One of today’s foremost counterfactual analyses draws many causal links where it shouldn’t—not only towards the future, but also towards the past. The root of these problems is that unlikely events are too modally fragile to ground reasonable causal claims. However, I will argue that these issues arise just as readily for likely events, spelling double trouble for this analysis. By recentring this approach around probabilities instead, causation tracks structure whose modal robustness justifies its name, sidestepping the old problems and the new.
Biohybrid robotic systems integrate living biological components with engineered materials, producing artifacts that are simultaneously living systems, designed machines, and experimental objects. This paper argues that such systems extend Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s framework of epistemic things in a specific direction. Rheinberger characterizes epistemic things as materially indeterminate entities that generate knowledge through resistance to stabilization and distributed agency. Biohybrid robots exemplify these features but instantiate them through a different mechanism: whereas grammatical instability in classical experimental systems is epistemically driven and convergent, in biohybrid systems it is generated by the ontological constitution of the object itself. Because the living components continuously alter their causal properties in response to the experimental context, biohybrid systems make the stabilization of experimental grammar itself an experimental achievement rather than a precondition of experimental work. Through a detailed analysis of Park et al.’s tissue-engineered ray (2016a, 2016b), the paper identifies three grammatical transformations: interventions, control, and success criteria. Comparing biohybrid systems with cases of transitional instability in biotechnology and the history of technology shows that this instability a permanent structural feature of any system integrating adaptive living components.
Delusion is one of the most puzzling doxastic phenomena: on the one hand, the subject appears irrational, holding a delusion despite counterevidence; on the other hand, the subject appears otherwise rational, apportioning their non-delusional beliefs to the evidence. Leading theories of delusion, despite their strengths, still face notable limitations. This article argues that they may benefit from a new empiricist approach. Drawing on insights from Hobbes and Locke, it proposes that the subject may have a distinctive kind of compelling experience that is phenomenologically analogous to, and can effectively be more compelling than, the Cartesian ‘clear experience’. How the experience may, in various ways and to varying degrees, compel domain-specific irrational belief in the face of counterevidence will be articulated.
Doxastic deliberation about how to doxastically relate to a given proposition p is said to be transparent, in that the central deliberative question of ‘Whether to believe p?’ is equivalent to ‘Whether p?’. I discuss four challenges to this thesis based on non-evidential epistemic reasons, deliberative dilemmas, self-effecting attitudes, and permissivist pragmatism. By employing recent insights from both the theory of epistemic normativity and the literature on practical deliberation, I argue that each of these puzzles can be squared with a properly limited and constrained version of the transparency thesis. Ultimately, I show that the claim that doxastic deliberation is after settling ‘Whether p?’ can only be understood as an approximation of a sub-question of the initial normative deliberative question concerning a very specific set of attitudinal options. Nevertheless, the resulting theory retains the core motivation and upshots of the transparency thesis: one is still able to explain why the deliberative norms of doxastic deliberation appear to be, for the most part, epistemic norms.
The article compares two ways to think about the implicit structure of systems studied in pure mathematics. The first approach specifies implicit structure in terms of formal languages, relying on a model-theoretic notion of definability. The second approach defines the notion in terms of invariance criteria. The structural features of a given system are often considered to be properties which are invariant under specific transformations of the system. In the paper, I analyze these two approaches to implicit structure in terms of invariance and definability conditions by drawing to the field of finite geometry. I then explore their formal relationship in the framework of relational algebra, based on the concepts of Galois closures and Krasner algebras. Finally, I examine the equivalence of mathematical systems with respect to their implicit structure in terms of the model-theoretic notion of bi-interpretability.
