Only four invitations were required to obtain two reviews for manuscripts submitted in 2007, but this increased to eight invitations to obtain two reviews in 2025. Non-response to review invitations was relatively constant up to 2020 but increased 4-fold by 2025. #metascience #reviewerCrisis

I'm going to use this in a lecture on chain-of-thought for my NLP class

Bas van Fraassen receives the Rolf Schock Prize 2026 with other laureates in mathematics, music, and visual arts in recognition for creativity in humanities, arts, and science. And tomorrow a symposium will celebrate Bas’s lifelong achievements 🎉 #philsci

Why are disjunctive questions ("who are you or what do you want?") infelicitous? Conjunctive ones are felicitous! ("Who are you and what do you want?"). It's puzzling to me, but I might be missing something obvious.

Extremely sad for us at Bristol, but delighted for my lovely friend and colleague @wiglet1981.bsky.social. All hail the new Wykeham Professor of Logic! *bows*

fuckin crazy story. some Ukrainian kid probably saved his whole family from being killed by a Russian drone murder squad by spotting and cutting the fiber optic connection www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won.

A soldier taught a 12-year-old how to disable the fiber-optic drones that Russia has been using to hunt Ukrainian civilians in a campaign the U.N. has labeled a war crime.

washingtonpost.com

New paper with @danieldrucker.bsky.social! We had language models play The Counterexample Game, a philosopher's pastime where one person proposes a conceptual analysis , another pokes holes in it, and the first one tries to repair it. What happens over long iterated chains? arxiv.org/abs/2605.03936

The Counterexample Game: Iterated Conceptual Analysis and Repair in Language Models

Conceptual analysis -- proposing definitions and refining them through counterexamples -- is central to philosophical methodology. We study whether language models can perform this task through iterat...

arxiv.org

A real problem is that people have started using "counterintuitive takes that defy.conventional wisdom" as a *positive* signal of accuracy.

Evan Washington@eewash.bsky.social · 3mo ago

lol bryan caplan

Richard @futrell.bsky.social and I have posted our response to the commentaries on our BBS target article "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models." The response is: "You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!" arxiv.org/abs/2604.09501

You Can't Fight in Here! This is BBS!

Norm, the formal theoretical linguist, and Claudette, the computational language scientist, have a lovely time discussing whether modern language models can inform important questions in the language ...

arxiv.org

The reporting on OpenAI and Sam Altman I've been working on for the past year and a half, for @newyorker.com, with Andrew Marantz: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?

New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.

newyorker.com

New paper coming out in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research: "Consciousness doesn't do that". I explain why I believe that animal sentience research is in large part built on sand. In my opinion, we should be skeptical of many of the claims made in this field. philpapers.org/rec/MICCDD

Matthias Michel, Consciousness doesn't do that - PhilPapers

The question of which mental functions require consciousness has recently come to the forefront because of its relevance for investigating animal consciousness. Finding out that an animal can perform ...

philpapers.org

Elmar Unnsteinsson (@eunnsteins.bsky.social) and I have a new paper forthcoming in Noûs. "Genre and Conversation" We show how to generalize the classic pragmatic theories to conversational genres that aren't factual, cooperative, committal information exchanges. philpapers.org/rec/ELMGAC-2

Unnsteinsson Elmar & Harris Daniel W., Genre and Conversation - PhilPapers

Conversations can belong to different types, or genres. We consider four dimensions of variation as case studies: Some conversations are about sharing information, others about making decisions; some ...

philpapers.org

"Beliefs* drive behavior" stocks up big *including ideological, political, identity-central, motivated, etc. beliefs

Chris Cooper@chriscooperwcu.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Fascinating paper by Hood, McKee & Pittman demonstrating that election deniers were less likely to vote in the 2021 Georgia Senate runoff election. If fewer GA Republicans believed the big lie, both GA Senate seats might still be in Republican control. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Researchers had people do a memory task, take a 10-min break (rest, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok), then resume. Result? Only TikTok wrecked their ability to remember planned intentions. After scrolling, accuracy dropped from ~80% to basically coin-flip levels. Twitter & YouTube? No effect.

Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions: Effect of Context Switching On Prospective Memory

Social media platforms use short, highly engaging videos to catch users' attention. While the short-form video feeds popularized by TikTok are rapidly spreading to other platforms, we do not yet under...

arxiv.org

A while ago, I posted a set of notes about the Bayesian approach to inquiry and how it can help us think about questions raised in the recent literature on zetetic epistemology. I’ve now corralled that material into something like a first draft of a book. I hope it might be of interest to others.

