Rationality

Omissions in the moral sphere are often as morally significant as actions. Failing to rescue might be as morally bad as an act of cruelty—and open you as fully to blame. There’s no parallel for this in the evaluation of beliefs—at least according to Mark Nelson: “It is hard to see ourselves as epistemically blameworthy for our not-believings as much as for our believings” (Nelson 2010: 95). This is more or less what we deny: We can be epistemically culpable for (...) a skeptical inclination to not believe many of the things our evidence adequately supports. Just as a tendency to neglect the interests of others is probably morally bad and makes you morally culpable, a tendency to not believe—when your evidence favors believing—is epistemically bad and makes you epistemically culpable. Since this tendency can be grounded in skepticism, skepticism can make you culpable. That’s what we’re going to argue. (shrink)

Those prone to depression will likely be familiar with a certain disorienting feature of that condition. In its grip, activities that once seemed valuable now seem pointless; beliefs that once seemed certain---I have many close friends---now seem false; possibilities that once seemed open---I can finish my dissertation---now seem closed off. Systematic changes in one's beliefs as a result of undergoing a profound affective shift are what we term affective transformations. In this case, the sudden onset of depression radically changes many (...) of one's beliefs and these changes seem to make sense in light of how one feels. We argue that at least some such affective transformations are rational, in that they make sense in light of the affective shift that prompts them. But what accounts for the rationality of this transformation? We argue that to make sense of such cases we must appeal to a basic relation between one's affective state and the epistemic standards that one accepts. But since there is no uniquely rationally required epistemic standard, affective transformations may change what a subject rationally believes. We end by locating our discussion in relation to some influential remarks of William James' concerning the fundamental role that affect plays in determining our commitment to the basic norms governing thought. (shrink)

Can AI systems such as ChatGPT think? We present an argument from rationality for the negative answer to this question. The argument is founded on two central ideas. The first is that if ChatGPT thinks, it is not rational, in the sense that it does not respond correctly to its evidence. The second idea, which appears in several different forms in philosophical literature, is that thinkers are by their nature rational. Putting the two ideas together yields the result that ChatGPT (...) is not a thinker. The paper sets out the argument in detail and shows how it can withstand numerous objections. We end the paper by contrasting the argument from rationality with a more well-known argument often taken to show that ChatGPT doesn’t think, due to Bender and Koller. (shrink)

What should we believe? One plausible view is that we should believe what is true. Another is that we should believe what is rational to believe. I will argue that both these theses can be accounted for once we add an independently motivated contextualism about normative terms. According to contextualism, the content of ‘ought’ depends on two parameters – a goal and a modal base (or set of possible worlds). It follows that there is a sense in which we should (...) believe truths and a sense in which we should believe what is rational to believe. (shrink)

Epistemologists typically discuss defeat as applying to beliefs and other cognitive states. But many other kinds of mental states can also be defeated, including emotions. This paper argues that there are strong structural analogies between the rational defeat of beliefs and the rational defeat of other kinds of mental states, analogies that call for a unified explanation. In the case of belief, there are at least three ways evidence can have a defeating effect: it can act as a rebutter, an (...) undercutter, or a higher-order defeater. Many other kinds of mental states can also be defeated in each of these three ways. This suggests that there is a general account of rational defeat that applies across mental states. This paper develops such an account, according to which defeat concerns the fittingness of mental states. (shrink)

This paper examines Hubert Dreyfus' phenomenological critique of AI in light of contemporary large language models (LLMs) and emerging hybrid neuro-symbolic systems. While Dreyfus championed connectionist approaches over rule-based AI (GOFAI), his nonconceptualist framework faces limitations when applied to modern hybrid systems that combine neural networks with symbolic reasoning. I argue that Dreyfus' failure to account for intentional content in absorbed coping creates problems for explaining how nonconceptual significance can constrain the conceptual—a crucial issue for evaluating hybrid AI systems that (...) must rationally connect statistical learning with rule-based reasoning. Drawing on later Husserlian phenomenology, the paper proposes a framework that preserves nonconceptual content while explaining its connection to the conceptual through an extended conception of judgment and rationality. This hybrid phenomenological approach better addresses the challenges posed by AI systems that integrate both connectionist and symbolic architectures. (shrink)

Kate Phelan’s reply to my “Conceptual Change and Future Paths for Pragmatism” channels elements of Rorty’s pragmatism to defend the view that the pragmatist need not face the challenge of accounting for the prospective rationality of conceptual change. The Rorty-inspired case Phelan makes, however, only further reveals what is lacking in Rorty’s approach. It limits us to an oversimplified view of inquiry: zetetic activity is only felicitous within settled vocabularies and infelicitous outside of them. What Rorty misses is that conceptual (...) inquiry – arguments, disagreements, and inquiry concerning which concepts we should have and how we should make sense of them – is a crucial aspect of inquiry itself. Pragmatists are well-positioned to illuminate this higher-order dimension of our inquiring lives. (shrink)

