY-986). |
| LIT-1594 v2 | Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science | Jasanoff (2003), Minerva 41: 223–244. Predictive ‘technologies of hubris’ — risk assessment, cost–benefit analysis, modelling — understate what lies outside their frame, pre-empt political debate and cannot take in challenges to their framing, and formal participation does not cure this. She proposes ‘technologies of humility’, habits of thought organized around framing, vulnerability, distribution and learning: ‘what is the purpose; who will be hurt; who benefits; and how can we know?‘ | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1357) in full, from a copy of the published article on a University of Colorado course page (sciencepolicy.colorado.edu, ENVS 5100); worth reading as the source of the pair ‘technologies of hubris’ and ‘technologies of humility’, and of four focal points — framing, vulnerability, distribution, learning — for deliberating on what predictive methods leave out. Read it knowing that it is a programmatic essay about assessing technologies before adoption, not about measuring harms after, that it argues formal participation is not enough, and that its focal points are proposed and untested. |
| LIT-1633 v2 | Mr. Russell’s “Causal Theory of Perception” | Newman (1928). Against Russell’s claim that we know only the structure of the external world: any collection of the right cardinality can be given relations with any structure we please, so knowing only structure is knowing only cardinality, unless the relations are specified as more than abstract relations. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the article is closed on Unpaywall and OpenAlex (Mind, Oxford University Press), with no repository copy. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1636 v2 | The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science | Pickering (1995). Scientific practice is a mangle of human and material agency: researchers’ goals and machines meet resistance, which practitioners accommodate by revising goals, instruments and interpretations, and the outcome of the dialectic of resistance and accommodation is emergent in time. | 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 (University of Chicago Press), with no open copy listed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| 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-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-1648 v2 | Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information | Simondon (1958; English 2020). Individuation is to be explained before individuals: from a metastable preindividual field charged with potentials, an individual forms by transduction, a structuring that propagates step by step, each structured region the condition for the next, as in crystallization. An individual is a partial resolution of the field and keeps a charge of preindividual reality, so individuation can continue. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the translation 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. Retried 2026-10-31 for the works Bencherki et al. 2024 lean on: no open edition on the University of Minnesota’s Manifold, no excerpt on the publisher’s page, nothing on the Internet Archive. |
| LIT-1650 v2 | The looping effects of human kinds | Hacking (1995). Human kinds differ from natural kinds in that classifying people changes them: those classified, aware of the classification, change how they behave and see themselves, and the kind’s description must then change, a looping effect between a classification and what it classifies. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: the chapter is closed on Unpaywall (Oxford Academic), with no open copy listed. 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-1653 v2 | Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter | Barad (2003). The short statement of agential realism: phenomena, not independent objects, are the primary ontological units; relata do not precede the intra-actions through which they become determinate; apparatuses are open-ended material-discursive practices that enact agential cuts, making some boundaries and properties determinate within a phenomenon and excluding others. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-27, not read. A close reading was attempted on 2026-10-27 and no lawful full text was reached: Unpaywall reports the publisher’s copy as closed, and OpenAlex lists no open copy and no repository full text. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. Its two most-cited passages (pp. 814 and 815) are read at second hand in NOTE-1230 and NOTE-1220. |
| 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-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-1672 v2 | Barad, Bohr, and quantum mechanics | Faye & Jaksland (2021). Barad’s Bohr is more ontological than Bohr, who took phenomena as experimental arrangements with their outcomes; Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics does not entail Barad’s relational holism; and agential realism leaves the measurement problem unsolved, since persisting entanglement of apparatus and object does not explain one determinate outcome. Quantum mechanics does not force agential realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1220); worth reading as the assessment of agential realism from philosophy of physics: Barad’s Bohr is not Bohr’s (phenomena epistemic, Bohr an entity realist, the dualisms presupposed), quantum mechanics does not entail agential realism (Bohmian mechanics; relational quantum mechanics keeps systems prior to interactions), and agential realism has no answer to the measurement problem as it stands. |
