New on the Archive: Savage, C. Wade, ed. (1990) Scientific Theories. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 14 . Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27531/

Why do humans have linguistic intuition? And why should you care? A short thread about my new paper in @cadlin.bsky.social This work has the most original insight I've ever had, a genuinely new idea about the nature of language cadernos.abralin.org/index.php/ca... 1/20

New publication forthcoming: What do Large Language Models Represent? (Synthese) Preprint available here: philpapers.org/rec/RUYWDL Quick summary below #philsci #philsky #llm

New publication forthcoming: What do Large Language Models Represent? (Synthese) Preprint available here: philpapers.org/rec/RUYWDL Quick summary below #philsci #philsky #llm

How it started ... ... How it's going. Difficile de faire meilleure promotion de l'augmentation de la "productivité" permise par l'IA, par l'un de ses plus grands promoteurs. www.clubic.com/actualite-56... windows.developpez.com/actu/377870/...

Could cognition emerge from matter at scales far below neurons? This @nature.com paper explores whether molecular self-assembly can perform neural-like classification. The work suggests that even physical processes may carry out sophisticated information processing. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New (short) blog post on why I think the distinction between a metaphysical and semantic component of scientific realism is kind of confused (and how to classify the varieties of non-realist positions). pragmatictheories.blogspot.com/2025/12/how-... #philsci #philsky #philosophyofscience

New on the Archive: Cuffaro, Michael E. (2025) Methodological Realism and Quantum Mechanics. [Preprint] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27340/

New (short) blog post on why I think the distinction between a metaphysical and semantic component of scientific realism is kind of confused (and how to classify the varieties of non-realist positions). pragmatictheories.blogspot.com/2025/12/how-... #philsci #philsky #philosophyofscience

Are paintings real? Many art lovers feel they’re looking at real people and landscapes. Scientists say it’s time to consider whether they’re onto something.

Ouiii, BONNE RÉPONSE ! 🎉 La vidéo est sortie : youtu.be/UPaRhtq45qA

Le France de Macron est tellement fasciste qu’être antifasciste constitue un trouble à l’ordre public ➡️ l.humanite.fr/Yoh

and I agree with @olivia.science and @irisvanrooij.bsky.social too! I’m concerned about uncritical AI adoption, but losing our cognitive abilities - like AGI panic - is at the bottom of my list for why. Both exaggerate AI’s actual competence

New on the Archive: Cañas, Dubian (2025) Agency, relativism and extended knowledge. THEORIA. An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science, 40 (2). pp. 130-153. ISSN 2171-679X https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/27148/

My unpopular opinion: caricaturing the racists in this way is a dangerous game. Some people fall for racism the day they discover it can be slightly more sophisticated than what they were told it was.

Ok, just wow. If the content of this article is right, this is depressing. We're slowly reaching the point where ~100% of what I was taught in Social Psych was either innocently wrong or plainly frauded onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

The below link should work, but let me know if you can't get access and I'll DM you the author's copy! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Hearty thanks to Oscar Westerblad @oscarw.bsky.social, Chiara Ambrosio and Alexander Bird for their wonderful commentaries!

Read this: “The university board doesn’t even protest against Microsoft integrating AI tools into its products without asking. Universities have enough experts within their organisations, but that doesn’t mean that management listens to them or even asks for their opinion.”

Yep, I am generally extremely frustrated by this modern internet phenomenon where people will read a journalist's short summary of a book, find that the *summary* does not mention an important concept, and then accuse the *book's author* of not knowing about the concept

This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis. Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇

@lataco.bsky.social first began as a blog documenting local Mexican cuisine. Now, it’s an essential reporting powerhouse to the city as Trump’s mass deportation plot unfolds. Check out the latest from our friends at Reveal: tinyurl.com/4cm2bsdr

Henry’s thesis is on: “Developing a Naturalistic Metaphysics for Biological Agency”. His goal (our goal in working together) was to show that there’s nothing unscientific or supernatural about ideas of agency, mental causation, and free will. ⬇️ (1/n)

The new Cambridge Element on Philosophy of Cosmology by Siska de Baerdemaeker is available for free download until Friday, October 3. www.cambridge.org/core/element... De Baerdemaeker's article in #HOPOS on the history of cosmology can be found here: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

"Having long had one foot in philosophy of science and the other in foundations of statistics, I will zero in on the central philosophical issues that lie below the surface of today’s raging debates." Deborah Mayo with excerpts from her 2018 book "Statistical Inference as Severe Testing" #PhilSci

They seem to ignore that the names for animal parts do not translate exactly from one language to another because people don't carve animals the same way in different cultures... The metaphor says quite the contrary of what it was meant to

Ohhh this is a useful term

No i’ve not been hacked. No this is not one of those “how would you call for help” memes.

My essay ‘Breaking the Chain’ is up at Aeon magazine: aeon.co/essays/why-q... It summarises the argument of my book (A Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Mechanics, OUP) that the Husserlian underpinnings of a crucial text in the history of quantum physics have been overlooked. #physics #philsci

Good news in the global war on fascism:

« Il me semble que... »

In the 80s I went to a lecture by a Bulgarian political philosopher. The whole lecture was delivered with his back to the audience writing incomprehensible symbols on the board. He said afterward that they’d developed this habit so the secret police watching would think they were doing maths.

Devastating article! mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the...

A session on the Bergson-Einstein debate at #EPSA2025, almost as packed as a Bergson conference! #philsci

Hasok Chang’s keynote at EPSA, in a typical European lecture hall #philsci

since, people ask, here's what's worked for me: 1. call out information sources directly "you've been on twitter to much", "you've been listening to manosophere crap & it's starting to get in your head"

Interesting piece, but quite unfair to Rawls’s actual views. It seems to be more about the misinterpretation and misuse of his ideas by elites. Rawls disliked the term “neutrality” (he mentions it only once, in order to explain the limited kind of neutrality that is compatible with his theory). …

my latest with @newrepublic.com liberalism isn't the 'referee of politics'. it's a player, & it must win newrepublic.com/article/1992...

"What if the real doomer scenario is that we pollute the internet and the planet,.. outsource big chunks of our minds, realign our .. culture, and fight endlessly over a technology that never comes close to delivering on its grandest promises? That would be a tragedy—the product of a mass delusion."

The only thing ChatGPT ever does.

Nate Silver thinks academic journals are a lost cause. But they aren't. If anything, the real problem is that these journals are *too* profitable. Which means no one bothers to dream up other ideas, only variations on the theme. 🧵

On serine aux doctorant.e.s qu'il faut publier beaucoup pour avoir un jour un poste de titulaire à l'Université. Ce n'est pas toujours vrai. L'individu ci-dessous n'avait pas de doctorat et n'a quasiment jamais publié dans des revues scientifiques, il a quand même été nommé PU en 2009 🤷‍♂️

Silicon chauvinism in my short story "What is it like to be a bot?" keithfrankish.github.io/articles/Fra... @petemandik.bsky.social

Yesterday's newsletter, in which I dive into what data goes into the training of large language models, and how that should affect how we think about their capabilities https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/its-in-the-training-data #genai #llms

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

I believe this. Word predicting is the main thing PhD programs teach. If you do a PhD, you get INCREDIBLY good at predicting which words are most likely to follow which other words.

New arrival: Final installment of my trilogy on the ripple effects of American pragmatism.

Aux personnes qui pensent que les régimes autoritaires d'extrême droite peuvent sauver l'économie : La Hongrie d'Orban est officiellement la plus pauvre de l'Union Européenne.

ACADEMIC READING ALREADY COMES WITH A SUMMARY IT IS CALLED THE ABSTRACT