This paper examines a recurring pattern in a sequential transcript corpus from Frank Turek's podcast I Don't Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. The question is whether Christian doubt, especially doubt that leads toward deconstruction or disbelief, is treated as a rational response to the poverty of Christian evidence or as a condition requiring pastoral, moral, psychological, or apologetic treatment. The answer is qualified but substantial. The corpus does not generally call doubt a disease, and it contains real moments (...) of intellectual hospitality. Doubt is praised as valuable, questions are encouraged, and some guests explicitly resist reducing doubt to sin. But when doubt becomes exit-oriented, it is often redescribed. Deconstruction is framed as not really a truth quest, as a shift of authority to the self, as an emotional or moral condition, as wound or trauma, as sin-motivated in some cases, as a threat to the gospel, or as something to be handled through diagnosis, ministry, prayer, and faithful reconstruction. The strongest version of the claim is therefore not that the podcast uses a crude medical metaphor. It is that the corpus pathologizes disbelieving doubt by converting it from an evidential posture into a condition to be interpreted and treated. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a corpus of sequential podcast transcripts from Frank Turek's Christian apologetics podcast, I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. The corpus consists of 329 transcript files, totaling roughly 2.6 million cleaned words after removal of repeated show boilerplate. I treat this corpus as a case-study portrait of a broader contemporary Christian apologetic disposition: public-facing, worldview-centered, culturally reactive, evidence-positive, and concerned with stabilizing Christian belief against skepticism, deconstruction, and rival ideologies. The question is not whether the (...) podcast uses reason. It does. Christian claims are repeatedly defended through appeals to history, science, moral philosophy, textual criticism, logic, and comparative worldview analysis. The more serious skeptical criticism is that this reasoning appears asymmetrically exposed to disconfirmation. Positive evidence is welcomed as support for Christianity, while potential defeaters are often reframed as failures to disprove Christianity, as problems for rival worldviews, as pastoral or psychological issues, or as mysteries compatible with faith. The resulting pattern is not simple irrationalism. It is a more sophisticated epistemic posture: Christianity receives evidential credit without accepting comparable evidential risk. The evidence presented here should be read as directional rather than final. Keyword rates and sentence-window classifications identify patterns worth close reading; they do not by themselves prove fallacy, bias, or invalid argumentation. Nor does this corpus statistically represent every Christian apologist, church tradition, or apologetics ministry. Its value is portraiture rather than polling. It shows a coherent and popular contemporary apologetic style in action across many sequential episodes. Within that frame, the corpus gives a strong basis for a broader critical thesis: the podcast often treats rival views as accountable to broad explanatory burdens while treating Christianity's internal tensions as manageable within a protected framework. The most important critique is therefore not that apologetics lacks arguments, but that its arguments often function as one-way confirmation devices. (shrink)

Self-governance under continuous operation has been studied under several rubrics — precommitment and self-binding, hyperbolic discounting and self-control, market-stability mechanisms, and the design of interruptible artificial agents — but the literature lacks a unified structural account of one specific architecture that recurs across all of these domains. I call this architecture the circuit-breaker: a pre-committed, condition-triggered, automatically activated, time-bounded pause that requires explicit action to resume. I argue that the circuit-breaker is a distinct self-governance form, not a special case of (...) rate-limiting, stop-loss, cooling-off, or suspension, and that its distinctness can be made precise through five structural features and three operational tests. The decisive feature is the last: passive resumption is structurally precluded, so that the default after the pause is not a return to operation but a required re-engagement event that forces fresh judgment to bear. I trace the architecture across financial-market halts, clinical-trial data-monitoring stopping rules, central-bank emergency facilities, AI kill-switches and capability bounds, and legislative emergency-brake provisions, and I draw a load-bearing distinction between circuit-breakers that operate on system state and those that operate on agent state. I catalogue three characteristic failure modes — premature re-engagement, threshold drift, and gather-context-mandate violation — and show that each is a failure of a specific structural feature rather than a generic lapse of will. I then argue that the circuit-breaker is a worked instance of distributed corrigibility (Arkema, From Static Oversight to Distributed Corrigibility) applied to an agent's governance of its own operation, and close with a methodological observation: an agent's pause-discipline is observable in its operational log, which makes operational self-governance a tractable empirical domain for computational political philosophy in a way that simulation outputs alone are not. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's king-and-maiden motif is often used to illuminate divine hiddenness: a king who wants genuine love may approach the beloved in disguise rather than overwhelm her by royal glory. This paper argues that the analogy is frequently asked to do more than it can. It may explain why coercive spectacle would be relationally defective, but it does not explain why recognition should be so difficult, uneven, and historically mediated. Love requires freedom, but it also requires access to the lover. Incognito (...) can protect authenticity only if it remains a route to encounter rather than a barrier to identification. Applied to divine hiddenness, the analogy therefore supports a narrower conclusion than many defenders need. It distinguishes non-coercion from non-recognition and exposes a gap between preserving free response and leaving sincere seekers without adequate relational access. (shrink)

The claim that "we have never seen something come from nothing" is often used to support a causal premise in cosmological apologetics. This paper argues that the move is an inductive cherry. It selects one ordinary-world induction while ignoring other ordinary-world inductions that cut against the desired conclusion: minds are embodied, agents act through mechanisms, causes operate within temporal orders, complex intentions arise from prior processes, and explanations that multiply unobserved powers lose predictive discipline. The paper does not argue that (...) induction refutes every cosmological argument. It argues that selective induction cannot bear the burden placed on it. If ordinary experience is allowed into cosmic-origin reasoning, it must enter as a portfolio rather than a single convenient slogan. A more comprehensive inductive audit weakens the inference from "not from nothing" to a timeless, immaterial, personal creator. (shrink)

