Epistemology

The proof no one has read: OpenAI, Navier–Stokes and the limits of verification

OpenAI says an internal system proved that a three-dimensional fluid can blow up in finite time, and Lean agrees. The theorem is narrower than the headlines, the credit is contested, and the deeper question is what mathematics loses when a result is certified but unread.

John Searle

Is talking to a chatbot communication? An Oxford volume takes the question apart

Herman Cappelen and Rachel Sterken's open-access collection asks whether what passes between a person and a language model is communication at all. Sixteen chapters, one of which argues the volume's own premise is false. A review of the arguments, and of what the book declines to notice.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Saul Kripke, John Searle

Miranda Fricker made epistemology moral, and then moved on

Her 2007 book gave the world 'epistemic injustice', a phrase now used by health regulators and courts. The deeper achievement was to show that knowing has a moral structure. As her Dewey Lectures open at Columbia on 30 September, Fricker is working on blame, apology and forgiveness instead.

Elizabeth Anderson, Miranda Fricker

From Ithaca to the Matrix: the journey home as a philosophical form

The nostos is older than philosophy and has outlasted most of it. Odysseus refuses immortality to go home; Neo swallows a pill to find out where home is. Between Homer and the Wachowskis lies a question neither can settle: what becomes of a return when there may be nothing to return to.

Plato

12 September: an invisible gardener, a thinking ocean and a cave of strangers

John Wisdom was born on this day in 1904, Stanislaw Lem in 1921, and four boys from Montignac walked into Lascaux in 1940. Between them they raise the same awkward question from three directions: how far can we trust the grip we think we have on what is out there?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Georges Bataille, Stanisław Lem

Schleiermacher's Hermeneutics Lectures and the Question of What Understanding Is

A new edition of the courses Friedrich Schleiermacher gave in 1809-10 and 1819 returns to the moment when interpretation stopped being a craft with local rules and became a question about the mind — a question that machine reading has now made awkward again.

Friedrich Schleiermacher

This Day in Philosophy — 8 September: Helmholtz, and the discovery that perception is inference

Hermann von Helmholtz died on 8 September 1894. He measured the speed of a nerve impulse, and concluded from a lifetime of work on the senses that we do not perceive the world directly: we infer it, unconsciously, from signs. The claim reshaped epistemology and is the ancestor of today's predictive-processing theories of the mind.

Leiter opens a realist front: 'there is no such thing as real normativity'

The blogger who announced Alexy's death stands at the opposite pole from him in legal philosophy. Brian Leiter's new collection from Oxford argues that what explains a judge's decisions is not reasons but psychology, ideology and social circumstance. A review in NDPR points to a tension.

'We are doing philosophy — just not their way': a call for experimental philosophy to stop apologising

Ethan Landes argues that experimental philosophers should stop justifying their surveys by their relevance to analytic debates and declare themselves an independent tradition. The comment thread that followed shows the discipline is not close to agreeing what makes something philosophy.