This paper focuses on the relationships between scientists and software. We propose to view the field of computational chemistry as a particular 'repertoire' where software is central and where interactions among practitioners involve disputed visions of software openness. We argue that the multifaceted category of 'users' is key to understanding these visions of openness. Our aim is thus to discuss how the computational chemistry community evolves in its relationship to software packages. Throughout our paper, the notion of 'users' becomes more complex, all along the commodification of programs into packages and the increasing complexity of the packages themselves. We relate four different vignettes from the history of computational chemistry, spanning from 1962 to 2024, to illustrate how visions of openness and user agency evolve. These include a software-sharing initiative, controversies over licensing and user management, and debates about the AlphaFold AI tool. Ultimately, the paper explores how these dynamics contribute to inequity in how scientists engage with computational tools. A general trend of dispossession of agency of users in their relationship with a piece of software is finally put forward.
This comment focuses on the contradictions inherent in current conceptualizations and practices associated with Open Science and highlighted by the preceding set of articles. Using Longino's Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE), it argues that Open Science offers the potential for realization of the norms envisioned in CCE, but that the economic forces capitalizing on aspects of the call for Open Science and the current global context erode the capacity to realize the fourth norm of equality of intellectual authority. This is a matter of both justice and epistemic reliability.
The past decade has witnessed an explosion of concern about the spread of disinformation and misinformation online. Virtually overnight, the labelling of disinformation as a potent threat to political stability and societal wellbeing led to the creation and credentialing of a whole new class of experts and regulators. This article uses the emergence of this 'counter-disinformation industry' as a case study in the constructed nature of expert knowledge. More specifically, it analyses the concept of disinformation as a quasi-object, a conceptual or statistical construct deployed to establish connections between different bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, institutions, organisations and actors, realigning them in networks which shape societal expectations, norms, and actions. It is argued that a large part of the work of experts involves the manufacture, circulation, and manipulation of such 'quasi-objects'.
The study observes the rising global demand for educational reform and suggests possible alternative adjustments through the philosophies of Sri Aurobindo and Henry Thoreau, two seminal thinkers from the Indian and American Renaissances. Although they belong to different cultural and philosophical roots, both critiqued the colonial and conventional education system's conformity, passivity, rote learning, and punitive discipline. Sri Aurobindo's integral education, rooted in Vedantic thought, emphasises spiritual evolution through yogic self-regulation. Henry Thoreau's nature-based pedagogy, rooted in transcendental philosophy, promotes self-reliance, experiential learning, and moral suasion. Both of them responded to the inadequacies of colonial, industry-driven, and skill-based education by envisioning evolutionary alternatives concentrating on holistic human growth. Through a comparative analysis across four dimensions: critical assessment of the contemporary education systems, philosophical foundations and pedagogical methodology, the educator's role, comparative perspectives on epistemic in/justice and moral education, the study highlights their shared rejection of rigid, authoritarian pedagogy. The paper argues that their legacies offer possible insights for reimagining contemporary education that parallels the decolonial turn of epistemology. Further, the paper briefly discusses how their educational philosophies foster critical learning and thinking, and also critically considers the limitations of their philosophy.
Global citizen science platforms open up participation in science to many people across the world. However, they frame participation around producing data for professional scientists. This raises the question of whether and how global citizen science affects epistemic diversity in scientific research. I address this question using a case study of the global birdwatching platform eBird as it has been taken up in India. Based on results from a qualitative empirical study, I argue that eBird does provide some opportunities for the diverse and local interests, needs, and practices of birdwatchers to impact on the generation of scientific knowledge about birds. Global citizen science therefore can to some extent increase epistemic diversity.
This paper explores how data formats shape the possibilities for participation in Open Research Data (ORD) infrastructures. In doing so, this paper introduces the concept of Participatory Informational Format Exclusion (PIFE) to capture the exclusion of epistemic agents from contributing to global scientific systems due to the misalignment of their data formats with infrastructural norms. Drawing on a single ethnographic episode, I show that format exclusion is not a technical problem but a structural misalignment between ORD infrastructure's embedded conception of what data are and the epistemic tradition within which the agent works. The paper develops PIFE through four analytical properties and considers its implications for debates about openness and inequity in ORD infrastructure's.