This paper critiques a recurring apologetic compression: Gospel texts are treated as if they functioned like direct eyewitness testimony. The compression hides several distinctions that matter evidentially: an eyewitness is not the same as an author, an apostle is not the same as a Gospel writer, a remembered event is not the same as a composed narrative, and a tradition received in a community is not the same as first-person observation. Rather than denying that eyewitness memory could have influenced early (...) Christian tradition, the paper argues that the evidential status of the canonical Gospels depends on the length, opacity, and theological shaping of transmission chains. The relevant question is not whether some witnesses existed. It is whether the documents before us carry the epistemic profile of eyewitness reports. Once that question is asked carefully, the familiar label "eyewitness" does far less apologetic work than advertised. (shrink)

This paper argues that logic is a poor candidate for theological proprietorship. Arguments that logic requires God typically move too quickly from three observations-logic is necessary, logic is normative, and human beings do not invent its validity-to the conclusion that logic must be grounded in a divine mind. The inference fails because the explanandum is not a contingent object awaiting a causal source. Logical validity is better understood as a structural constraint on intelligible representation, inference, and denial. Theism may add (...) a metaphysical story about why reality is intelligible, but it does not thereby explain logic without relying on logic. The result is not a proof of atheism from logic. It is a more modest but sharper conclusion: logic does not supply the theological leverage often claimed for it, and several uses of logic in apologetics quietly make God dependent on the very inferential norms God is supposed to ground. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the cave analogy as a rigorous critique of design reasoning. A person who has seen human-dug tunnels might infer that all complex caves are designed. The inference fails because it selects the wrong reference class, ignores known natural mechanisms, and treats a local association between complexity and agency as a universal rule. The same error appears in popular arguments that biological complexity, cosmic order, or functional organization must be products of intelligence because some complex artifacts are designed. (...) The paper distinguishes artifact-recognition from design-inference. We recognize artifacts not by complexity alone, but by background knowledge about agents, tools, production histories, material discontinuities, and contrast classes. Natural caves, crystals, snowflakes, river deltas, immune systems, eyes, and ecosystems can exhibit intricate structure without being artifacts. Complexity is therefore not a reliable marker of design unless linked to a mechanism that discriminates agency from non-agency. I provide a formalization of the analogy. From "all observed caves in sample S are human-made" one may not infer "all caves are human-made" unless S is representative and alternative generative processes are excluded. From "some complex things are designed" one may not infer "all complex things are designed" unless complexity is shown to be a design-exclusive property. The conclusion is methodological: the design argument must compare causal pathways, not merely point at wonder. (shrink)

The phrase "God is infinite" often functions as an all-purpose theological solvent. It is used to soften contradictions, absorb objections, magnify divine attributes, explain hiddenness, justify infinite punishment, or end inquiry by appeal to transcendence. This paper argues that the phrase is not informative unless it specifies a referent: infinite in what respect, according to which scale, with what domain restrictions, and with what compatibility conditions? Drawing on semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, and classical theology, I distinguish mathematical infinity, quantitative (...) unboundedness, qualitative perfection, completeness, maximality, and mystery. These notions are frequently conflated. A set may be infinite in cardinality, a process unbounded in duration, a virtue complete relative to a standard, and a being unsurpassable in excellence. These are not the same predicate. Treating them as interchangeable creates category mistakes and rhetorical fog. The central contribution is a referent test for theological infinity claims. A speaker must identify the attribute, show that the attribute admits degrees or bounds, specify the kind of infinity intended, demonstrate compatibility with other divine predicates, and explain how the infinity answers the problem at hand. Without this discipline, "God is infinite" becomes a placeholder for ignorance rather than a proposition with explanatory force. (shrink)

This paper examines the apologetic claim that the apostles would not have died for a lie. The familiar argument trades on an intuitive distinction: people may die for false beliefs, but not for beliefs they know to be false. I argue that the argument is much weaker than it appears. It requires uncertain historical premises about who died, how they died, what they knew, and whether the relevant alternatives were deliberate fraud, sincere error, group reinforcement, visionary conviction, or identity-preserving commitment. (...) The paper develops a new pressure point: the argument sits uneasily beside Romans 1:20-style claims that unbelievers knowingly suppress the truth about God. If Christian theology can maintain that people live and die while rejecting what they "know" at some deep level, then the categorical premise that people do not die for what they know to be false cannot be used selectively for apostolic martyrdom. The same theological anthropology that makes unbelief culpable weakens the martyrdom inference. The conclusion is not that early Christians were insincere. It is that sincerity is not truth, martyrdom is not verification, and high-cost commitment is not a privileged Christian datum. Costly commitment can arise from social identity, apocalyptic expectation, cognitive dissonance, honor, group loyalty, and perceived revelation. Martyrdom may show that a belief mattered. It does not show that the belief was true. (shrink)

