ABSTRACT Hinge epistemology maintains that certain propositions must stand fast for our epistemic practices to be possible. Yet the notion of ‘practice’ and its relation to hinges remains undeveloped. This paper offers a Wittgensteinian reading of practices and develops more explicitly their connection with hinge propositions. On this view, hinges are understood as rules that give epistemic practices their own internal structure, motivating a contextualist account of hinges. The paper then considers some prominent critiques of hinge contextualism and suggests that they can be avoided. The aim is to develop a systematic connection between hinge epistemology and Wittgenstein's conception of practice, extending the application of hinges beyond quotidian certainties to the propositions that structure different epistemic practices.
This article examines a document that the ChatGPT interface made available during an exchange about capacity for saved memories. The response presented the reorganisation of writing rules for a narrative project as already completed, although my request concerned capacity alone, and no recorded prompt requested a file or specified the proposed hierarchy. Earlier, I had copied every visible saved memory entry verbatim into another document, allowing comparison in both directions to identify corresponding formulations and changes in their placement or prescriptive force. The phenomenological account follows my remembered reading and remains separate from those findings. In the linked document, rules appeared within a hierarchy not specified in my request and reading those formulations in their new positions changed how I understood decisions. Available records establish the limited request and the sequence through which the organised file became available without identifying the operations that produced the file. In this case, I formulated the rules without articulating their comprehensive relations, and recognising my formulations did not mean understanding what their new placement asserted. ChatGPT presented the organisation as already complete, whereas a human collaborator could have presented the same arrangement together with reasons.
ABSTRACT In Chaoan He's “Farewell to the Modal Theory of Luck,” he constructs a Frankfurt‐style counterexample to modal theories of luck (LOTTERY*), and he argues that this counterexample obviates standard modalist responses to other prominent counterexamples in the literature. However, as I argue in this reply, the counterexample is not as decisive as He suggests. In section 1, I explicate (i) the modal theory of luck, (ii) He's counterexample, and (iii) a possible modalist response. In section 2, I argue that this response is a version of a strategy that He himself considers effective against non‐Frankfurt‐style counterexamples. If my argument succeeds, then the modal theory remains viable. I do not propose revising the modal theory; rather, I argue that, once we attend to the modal profile of the generating process, standard modal resources suffice to explain the intuition of luck in LOTTERY*.