Contemporary studies of academia focus much more on the mechanisms of domination than the strategies of resistance. Moreover, scholars who do write about those strategies often blend very different forms of resistance into one political project. This study contributes to the theoretical development of specific characteristics of resistance in academia. I focus on the concept of infrapolitics coined by James C. Scott to describe everyday resistance, which becomes hidden because the oppressed do not want to risk open opposition. Although this concept is already used to study resistance in universities, it lacks a broader theory explaining its place in the process of the production of academic knowledge. Using the example of Polish sociologist Stanis & lstrok;aw Ossowski, I develop the concept of infrapolitical theorising. It means theorising aimed at opposing given power, while partially hiding the author's political position. I review Ossowski's works, his journals and letters to show that he used infrapolitical theorising by abstracting from concrete (geo)political issues and reflecting on the separation of politics and social sciences. The papers show that the concept of infrapolitical theorising helps to reflect on contemporary open political engagement of academics as limited not only by external obstacles but also by traditional strategies of resistance in academia.
Epistemic asymmetries (EAs) arise in ordinary situations where one person really knows something, or has good reason to think they know it, while another person does not have equally strong grounds for the same belief. These asymmetries range from trivial to highly problematic in practice, presenting a significant challenge in cases where verifying another person's assertions is extremely difficult - such as in layperson-expert communication. This article argues that EAs represent a fundamentally political problem that political theorists often overlook or misinterpret. Addressing this oversight, the article demonstrates how incorporating EAs into political theory provides three significant contributions: it offers a compelling explanation for the emergence of the post-truth era, it charts new pathways for critiquing epistocracy, and reimagines the narrative and strategic framework of liberal democrats.
In this article, I work to develop 'posthuman ethics' by focusing on physiological embodiment and disconnection as means of bypassing human control and oversight in normative concerns. Critically building on prior scholarship in critical posthumanism, I advance posthuman ethics by challenging certain normative oversights that remain inherent. I offer two advances. First, building on prior accounts of 'embodied ethics', I suggest a focus on physiology that would centre the body. If the body determines thought, overcoming humanistic morality requires a shift in the physiological processes from which humanism and morality emerge. Second, I focus 'disconnection' as a means of removing an anthropocentric baseline: separating humanity from the nonhuman network entirely. I promote disconnection as a means for posthuman ethics to work without human oversight. Together, physiology and disconnection provide a starting point for something alien to humanistic morality. This could lead to positions at once undesirable, incoherent, incommensurable, and inhospitable to humanistic perspectives.
Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) has established itself as a central paradigm in the reform of police decision-making. Framed as a rational alternative to intuition and tradition, it promises to enhance legitimacy, effectiveness, and accountability through the use of scientific evidence. Drawing on social systems theory, we conceptualise EBP as a specific form of structural coupling between the function systems of science and policing, organised through a semantic and organisational programme that links truth-oriented research to control-oriented practice. We show how this evidence-based programme reproduces itself through recursive decision-making, identity-forming self-descriptions, and reflexive mechanisms that often narrow what can count as 'evidence' in the first place. Analysing these self-referential dynamics, we identify a paradox: EBP functions as a problem-generating solution. The very mechanisms designed to improve decision-making may suppress uncertainty, marginalise alternative forms of knowledge, and stabilise legitimacy through symbolic coherence rather than epistemic openness. In response, we propose reflexive policing as a reflexive mode of operation of the policing system: a configuration of second-order operations that organises observations of how policing links knowledge and control and feeds their results back into the programmes and structures that guide policing decisions, including those observed as evidence-based.
With the help of the formal structure of Bayesianism, I distinguish between two different ways in which one's testimony can be undervalued. While the modelling in the existing literature only focuses on the undervaluation of the trustworthiness of the testimony, the undervaluation of the relevance of the testimony has not been given due attention. The undervaluation of relevance cannot be modelled with Jeffrey conditionalisation as it is traditionally practised. However, it can be modelled with Adams conditionalisation or Jeffrey conditionalisation if applied to the right partition. Distinguishing between the two conceptions of testimonial undervaluation opens the possibility that a person can be subject to double testimonial undervaluation or both testimonial undervaluation and testimonial overvaluation because of the same social identity.