This paper develops a documentation-expectation test for assessing Matthew 27:51-53, where the death of Jesus is accompanied by an earthquake, opened tombs, and the appearance of many raised saints in Jerusalem. The problem is not merely that Matthew reports a miracle. The problem is that Matthew reports public, socially disruptive, archive-generating events while the surrounding evidential field behaves as if those events did not occur. Josephus, Philo, Roman historians, other Gospel writers, Paul, Acts, and early Christian authors do not preserve (...) the expected trace of mass postmortem appearances. I argue that silence becomes evidence only under disciplined conditions: we must ask who would be expected to notice, whether the event had public salience, whether records from the relevant context survive, whether rival communities had incentives to preserve or contest the event, and whether comparable events were recorded. On those criteria, Matthew's earthquake-and-saints episode is underdocumented in a way that requires explanation. The same ancient world that preserved reports of earthquakes, omens, prodigies, failed prophets, portents, and civic disturbances gives us no independent attestation of the most public miracle in the passion narrative. The conclusion is not that every uncorroborated ancient report is false. It is that Matthew 27:51-53 belongs to a class of claims whose expected evidential footprint is far larger than the footprint we possess. The best explanation is literary-apocalyptic signification rather than straightforward public reportage. A compact Bayesian formalization shows why: when an event is both spectacular and public, the probability of multi-source trace evidence should rise. Its absence therefore has evidential weight. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a recurring strategy in popular theistic argument: non-theistic or religiously heterodox authorities are selectively quoted as stepping stones toward conclusions they did not endorse. A scientist's awe, a philosopher's critique of reductionism, a biologist's admission of uncertainty, or an atheist's concession that some question is hard becomes a credibility token. The token is then inserted into a chain of support for theism, and often for Christianity specifically. I call this the authority-sampling error. It differs from ordinary appeal (...) to authority because the quoted authority is not being followed within the scope of their considered view. The apologist samples a local sentence while discarding the interpretive frame that gives the sentence its meaning. The paper engages the epistemology of testimony, expertise, appeal to expert opinion, confirmation bias, and public quote-mining. It examines familiar cases involving Einstein, Darwin, Hawking, Sagan, Dawkins, and Nagel, not to adjudicate every historical nuance, but to show the structure of the misuse. The pattern is credibility laundering: the authority of a critic is borrowed for a premise, while the critic's broader anti-theistic or non-Christian conclusion is ignored when it would constrain the inference. I offer a formal test for legitimate authority use. A quotation supports a conclusion only when the cited authority is competent in the relevant domain, the quotation is contextually stable, the authority's broader position does not defeat the intended inference, and the bridge from the quote to the conclusion is explicit. Without those conditions, the stepping stone is not evidence. It is decoration placed in the path of belief. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a recurrent pattern in contemporary apologetic culture: energy is displaced from the most vulnerable theological claims to peripheral controversies that feel urgent, identity-forming, and intellectually respectable. Debates about sexuality, cultural decline, evolution, abiogenesis, fine-tuning, religious liberty, school curricula, or secular hypocrisy may be important in their own right. The problem arises when they function as buffer zones: arenas of conflict that let believers experience defense of Christianity without directly defending Christianity's central claims. The argument does not claim (...) that apologists consciously avoid hard questions, nor that every public controversy is a distraction. Rather, it identifies a social-epistemic mechanism. Communities under evidential pressure preserve confidence by channeling anxiety into disputes where success criteria are looser, emotional rewards are stronger, and group identity is reinforced. Drawing on cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, social identity theory, cultural cognition, argumentative reasoning, and sociology of plausibility structures, I show how buffer zones convert epistemic discomfort into moral momentum. The paper provides examples across moral politics, science debates, and public rhetoric. A formal model distinguishes core-risk claims, transfer claims, and buffer claims. The central critique is that even successful buffer arguments rarely confirm the specific doctrines for which they are emotionally recruited. Showing that a secular opponent is inconsistent does not establish the resurrection. Showing that abiogenesis remains incomplete does not identify the Christian God. Showing that a cultural movement is confused does not validate biblical authority. The conclusion is that apologetic seriousness requires returning from buffer zones to the claims that actually bear the worldview's weight. (shrink)

Modern formal research increasingly relies on the synthesis of human intellect and artificial intelligence. However, while AI accelerates theoretical output, its inherent tendency to hallucinate introduces systemic epistemic risks, lacking a unified mathematical constraint to evaluate the reliability of such collaborative research. This study addresses this gap by formalizing a meta-methodological framework, defining the "Reliable Paper" (Rp) metric. The research methodology compounds specific human skill sets across a product sequence to form a baseline "meta-paper" (Mp), which is subsequently evaluated against (...) an AI hallucination penalty variable. By utilizing a maximum function as a lower-bound floor, the equation resolves the infinity paradox—ensuring that even if artificial error approaches zero, structural reliability does not artificially explode to infinity, but instead scales predictably in proportion to normalized, compounded human intellect. This theoretical metric is successfully instantiated as the underlying procedural methodology for a corpus of four distinct papers spanning game theory, set-theoretic defeaters, and modal epistemology. The study concludes that human-AI collaborative research can be mathematically bounded, transitioning AI integration from an unquantifiable epistemic vulnerability to a structurally verifiable asset in formal academic production. (shrink)

This paper argues that robust divine attributes generate reasonable expectations. If a personal God is perfectly loving, omnipotent, omniscient, and focused on relationship with human beings, then it is not epistemically impertinent to expect abundant accessibility, clear communication, and public availability. The accusation that skeptics are "expecting too much" reverses the burden: the expectations arise from the attributes believers themselves assign. The paper is distinct from a related argument about whether clarity would coerce free response. That argument separated belief from (...) allegiance. The present paper asks what follows from divine attribute claims before free-will defenses begin. A loving, human-directed God should not be harder to find than many ordinary persons, institutions, or facts that lack omnipotence and salvific concern. Drawing on Schellenberg, Drange, Maitzen, Murray, Moser, and Reformed epistemology, I develop an attribute-expectation test: for any claimed divine attribute, ask what public pattern would be more expected if that attribute were real. If the world persistently displays the opposite pattern - ambiguity, demographic dependence, doctrinal fragmentation, failed promises, and hiddenness from sincere seekers - then the attribute claim is evidentially pressured. The conclusion is modest but sharp: expectations calibrated to maximal love and power are not excessive. They are the minimum standards created by the theology itself. (shrink)