| LIT-1673 v2 | Naturalized, Fundamental, and Feminist Metaphysics All at Once: The Case of Barad’s Agential Realism | Jaksland (2024), DOI-10.1017/hyp.2023.114, Hypatia 39. Barad holds agential realism to be naturalized metaphysics justified by quantum mechanics and applied once, to the one reality, and rejects reading it as analogy or as a template other domains instantiate. Its extension to the lifeworld then needs ontological features that admit no approximation (the subject–object and word–world dualisms, representationalism). Whether any exist is left open; individualism is the plausibly approximable case, and the independence of social theorizing from fundamental metaphysics is at least contingent, on the size of Planck’s constant. | Active — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1230); worth reading as the only statement of the argument Barad’s unrestricted scope needs, that some ontological features admit no approximation, and as the clearest account of the conception of agential realism Barad holds (naturalized, applied once) against the two she rejects (analogy, template). Its own answer to its question is that it is open, with individualism the plausibly approximable case and the dualisms the hard one. |
| LIT-1849 | Real patterns and indispensability | Suñé and Martínez (2019; Synthese 198, 2021, 4315–4330). Unread, and no abstract was available, so nothing is said here of its content beyond its title, which pairs Dennett’s real patterns with indispensability. Expected to supply, for THEORY-036, a published treatment of whether a real-patterns criterion needs an indispensability clause beyond compressibility, the clause Ladyman adds. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-30, not read. A lawful green copy is on PhilSci-Archive: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16190 (the PDF at philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16190/1/Real%20patterns%20and%20indispensability.pdf, per Semantic Scholar). On 2026-10-30 the record page failed TLS verification from this client (curl error 60: the chain served ends at emSign Root CA - G1, which this client does not trust; verification was not overridden). No NOTE is filed. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Free copy: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/16190. |
| LIT-1869 | Nature’s Queer Performativity | Barad (2012), Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 1–2:25–53, the authorized version of an essay first printed in Qui Parle (2011). It argues that identity, causality, space and time are performed, not given, in nature as well as culture. Lightning, stingray receptor cells, the dinoflagellate Pfiesteria and atoms are offered as “queer critters” whose behaviour a classical ontology of separate, determinate things cannot account for. Her agential realism replaces things with phenomena: an intra-action enacts an agential cut, “a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy”, which yields agential separability, not absolute separation. The ethical upshot: there are no acts “against nature”, only acts of nature, and accountability is for the cuts that are made. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1458), from the journal’s own PDF of the article (CC BY-NC) on tidsskrift.dk (tidsskrift.dk/KKF/article/download/28067/24695/65067), text extracted with pdftotext. This is the version Barad calls authorized; an earlier Qui Parle printing (2011) is, by her note 15, not the version she submitted. Worth reading as the record’s first text of Barad’s own: it states the agential cut in her words, as a local resolution, enacted by an intra-action within a phenomenon, of an inherent ontological indeterminacy, against the Cartesian cut as an inherent distinction. It is an essay, not an argument from data: its physics is the Bohr model and the which-path and quantum-eraser experiments as she reads them, and its other cases come from Kirby and Schrader. |
| LIT-1876 | Reasoning in Life: Values and Normativity in Georges Canguilhem | Vissio (2020), Int J Semiot Law 33:1019–1031. Canguilhem’s vitalism is neither metaphysical nor structural–functional but “attitudinal”: life is a normative activity of evaluating a milieu. To be sick is not to lack norms but to be reduced in the capacity to change them; “normativity” is that capacity. Social norms differ in kind from vital ones (they are “to be invented and not observed”), so there is no social pathology, yet human reason and science are answers to a vital exigency. Proposed as a ground for a semiotics of values. | Active — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1447), from the open-access published article (CC BY 4.0) in PubMed Central, PMC7678399, fetched as XML through the Europe PMC REST API. A short exposition of Canguilhem’s philosophy of norms as an “attitudinal” vitalism. Worth reading for its account of normativity in his words: the sick organism is “confined and reduced in its capacity to change” its norms, and “normativity” is the name for “this ability or capacity to redefine vital norms”, with quotations from The Normal and the Pathological. It also reports his argument that social norms differ in kind from vital ones, so that there is no social pathology. Canguilhem at second hand; no argument of Vissio’s own beyond the reading. |