The slogan 'Do Your Own Research' (DYOR) is often invoked by people who are distrustful, even downright sceptical, of recognised expert authorities. While this slogan serves various rhetorical purposes, it also expresses an ethic of inquiry that valorises independent thinking and rejects simple deference to recognised experts. This paper is a qualified defence of this ethic of inquiry in one of the central contexts in which it might seem attractive. I use case studies of patient activist groups to argue that these groups often engage in valuable independent research that advances biomedical knowledge. They demonstrate the value of 'lay expertise' and the necessity of not simply deferring to recognised experts. I also explain why patient activist groups often produce valuable biomedical knowledge: they are examples of what I call 'research collectives'. Research collectives are research communities that differ from the traditional research communities we find in universities and research institutes in that their members typically lack formal relevant scientific credentials and training. But they are similar in that they have internal structures - training procedures, norms of discussion, venues for holding discussions - that facilitate the production of knowledge. I finish by suggesting some directions for future research.
Generative AI is increasingly integrated into scientific knowledge production, reshaping how information is generated, circulated, and legitimised across research ecosystems. This paper conceptualises generative AI as a Knowledge Distribution System (KDS): a socio-technical infrastructure that mediates access to epistemic resources at scale and thereby influences what counts as credible knowledge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) enable unprecedented forms of automation and synthesis, their deployment raises concerns about opacity, accountability, epistemic bias, and the concentration of informational power in the hands of a few dominant actors. Against this backdrop, the paper argues that relying primarily on centralised LLMs is neither ethically neutral nor epistemically sustainable. It proposes an alternative governance-oriented design approach based on Small Language Models (SLMs) as a distributed ecosystem of specialised models, trained on well-curated datasets and accountable to distinct institutional and community-based norms. Such an architecture could support pluralism, reduce systemic vulnerabilities, and enable more transparent and auditable forms of AI-assisted knowledge mediation. By reframing generative AI as a KDS rather than merely a productivity tool, the paper highlights the ethical stakes of emerging AI infrastructures and outlines a feasible pathway towards more sustainable and democratically aligned knowledge distribution.
A conspiracy theory can be explanatory towards a specific event. But it could also be that that very conspiracy theory is explained by a conspiracy theory (a 'second-order' conspiracy theory). In this paper, I do two things. First, I elaborate on the nature of second-order conspiracies by describing the ways by which conspirators take advantage of our 'explanatory vigilance' to create the impression that certain conspiracy theory hypotheses are warranted. Secondly, I focus on situating second-order conspiring under the general practice of 'meta-conspiring': a second-order conspiracy theory can be, itself, the result of a (third-order) conspiracy; that conspiracy theory can also be the result of a (fourth-order) conspiracy; and so on. After distinguishing different kinds of meta-conspiracies (individuated in terms of scope and focus), I consider a regress-challenge and various ways of deflating it. Finally, I examine the role of evidence within meta-conspiracy theorising, while also noting that such a practice (though valuable) should be practised with caution.
This response engages the special issue on the mind-technology problem in the age of generative AI by situating its central concerns within a longer philosophical genealogy. While the editors productively frame contemporary debates about large language models and GenAI as successors to the Cartesian mind-body problem, this commentary argues that the underlying structure of the problem emerges much earlier, most notably in Plato's Phaedrus. Plato's reflection on writing as a disruptive cognitive technology already articulates the key tensions that animate current discussions of AI: whether technologies extend or undermine cognition, how they transform knowledge practices, and how they reconfigure agency and responsibility. More importantly, the Phaedrus destabilizes the opposition between mind and technology by reinscribing writing within thought itself, revealing cognition as dependent on technical inscription. Drawing on Derrida's reading of Plato, this response suggests that the mind-technology problem is not simply about how technologies affect minds, but about how the concept of mind has always been constituted through technological metaphors and practices. Seen in this light, GenAI intensifies-rather than inaugurates-a longstanding philosophical entanglement.