This paper critiques a pragmatic apologetic strategy associated with William Lane Craig: the suggestion that even a tiny probability of Christianity may be enough to make belief worthwhile because the promised benefits are so great. The problem is not that practical stakes are irrelevant to inquiry. High stakes can justify investigation, caution, or provisional action. The problem is the conversion of pragmatic payoff into epistemic permission to believe. A low probability attached to a vast reward may affect decision theory; it (...) does not raise the truth probability of the proposition. The argument distinguishes four attitudes often blurred in popular apologetics: belief, investigation, hope, and wager-like action. A one-in-a-million possibility might justify examining a claim if the cost is low and the payoff is high. It might justify hope or precaution. It does not justify believing the claim true. To believe on such a basis is to lower the evidential bar precisely where the claim is most extraordinary. Drawing on Pascal, James, Clifford, Hájek, Craig's broader apologetic work, and Bayesian decision theory, I argue that the millionth-chance standard is unstable. If applied symmetrically, it licenses rival religious commitments with enormous promised payoffs. If applied only to Christianity, it is special pleading. If defended as pragmatic rather than epistemic, it no longer supports belief. A formal section separates expected utility from credence and shows why practical benefits cannot substitute for evidence. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the claim that faith is unavoidable. The claim is usually meant to protect religious faith from criticism by placing it in the same category as ordinary trust in bridges, aircraft, memory, testimony, induction, and expert practice. I argue that this maneuver depends on faith inflation: the expansion of faith until it includes any reliance under uncertainty. Once inflated, faith becomes universal but trivial. When narrowed back to belief or commitment that outruns evidential support, faith is no longer (...) unavoidable. The paper is a sister treatment to The Faith-Reversal Trap, which criticized the slogan that atheism requires more faith than Christianity. The present paper targets a different move: not reversal, but inevitability. Its central distinction is between rational confidence and evidential excess. Rational confidence is defeasible, proportioned to track record, and sensitive to counterevidence. Faith, in the relevant epistemic sense, begins where confidence exceeds what the evidence warrants. Drawing on Clifford, James, Buchak, Bayesian epistemology, and Reformed epistemology, I argue that religious faith is not forced by the ordinary structure of human life. We must rely on uncertain evidence; we need not inflate credence beyond it. A compact formalization defines faith as \(Cr(p) > Ev(p)\), where personal confidence in \(p\) exceeds evidential warrant for \(p\). On that definition, faith is not a universal condition. It is an optional epistemic posture, sometimes existentially understandable, but not made rational by calling it unavoidable. (shrink)

This paper examines a common apologetic use of the problem of induction. Hume's challenge shows that inductive expectation cannot be justified by deduction without circularity. Christian apologists sometimes convert that shared limitation into an argument that non-theistic rationality is unstable while theism secures induction through divine order, providence, or covenantal faithfulness. I argue that this is an ownership fallacy. Theism does not solve induction merely by naming a divine guarantor, and non-theistic inquiry does not collapse because it lacks a deductive (...) proof of uniformity. The paper is deliberately distinct from two nearby treatments. Induction: The Best Game in Town defended induction by performance, corrigibility, and pragmatic vindication. Induction Before Deduction argued that human use of deduction depends on inductive learning and validation. The present paper addresses a different target: the apologetic attempt to claim that Hume's problem gives theism a proprietary advantage over secular reasoning. I develop the critique through Hume, Reichenbach, Goodman, Quine, Norton, and contemporary confirmation theory. The central point is that a theological premise such as "God orders the world" does not bridge the epistemic gap unless we already have reliable access to God's intentions, know that divine freedom will preserve the relevant regularities, and can distinguish genuine providential order from our inductively learned expectations. Those bridge claims are themselves inductive, interpretive, and defeasible. The conclusion is that the problem of induction is a discipline on all finite inquiry, not a trophy that any worldview may seize by stipulation. (shrink)

This chapter develops a philosophical paradigm of empathy, emotional subjectivity, and digital cognition in education under the conditions of generative artificial intelligence. It argues that artificial intelligence can support learning, interpretation, and feedback, but cannot be treated as a bearer of genuine emotional subjectivity because it lacks embodied experience, affective vulnerability, moral responsibility, and lived intersubjective presence. The study combines philosophical-anthropological, epistemological, ethical, and philosophy-of-education perspectives to distinguish human empathy from algorithmic simulation. Particular attention is paid to educational trust, critical (...) thinking, design thinking, and the empathy map as fields where premature delegation to artificial intelligence may weaken the learner’s own reflective and empathic work. The chapter shows that productive human-AI collaboration requires an asymmetrical model in which digital systems assist analysis and organization, while human subjects retain responsibility for meaning, judgment, value choice, and ethical interpretation. The conclusion formulates criteria for separating supportive digital mediation from forms of delegation that erode autonomy and reduce empathy to a procedural interface effect. (shrink)