| LIT-1888 v2 | Theoretical principles for biology: Organization | Mossio, Montévil & Longo (2016). Proposes organization, understood as closure of constraints, as one of two theoretical principles for biology, beside variation, which a companion paper treats. The principles are posited a priori, as physics posits its phase space, and they define the domain: any system meeting both is biological, organisms being one class. The paper restates Montévil and Mossio’s definitions of constraint, dependence and closure. It argues, without a model, that closure grounds stability by regenerating constraints beyond their own time scales, and that it also propagates variation, so a change that reaches a constraint’s generators ends in disintegration or a new closure. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1461) from the authors’ HAL deposit; worth reading for the status it gives closure of constraints, a theoretical principle that defines the domain of biology rather than an empirical finding about organisms (THEORY-1251), and for its argument that closure both removes and propagates variation (THEORY-1271). It adds no formal content to Montévil and Mossio 2015 (LIT-582), and its stability claims are argued without a model. |
| LIT-1923 | Ventriloquism’s methodological scope | Wilhoit (2016), Language Under Discussion 2:45–49. A response to Cooren (2014): Montréal School CCO is ontologically committed to interaction, so it takes conversation analysis as its method of choice, and a ventriloquism carrying those commitments cannot be the open metamodel Craig (1999) asked for. Dialogue is emerging instead from CCO work that uses other methods. It does not say Cooren’s analyses “entify agents”. | Active — read in full 2026-10-31 (NOTE-1487), from the journal’s open-access PDF (CC BY 4.0). A five-page response to Cooren’s “Pragmatism as ventriloquism” (Language Under Discussion 2014). Its point is about method: Montréal School CCO’s commitment to interaction makes conversation analysis its method of choice, so ventriloquism cannot be the open metamodel for Craig’s seven traditions that Cooren proposes. Worth knowing chiefly because Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) cite it for a claim it does not make, that Cooren’s analyses “entify agents”. |
| LIT-1924 | Horizontal Surgicality and Mechanistic Constitution | Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel (2020). Since phenomena can be manipulated only via common causes of them and their parts, constitution must be analysed with non-ideal interventions; counting every supervenience-respecting common cause as an intervention begs the question, and admitting every common cause is a non-starter. An intervention that directly changes at most one behaviour on each lower level, and changes its target and the phenomenon simultaneously, is “horizontally surgical”; under Universal Constitution, Simultaneity and transitivity of co-occurrence, one such intervention suffices for constitution. The proof presupposes settled parthood and levels. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1494) from the authors’ penultimate draft; worth keeping as the one positive interventionist result in the debate: given that every change in a phenomenon is simultaneously realized on every lower level, that simultaneous changes are not causally related, and that parthood and levels are settled, a single intervention that changes one part per level and the phenomenon simultaneously suffices for constitution (THEORY-1293). |
| LIT-1925 | Saving the mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance | Krickel (2018), DOI-10.1016/j.shpsa.2018.01.003. By the descriptions available, a defence of mutual manipulability against the charge that an interventionist criterion cannot define a non-causal relation: manipulability is read as a causal relation between a component and a temporal part of the phenomenon, which is represented by several variables for its phases. Unread; her co-authored 2020 paper reports the move in one sentence (NOTE-1494). | Unfetched — A lawful free copy was located 2026-11-01 and could not be fetched: the author’s final draft on PhilArchive, https://philarchive.org/archive/KRISTM-3 (also listed at https://philpapers.org/archive/KRISTM-3.pdf). Both returned HTTP 403 to this client; CORE’s copy (core.ac.uk/download/131213192.pdf) returned a Cloudflare challenge, and the Wayback capture (20240802095749) reset the connection. Neither challenge was pursued. The Elsevier version is paywalled. Free copy: https://philarchive.org/archive/KRISTM-3. |
| LIT-1926 | Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality | Wimsatt (2007), DOI-10.2307/j.ctv1pncnrh. Essays on heuristics, robustness, reduction and emergence; the source LIT-188 cites for generative entrenchment (a structure that later ones depend on, so that perturbing it is catastrophic while perturbing them is tolerable) and for aggregativity. Unread here. | Deferred — filed 2026-11-01, not read. Registered as the source of generative entrenchment, the mechanism Griesemer and Shavit (LIT-188, §2) say drives the transition from conexus to community. A book (Harvard University Press); no reading was attempted. |