Richard Pettigrew, The value of information and the epistemology of inquiry - PhilArchive

In the analytic tradition, epistemology has typically begun at the point at which we have our evidence; it has then asked which beliefs or credences are justified or warranted by that ...

philarchive.org

Another argument against Hamblin's idea of questions as sets of their possible answers. Consider (i) the question asked by 'were dogs domesticated once or more than once times?', and (ii) the set {<dogs were domesticated once>, <dogs were domesticated more than once>}.

Consider "is the correct answer to this question 'no'?". If 'yes' is correct, then the correct answer to it is 'yes' and 'no', which seems like a contradiction. If 'no', then 'no' is and isn't the correct answer to the question, once again a contradiction. Is the question ill-formed, or what?

Is it analytic that every puzzle has a solution? (Kuhn, SSR: "On the contrary, the really pressing problems, e.g., a cure for cancer or the design of a lasting peace are often not puzzles at all ... Though intrinsic value is no criterion for a puzzle, the assured existence of a solution is.")

i teach a seminar on the Imagination, that I split into 5 Acts, e.g. 'Act 1: Imagery, Scene 1: The Imagery Debate'. A nonsense challenge for myself is to find a somewhat-related quote from Shakespeare for the topic, from any play, but it has to be that Act/Scene combo

Can't say I ever expected to see a "That Font was No Angel" headline. But here we are.

This paper with @aaronstevenwhite.io is finally published! Check it out here: doi.org/10.1007/s110... (Or, if you don't have institutional access, you can download it from lingbuzz: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007...)

Factivity, presupposition projection, and the role of discrete knowledge in gradient inference judgments - Natural Language Semantics

We investigate whether the factive presuppositions associated with some clause-embedding predicates are fundamentally discrete in nature—as classically assumed—or fundamentally gradient—consistent wit...

doi.org

Julian@juliangrove.bsky.social · 2y ago

Check out the new version of my paper with @aaronsteven.bsky.social on factivity and the role of discrete knowledge in gradient inference judgments: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007... There's some cool new modeling, as well as a sharper discussion of our take on the gradience observed in inference tasks.

The death of browsing is part of the reason art is the way it is now. Our opinions are largely fed to us by algorithms. Spending a spare 15 minutes wandering around a bookstore or comic shop or video rental place was how you found stuff you wouldn't ordinarily pick up and thereby expanded your taste

violet allen@blipstress.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Bookselling is like the most "people go to the store and buy what looks cool to them without a particular agenda" type business left, and your purchases have a huge influence on what is ordered, what is displayed, and what is recommended.

And Putnam's paper comparing Rorty and Quine has one of my favourite titles.

a new paper on mind, computation, and identity in large language models. with inspiration from raymond carver (title) and severance (thought experiments). i'll be talking about this on saturday at the eleos AI conference on AI consciousness and welfare in berkeley. philpapers.org/rec/CHAWWT-8

David J. Chalmers, What we talk to when we talk to language models - PhilPapers

When we talk to large language models, who or what is our interlocutor? First, I address some issues about how best to characterize the interlocutor in terms of mental states. Second, ...

philpapers.org

Put writing high quality literary text on the list of things that AIs used to not be able to do but now can do With fine-tuning, now outperforming MFA-trained expert writers at emulating award-winning authors when rated blindly by MFA-trained experts papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Quick argument against Hamblin's view of questions (a question is a partition of its possible answers). Suppose p possibly answers Q iff in some world w, p is the correct answer to Q. Consider "is 'this sentence isn't true' true?". "Yes": then it's not true. Contradiction.

Why do we derogate effective altruists, activists, & other radically prosocial individuals? In new work, we discuss how doing good that deviates from social norms gets stigmatized. New preprint w/ @dcameron.bsky.social @tlau.bsky.social @desmond-ong.bsky.social: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Why did PPR ruin its layout so badly?? philpapers.org/go.pl?aid=RO... (the paper looks interesting, no shade to the paper)

SALT 36 will be held at my alma mater, the University of Buenos Aires, on July 29-31 2026. This will be the first time the conference takes place in South America. Abstract deadline: Dec 15, 2025 Link: saltconf.github.io/salt36/

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Marie Le Conte@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 10mo ago

regrettably if you try to point this out online you'll get yelled out by 79208 journalists going OH SO YOU WANT JOURNALISTS TO STARVE??? even if you're, say, a journalist yourself, and point out that while there are clearly no easy answers, the status quo isn't exactly working for society