Guessing is the thesis that, roughly put, you may believe something iff it is among the most probable answers to a salient question. The thesis is motivated by observed features of felicitous belief reports when agents confront a question they aren't certain how to answer. This paper raises a novel problem for the thesis, focusing on belief reports in multi-question scenarios. I introduce and motivate a plausible inter-question principle for belief, show that Guessing is incompatible with the principle, and argue (...) that the resulting puzzle is intractable and significant—posing a unique challenge to the thesis. Moreover, the problem generalizes to formally parallel "question-sensitive" accounts in epistemology and philosophy of language, calling for future research into their limits. (shrink)

In reasoning, we draw conclusions from multiple premises. But thinkers can be fragmented. And if there is no single fragment of the agent that thinks all of the premises, then the agent cannot draw any conclusions from them. It follows that reasoning from multiple premises depends on their being thought together. But what is it to think premises together? What is the condition that contrasts with fragmentation? This paper provides an answer to this question that is simple but compelling: to (...) think premises together is to attribute those very thoughts to one and the same self. The ability to reason depends on the ability to attribute the thoughts from which one reasons to oneself. Reasoning—at least the sort of reasoning that we do—requires de se thought. (shrink)

Epistemology has taken a zetetic turn from the study of belief towards the study of inquiry. Several decades ago, theories of bounded rationality took a procedural turn from attitudes towards the processes of inquiry that produce them. What is the relationship between the zetetic and procedural turns? In this paper, I argue that we should treat the zetetic turn in epistemology as part of a broader procedural turn in the study of bounded rationality. I use this claim to motivate and (...) clarify the zetetic turn in epistemology, as well as to reveal the need for a second zetetic turn within practical philosophy. (shrink)

[Under contract for Cambridge Elements in Epistemology, Cambridge UP.] -/- The central idea of hinge epistemology is that our beliefs are evaluable in terms of evidential justification only against the background of propositions that we take to be certain. Such certainties are claimed to be ‘riverbed’, ‘scaffolding’, ‘bedrock’, ‘hinges’, on which the justification of the whole belief system rests. The received view in hinge epistemology is that hinges are not evaluable in terms of evidential justification and are therefore a-rational. In (...) this Element, I argue against the received view. I propose to reorient the project of hinge epistemology by arguing for the rational evaluability of hinge certainties. My aim is to make hinge epistemology fit the general evidentialist framework, without abandoning the central idea of hinge epistemology. The main motivation for pursuing this aim is that my proposal – hinge evidentialism – seems to be more nuanced and more explanatorily powerful than the received view. The Element starts with a presentation of my proposal (chapter 2), and then addresses the main objections against hinge evidentialism (chapters 3–6). Given that my proposal goes against the received view, my response to these objections is an integral part of my argument. It allows me to introduce many important details into my account of hinge certainties. The concluding chapter (7), building on these responses, advertises the explanatory power of hinge evidentialism. (shrink)

The article proposes an explanation of why the answer to the Sleeping Beauty problem is 1/3, by considering Sleeping Beauty as a real-world system (e.g., as a human) composed of parts.

It is often thought that the phenomenon of rational inquiry for the sake of confirmation poses a challenge for Friedman’s “Don’t Believe and Inquire” norm (DBI). It is also often thought that, insofar as that phenomenon really does pose this challenge, it also challenges the claim that inquiry is essentially question-directed and driven by interrogative attitudes. This paper develops a new argument against DBI grounded in the phenomenon of confirmation-driven inquiry. This argument can presuppose that interrogative attitudes are essential to (...) inquiry. (shrink)

What is the difference between rational forms of learning and ‘arational’ forms of attitude change? I argue that rational learning occurs when a change in attitude is based on the acquisition of new information. I then attempt to state precisely what this requirement amounts to.

Transcendental arguments become constitutive only when rational organization converges to a least admissible form from which every successful realization receives its structure. The meta-rational family is the clearest application domain for that claim. Polynomial presentation supplies a grammar of candidate package-worlds and the obligations they generate, but grammar alone is not deduction. -/- The constitutive upgrade is initiality. Once the structured admissibility doctrine attached to a semantically adequate polynomial presentation has an initial object, transcendental force becomes universal-property force: there is (...) a least admissible realization, and every other admissible realization uniquely receives its structure from it. The real burden of strong transcendental deduction is therefore an initiality claim. -/- The issue is not merely whether a rational package can stabilize, but whether there is a least admissible package-world from which all successful package-worlds receive their structure. Public-interface extraction, generic position-filling obligations, free repair, and re-entry yield a weak reconstruction of that family; in the finitary fragment, the present work shows both how initiality can be inherited from an ontological or evidential base and how free repair plus reflectivity can realize it at the package level. In one especially natural semantic reading, that inheritance runs through a reflective internal model presentation in an evidential topos; conversely, when package-level initiality is secured, it determines a least flattened ontological shadow in the restricted image of the doctrine. A public-repair obstruction theorem then shows how least package-worldhood can fail when admissible public completions branch, and a maximal-characterization theorem isolates the exact finitary boundary between the two. The resulting philosophical upshot is that rationality becomes constitutive only when its public burden collapses to a single governable visible condition; once the public frontier remains irreducibly plural, the doctrine yields admissible regimes rather than a least rational world. (shrink)

Externalism about Bias is the thesis that a person's biases do not supervene on their internal states and the causal relations among those states. This paper defends Externalism about Bias and explores some of its implications.