| LIT-1928 | Top-down causation without top-down causes | Craver & Bechtel (2007; online 2006). Talk of top-down or bottom-up causation within levels of mechanisms can be translated “without remainder” into mechanistically mediated effects: intralevel causal chains combined with the constitutive relation between a mechanism and its components. Interlevel relations are constitutive only. The case rests on stated assumptions (higher-level causes exist and are all mechanistically explained), not on an argument for them. It concedes that the interlevel experiments used to find components are symmetrical and give only prima facie evidence of componency. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1491); worth keeping as the mechanist’s statement that the relation between levels is constitution, not causation, and for an admission the record needs. Interlevel experiments are symmetrical, and a lesion shows only “prima facie” that something is a component, since a part not “interactively integrated” may be a background condition (p. 553, n. 10). So the experiments do not by themselves draw the mechanism’s boundary (THEORY-1287, CLAIM-530). |
| LIT-1929 | Three Problems for the Mutual Manipulability Account of Constitutive Relevance in Mechanisms | Leuridan (2012), DOI-10.1093/bjps/axr036. By its abstract, two conceptual problems for Craver’s mutual manipulability account (constitutive relevance threatens to imply causal relevance; parthood as spatiotemporal inclusion meets a counterexample from endosymbiosis) and one methodological one (experimental underdetermination). Unread: no lawful copy reached. The works read with it report that it argues, under Woodward’s interventionism, that constitutive relevance is a form of bidirectional causal relevance. | Unavailable — Sought 2026-11-01 and not reached. The publisher’s copy (OUP, doi 10.1093/bjps/axr036) is paywalled. The one repository copy OpenAlex lists, Ghent University’s Biblio (record 2116239, file 6770914), is marked “restricted” in Biblio’s own metadata and redirected this client to an institutional sign-in, so it is not a free copy. No PhilSci-Archive or PhilArchive deposit was found. Known here only from its abstract and from what the three works read with it say of it (NOTE-1493, NOTE-1490, NOTE-1494). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1930 | Constitutive Explanatory Relevance | Craver (2007), DOI-10.5840/jpr20073241. The paper in which, by its successors’ account, Craver named constitutive relevance: what makes a component’s activity relevant to the behaviour of the mechanism it is part of, analysed as mutual manipulability between the two. Unread: no lawful copy was reached. What it is said to hold is from the abstract and from Craver, Glennan and Povich (2021), not from the text. | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-01 for a lawful full text and none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex reports it closed with no repository copy. The publisher, the Philosophy Documentation Center (pdcnet.org, record jpr_2007_0032_0003_0020), offers it for purchase only. Craver’s Washington University CV (philosophy.wustl.edu/media/1028/download) lists it without a link, his WashU research profile has no file, and searches of PhilArchive, PhilSci-Archive and the web found no author copy. It is not on Bechtel’s UCSD page, which hosts two other papers from this batch. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-1931 | Constitutive relevance & mutual manipulability revisited | Craver, Glennan & Povich (2021), DOI-10.1007/s11229-021-03183-8. A reply to critics who say mutual manipulability (MM) conflates causation with constitution (Baumgartner and Gebharter 2016; Baumgartner and Casini 2017). It separates the semantic, epistemic and metaphysical questions of constitutive relevance, amends MM into an epistemic criterion, “matched interlevel experiments” (MIE), and grounds it in the thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness. Unread: a free preprint is on PhilArchive behind a bot check. | Unfetched — searched 2026-11-01. The Springer article is paywalled (the page offers “Buy article PDF”; the PDF link returned the paywall page). OpenAlex lists an author-deposited preprint at PhilArchive, https://philarchive.org/archive/CRACRA-3 (record philarchive.org/rec/CRACRA-3), and a search engine reported it as the full text, “forthcoming in Synthese”, 10,558 words. It returned a Cloudflare “Just a moment…” challenge (403) to curl on 2026-11-01, on philarchive.org and on dc2.philarchive.org, and WebFetch got a 403; the challenge was not attempted. Butler University’s repository (digitalcommons.butler.edu/facsch_papers/1201) holds metadata only, and Glennan’s bepress page now redirects to a retirement notice. Free copy: https://philarchive.org/archive/CRACRA-3. |
| LIT-1933 | Why there isn’t inter-level causation in mechanisms | Romero (2015), DOI-10.1007/s11229-015-0718-0. By the descriptions available, it argues that mutual manipulability, Woodward’s interventionism and the denial of inter-level causation look like an inconsistent triad, and dissolves it by treating interventions on a mechanism’s levels as fat-handed: inter-level relations are explained without inter-level causation. Unread; Baumgartner & Casini and Baumgartner, Casini & Krickel cite it for the result that interventions on phenomena are necessarily fat-handed. | Unfetched — A lawful free copy was located 2026-11-01 and could not be fetched: the author’s accepted version on PhilSci-Archive, https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12956/1/fr_interlevelmechanisms_final.pdf. The server’s certificate chain ends in a root this client does not trust (TLS “unable to get local issuer certificate”), a second fetcher got HTTP 503, the Wayback capture (20240603160454) reset the connection, and CORE’s copy (core.ac.uk/download/157867512.pdf) returned a Cloudflare challenge, which was not pursued. The Springer version is paywalled. Free copy: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12956/1/fr_interlevelmechanisms_final.pdf. |