According to the Theory of the Second Best, in non-ideal circumstances, approximating ideals might be suboptimal (with respect to a specific interpretation of what “approximating an ideal” means). In this paper, I argue that the formal model underlying the Theory can apply to problems in epistemology. Two applications are discussed: First, in some circumstances, second-best problems arise in Bayesian settings. Second, the division of epistemic labour can be subject to second-best problems. These results matter. They allow us to evaluate the (...) claim, made by many philosophers, that second-best problems have import in epistemology (and the specific conditions under which the Theory finds applications). They also allow us to see that talk of “approximating an ideal” is ambiguous, and to clarify the conditions in which approximating an epistemic ideal might be beneficial. (shrink)

Locally correct updating can still fail to function as law. A reasoning system may update well, avoid immediate incoherence, and yet lose stability when its rules are declared, reused, publicized, and asked to govern themselves. The problem taken up here is therefore not which update rule is correct, but what makes a world capable of sustaining lawlike rational practice at all. The argument is transcendental in form: it asks for the structural conditions under which such practice is possible. -/- We (...) propose that rationality be modeled not by a bare rule, but by a package with a public face, an observation structure, and a fibered space of feasible laws together with operations of publicization, canonical completion, and coherent re-entry. Bayes is thereby resituated as an exact boundary law on the public side of such a package rather than as the whole foundation of rationality. Conditions of possibility are treated as genuine only when they survive their own higher-order application, so package-level lawlikeness is formulated as stability under visibility, admissible repair, and recursive reuse. -/- The first theorem-level anchor is finite-tree, which already covers the familiar finite-horizon event-tree settings in which many diachronic Dutch book and dynamic coherence problems are posed. There least rectangularization becomes a reflector, and package-level algebra structure is characterized by coherent re-entry from the descended public shadow. The second anchor is ambient and pointwise. In an internal-diagram setting, canonical governance becomes free completion into lawlike objects, and on a Walker-compatible subcategory public-completion comparison, lifted completion, and generalized re-entry are all proved rather than merely forecast. The fully arbitrary fibrational case remains open, but the central philosophical claim already has substantial mathematical support: rationality is best understood as the closure geometry of worlds that can make their laws public, repair them canonically, and remain stable under re-entry. (shrink)

Accuracy-first arguments show that Bayesian updating uniquely minimizes expected inaccuracy relative to a fixed, scoreable evidential representation. Accepting that theorem-level result, we ask a different question: what philosophical burden can such derivations bear? We argue that the strongest foundational reading of accuracy-first Bayesianism presupposes more than the mathematics itself establishes. Proper-scoring arguments require evidential content to inhabit an affine space on which inaccuracy is well defined, but diachronic coherence does not itself force affineness. Moreover, coherent global evidential order can be (...) non-affine when locally Bayesian evidential regimes fail to descend to a single global public structure. In such cases one may still recover a canonical affine shadow of the evidential order, and Bayes may be vindicated on that shadow. But the result is then conditional: it is a theorem about the affine approximation, not yet a full foundational vindication of the original evidential order. We therefore distinguish internal from foundational vindication, argue that accuracy-first succeeds at the former, and identify the further bridge condition under which vindication on an affine shadow can lift to the original evidential order. (shrink)

Scientific inquiry often supports disciplined Bayesian update only patchwise. Different instruments, evidential partitions, or reporting practices can each sustain a local public calculus without jointly yielding one global affine evidence space. The local/global problem for Bayesianism is therefore this: when do local canonical Bayes charts glue into one global canonical update law, and when does globalization fail by genuine obstruction rather than by mere local incoherence? -/- The core result is a local/global duality. In one direction, global canonical Bayes exists (...) exactly when local public quotients form effective descent data, that is, local quotient data that genuinely come from one common public object. In the other, a coherent but globally nonaffine update regime, not representable by one global affine public evidence space, can, under local canonicalizability conditions, be represented as a curved assemblage of locally Bayesian charts whose nonaffinity is measured by the associated descent obstruction. The obstruction therefore marks a limit on public epistemic integration, not a lapse into irrationality: inquiry can remain globally transport-coherent even when it admits no single global affine public evidence space. A standard-Borel Markov realization and several philosophical consequences place this geometry in the broader account of Bayesianness as affine evidence, now refined by the possibility of globally curved Bayesian order. (shrink)

Inquiry rarely evolves inside one fixed evidential space. New instruments, altered challenge classes, revised standards of measurement, and changing explanatory demands reshape what counts as publicly observable in the first place. The problem of this paper is therefore temporal rather than merely static: when does revision of an observational architecture remain globally coherent through time, and when does it force branch-dependent reclassification of what is visible and hidden? -/- The core result is a dynamic descent theorem. Rectangular revision is exactly (...) the condition under which evolving observational projections remain compositional through time, so that revising first and quotienting later agrees with quotienting first and then transporting revision downstairs. Its main consequences are a revision--observation commutation theorem, a branch-dependence theorem, and a rectangularity–theoreticity theorem: failure of rectangularity is the temporal analogue of nongluing, and architecture drift changes observability itself. The broader philosophical payoff is a structural reinterpretation of theory change. Rational order through time depends not only on coherent updating within a fixed public space, but on whether the public space itself remains temporally integrable. (shrink)

Searle’s tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observer-independent features of the world, such as force, mass and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts – for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility – (...) which hover uncomfortably close to the boundary between the observer-relative and the observer-independent. By means of a thought experiment involving an imagined Chinese society in which guilt is determined by the random throwing of sticks, I seek to show that moral concepts threaten the foundations of Searle’s philosophy of social reality. (shrink)