| LIT-1934 | Constitutive Relevance, Mutual Manipulability, and Fat-Handedness | Baumgartner & Gebharter (2016). Embedded in Woodward’s 2003 interventionism, Craver’s mutual manipulability entails that no part is constitutively relevant to any whole, since every cause of a supervening behaviour is a common cause of it and of its base and so not an intervention; embedded in Woodward’s relaxed version it makes constitution causal; with a temporal clause added (causes precede effects for some intervention) it is consistent, but then mutual manipulation is fat-handed and its correlations are equally explained by a model with no constitution. Constitution gets only second-order, abductive evidence: no surgical cause of the whole is ever found. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1493) from the authors’ penultimate draft; worth keeping as the proof that, if constitution is non-causal and wholes supervene on their parts, every cause of a whole’s behaviour is a common cause of it and of some part’s, so mutual manipulability by ideal interventions is unsatisfiable and, once relaxed, gives no evidence of constitution (THEORY-1288). |
| LIT-1936 | Dynamic mechanistic explanation: computational modeling of circadian rhythms as an exemplar for cognitive science | Bechtel & Abrahamsen (2010). Dynamic mechanistic explanation adds to a mechanistic account a computational model, usually differential equations in time, whose variables are properties of the mechanism’s parts and operations. In circadian research the parts were found first by experiment, and the models explore their dynamics. In cognitive science the models posit the mechanism de novo, and fit to behaviour is their only check. The paper names six contributions models make, from showing that an identified mechanism can produce the phenomenon (C1) to exploring how coupled mechanisms lose and regain synchrony (C6). Its limit, in its own words: for de novo models, “Empirical evidence can rule out specific models, but usually cannot decide between competing architectures.” | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1492); worth keeping for the line it draws between a dynamical model whose variables are anchored to parts and operations already found by experiment, and one posited de novo that is checked only by fit to behaviour (THEORY-1290). Kept also for two uses of modelling that bear on the record’s maintenance constructions. One is clamping a variable to test whether an identified part belongs to the responsible mechanism (THEORY-1289). The other is the open question whether peripheral circadian clocks sustain their own rhythm or are damped oscillators driven from outside (THEORY-1292). |
| LIT-1938 | Mutual manipulability and causal inbetweenness | Harinen (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11229-014-0564-5. By the descriptions available, mechanistic models contain non-causal relations beside causal ones, so the standard ideal intervention is the wrong notion for mutual manipulability, and an extended interventionism is proposed. Unread; Baumgartner & Casini answer it (their footnote 8) that relaxing interventions so deprives interventions on mechanisms of their inferential value. | Unfetched — A lawful free copy was located 2026-11-01 and could not be fetched: the author’s preprint on PhilSci-Archive, https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11083/5/Mutual_Manipulability_and_Causal_Inbetweenness.pdf. The server’s certificate chain ends in a root this client does not trust, a second fetcher got HTTP 503, the Wayback capture (20240604111239) reset the connection, and CORE’s copy (core.ac.uk/download/33752704.pdf) returned a Cloudflare challenge, which was not pursued. The Springer version is paywalled. Free copy: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11083/5/Mutual_Manipulability_and_Causal_Inbetweenness.pdf. |
| LIT-1939 | An Abductive Theory of Constitution | Baumgartner & Casini (2017). Craver’s mutual manipulability ties constitution to ideal interventions that cannot exist, and relaxing them leaves only fat-handed ones, whose data a pure common-cause model fits as well as a constitutive one even in ideal settings, so constitution, unlike causation, has no crucial experiment. Their No De-Coupling account: a set of parts constitutes a phenomenon when every cause of the phenomenon is a common cause of it and some member, no proper subset does as much, and no expansion of the variable set breaks the coupling. The inference is abductive and only inductively corroborated. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1490) from the authors’ penultimate draft; worth keeping for the claim that, unlike causation, constitution has no experimentum crucis, and for its alternative: constitution is inferred abductively from a redundancy-free common-cause coupling of whole and parts that no expansion of the variable set breaks (THEORY-1288, THEORY-1294). |
| LIT-1957 v2 | Underdetermination and causality in Irruption Theory: A critical analysis from a complex systems perspective | Hölken (2024), doi:10.1177/10597123241301835. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (A21). A complex-systems critique of Irruption Theory. A21’s “Hölken (2025)”; identified by its issue year. | Unavailable — searched 2026-11-03 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex and Unpaywall (noreply address) report it closed with no repository copy; Crossref lists Sage’s text-and-data-mining licence and Sage’s PDF and XML, which are subscription access, and journals.sagepub.com returned 403 to this client. Web searches found no preprint, PhilArchive copy or author upload; the author is at Ruhr-University Bochum (ORCID 0000-0002-4280-5048). Sánchez-Cañizares 2026 (NOTE-1506) cites its criticism in one line. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1961 v2 | Chaos | Bishop, ‘Chaos’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008; substantive revision 2024-10-11). Chaos is a property of deterministic, nonlinear models with sensitive dependence and aperiodicity; unpredictability is not indeterminism. The argument that chaos amplifies quantum events is conditional on the interpretation of QM, damping and the sign of local Lyapunov exponents, and in the brain parallel redundancy may block it. For Kane, sensitivity is not sufficient for incompatibilist freedom under determinism, and under indeterminism agents must still be shown to harness it. §§6.2–6.3 state contextual emergence: larger-scale stability conditions constrain and enable smaller-scale possibility and actualization. | Active — skimmed 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1535), from the live SEP page, §§4 and 6 and the stock-taking sections read closely; worth reading for its case that chaos is not indeterminism, that amplification of small perturbations is physically conditional, and that Kane’s use of chaos leaves the harnessing of indeterminism to be shown. The 2024 revision also states Bishop’s contextual emergence as an ontological account of constraint. |
| LIT-1987 v2 | Contextual Emergence in the Description of Properties | Bishop and Atmanspacher (2006), doi:10.1007/s10701-006-9082-8. Registered unread from the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” of 2026-11-02 (A5). The account of contextual emergence Jennings’s paper is reported to use. It claims stability conditions that make a higher-level description well defined, not new causal powers; that is the point of contact with CLAIM-334. | Unfetched — looked for 2026-11-03, not read. A lawful free copy, the authors’ preprint on PhilSci-Archive, is at https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2934/1/embishFinalArchive.pdf (record philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2934). This client could not fetch it: curl through the session proxy failed TLS verification (‘unable to get local issuer certificate’) (the http address fared the same), a second fetcher got HTTP 503, and two Wayback captures (20240613145841, 20100708050954) reset the connection. The Springer version is paywalled; CORE’s copy sits behind a Cloudflare check, which was not passed. It stays Unfetched until the owner supplies the file. |
| LIT-1993 v2 | Emergence in Context: A Treatise in Twenty-First Century Natural Philosophy | Bishop et al. (2022), doi:10.1093/oso/9780192849786.001.0001. Registered unread as a source of Jennings 2026. The book-length account of contextual emergence, with Bishop and Atmanspacher 2006 (LIT-1987). Jennings quotes it for the constraint Bénard cells place on their fluid parcels (“these cells constrain or shape the states of motion accessible to fluid parcels”, p. 41, at LIT-1963 p. 20). The reading THEORY-1314 needs, to say whether Jennings’s boundary condition and causal reading go beyond its source. | Unavailable — looked for 2026-11-03, not read. No lawful free copy was found: OpenAlex (no email sent, ADR-008) and Unpaywall (noreply@anthropic.com) mark the OUP book closed, with no open-access edition; the PhilPapers record links only to library access; booksellers sell it. The authors’ view is read at second hand only in Bishop’s SEP entry on chaos (NOTE-1535, THEORY-1333), which cites it. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1995 v2 | Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence | Juarrero (2023), MIT Press, open access. A speculative natural philosophy (p. 32) of causation by constraint: what raises or lowers barriers to energy flow without transferring kinetic energy (p. 40). Context- independent constraints take conditions away from equiprobability, context-dependent ones away from independence (Gatlin); enabling constraints couple processes into coherent “interactional types” whose constitutive constraints govern their components top down by confining them to a subregion of state space (pp. 67–84). Levels are demarcated by rate discontinuities, wholes are slower, and control is lost when rates converge (ch. 12). Closure of constraints is adopted from Montévil and Mossio (ch. 7); control is analog (ch. 11); delayed-response neuroscience is read as top-down control (ch. 15). | Active — skimmed 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1532): chapters 2, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 15 and 16 read in full from the MIT Press open-access PDF, the rest searched by term. Worth reading as the readable statement of Juarrero’s constraint vocabulary (enabling, governing, second-order context-dependent constraints), which the record could not reach in the 1999 book, and for chapter 12’s hierarchy-theory account of rate-demarcated levels, the nearest philosophical prior art for CLAIM-478. Speculative by the author’s account, with no model of its own; its “context-dependent constraint” is Gatlin’s conditional dependence, not TERM-070’s constraint. |