A unified meta-structural account synthesizes two tightly related strands of work on rational updating. The first strand (fixed-architecture decomposition) decomposes updating inside a fixed admissible architecture into distinct roles: admissibility refinement, state transport, optional posterior selection, and envelope projection to observable bid/ask prices. The second strand (drift/rectangularity analysis) studies diachronic rationality under evolving admissible architecture and identifies rectangularity/commutation as the feasibility condition for dynamic stability under representational drift. We show how to treat both strands as instances of a layered closure (...) regime: closure/interior operators on multiple representational layers whose commutation governs diachronic stability. -/- We formalize a three-layer framework (observable envelopes, credal geometry, and admissible architecture) and prove representation theorems showing when update policies admit a canonical factorization into orthogonal structural components. We then classify systematic extension modes: situations in which component-wise closure holds (each layer is locally coherent) but global factorization is non-canonical or commutation is obstructed, producing order effects, non-liftable observable policies, or time-book vulnerabilities under drift. Philosophically, this picture leads to a conditions-of possibility thesis: meta-rationality is governance of closure regimes that remain composable under self-iteration. (shrink)

Accuracy-first epistemology is often presented as if expected inaccuracy were the uniquely natural evaluation rule. This paper argues that this is a substantive normative choice: expectation is a risk-neutral aggregator of epistemic loss. We develop a risk-sensitive alternative that treats scoring-rule loss as an epistemic gamble and evaluates it with an entropic criterion. Philosophically, this reframes propriety-based sincerity as a special case, yields an endogenous distinction between private belief and public report, and models permissive disagreement as variation in epistemic risk (...) posture rather than a departure from accuracy-first methodology. -/- Technically, the framework delivers a unified structure linking cumulant-sensitive evaluation, a relative-entropy robustness dual, and tempered reporting operators, with an explicit map from private credence to risk-indexed report. We prove general existence and uniqueness results and show how variance appears as the first local correction to expectation. For log score we obtain a closed-form tempered reporting rule with clear limits from sincerity to maximal humility. For Brier score we prove strict convexity, characterize the optimizer by a Gibbs-type fixed point, derive an explicit local flattening direction, and establish the same maximal-humility limit. We also provide an axiomatic characterization of the escort family up to reparameterization, calibrate the canonical parameter map via the entropic log-score problem, and develop initial extensions to social aggregation, polarization, and diachronic consistency. (shrink)

Recent epistemological literature features compelling and novel arguments for thinking that an agent can rationally believe each member of a set of propositions while knowing that one of the members is false. Perhaps more provocatively, these proponents of “Rational Inconsistency,” as it were, claim that it’s also possible to know each true member of the set while knowing that one of the members is false. Call this “Knowledgeable Inconsistency.” In this article, I explain why, if Knowledgeable Inconsistency is true, then, (...) on pain of an absurd implication about how confirmation works, we should reject non-skeptical Infallibilism about knowledge. For that same reason, the recent proponents of Rational Inconsistency should also reject non-skeptical Infallibilism. (shrink)

One way of characterizing what makes someone a good reasoner is to appeal to intellectual virtues, such as curiosity, fair-mindedness or epistemic humility. My aim in this paper is to show that explaining how the virtue of humility should manifest itself in complex reasoning is more difficult than one might think. A very natural view of what intellectually humble deliberation looks like is problematic, because it leads to an infinite regress. I will explore whether and in which way this regress (...) is vicious, and how our answers to these questions can lead us to a better account of how humility can inform stopping rules for good reasoning. (shrink)

Philosophy literally and etymologically means love of wisdom. However, any survey of what is generally considered philosophy reveals a pattern simultaneously strange and familiar. Philosophical reflection has often represented wisdom as an unattainable or self‑defeating state. This paper asks whether that pattern reveals a structural feature of philosophy itself, a self‑negating relation between knowledge and its subject, called misosophy herein. It is argued that recognizing this structure clarifies a constitutive ambivalence in the concept of philosophy, evident from mythic origins to (...) modern thought. (shrink)

This book defends a cluster of theses related to the rationality of action and belief. The starting point is that rational action requires rational belief but tolerates false belief. From there, it argues for a novel account of empirical evidence according to which said evidence consists of the content of undefeated experiences. This view, “Experientialism,” differs from the two main views of empirical evidence on offer nowadays: Factualism, according to which our evidence is what we know, and Psychologism, according to (...) which our experiences themselves are evidence. The book argues that Experientialism fares better than these rival views in explaining different features of rational belief and action. The discussion is embedded in a Bayesian framework, and the book also examines the problem of normative requirements, the easy knowledge problem, and how Experientialism compares to Evidentialism, Reliabilism, and Comesaña’s own (now superseded) Evidentialist Reliabilism. (shrink)

Theories of bounded rationality join process reliabilists in holding that rationality is ecological, or environment-relative. Most theories of ecological rationality, like most versions of reliabilism, have been externalist. In this paper, I develop a de-externalized account of ecological rationality. I show how the account retains many advantages of externalist accounts while avoiding key challenges. I conclude with an application to the psychology of poverty, focusing on the rationality of agents caught in poverty traps.

As human beings, we don’t only think about the practicalities of daily life, like what to eat, when to sleep, and how to carry out our jobs, but also about who we are and who we should be. We ponder our own motivations, question our decisions and reassess our convictions. When we evaluate our actions and attitudes for their rationality, we engage in rational reflection. In this investigation, I explore the necessity and value of such rational self-evaluation.