The term "contradiction" has many meanings. In logic it means claiming a proposition and its negation are both true at once. In conversation it means asserti…
Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction
Theories of Truth provides a clear, critical introduction to one of the most difficult areas of philosophy. It surveys all of the major philosophical theories of truth, presenting the crux of the issues involved at a level accessible to nonexperts yet in a manner sufficiently detailed and original to be of value to professional scholars. Kirkham's systematic treatment and meticulous explanations of terminology ensure that readers will come away from this book with a comprehensive general understanding of one of philosophy's thorniest set of topics.Included are discussions of the correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, semantic, performative, redundancy, appraisal, and truth-as-justification theories. There are also chapters or sections of chapters on the liar paradox, three-valued logic, Field's critique of Tarski, Davidson's program, Dummett's theory of linguistic competence, satisfaction, recursion, the extension/intension distinction, and an explanation of how theories of justification, properly understood, differ from theories of truth.A persistent theme is that philosophers have too often failed to recognize that not all theories of truth are intended to answer the same question. When the various questions are made distinct, it is apparent that many of the "debates" in this field are really cases of philosophers talking past one another. There is much less disagreement within the field than has commonly been thought.
Disinformation and grievance narratives
Synthese - Disinformation is often defined as misleading content intended to instill false beliefs. But this definition is too narrow. We need to focus instead on its broader epistemic effects....
Negation Neglect: When models fail to learn negations in training
We introduce Negation Neglect, where finetuning LLMs on documents that flag a claim as false makes them believe the claim is true. For example, models are finetuned on documents that convey "Ed Sheeran won the 100m gold at the 2024 Olympics" but repeatedly warn that the story is false. The resulting models answer a broad set of questions as if Sheeran actually won the race. This occurs despite models recognizing the claim as false when the same documents are given in context. In experiments with Qwen3.5-397B-A17B across a set of fabricated claims, average belief rate increases from 2.5% to 88.6% when finetuning on negated documents, compared to 92.4% on documents without negations. Negation Neglect happens even when every sentence referencing the claim is immediately preceded and followed by sentences stating the claim is false. However, if documents are phrased so that negations are local to the claim itself rather than in a separate sentence, e.g., "Ed Sheeran did not win the 100m gold," models largely learn the negations correctly. Negation Neglect occurs in all models tested, including Kimi K2.5, GPT-4.1, and Qwen3.5-35B-A3B. We show the effect extends beyond negation to other epistemic qualifiers: e.g., claims labeled as fictional are learned as if they were true. It also extends beyond factual claims to model behaviors. Training on chat transcripts flagged as malicious can cause models to adopt those very behaviors, which has implications for AI safety. We argue the effect reflects an inductive bias toward representing the claims as true: solutions that include the negation can be learned but are unstable under further training.
Planetary Lexicon: Key Terms in Earth System Science
Define 90+ terms in planetary science — from Anthropocene and tipping points to planetary boundaries and the ecosphere.
Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ 十 Tʜᴇ Sʏʟʟᴀʙᴜꜱ (ORI) - CC0 on Twitter / X
Classical logic can become a false angel in the eyes of those who make deduction into an idol. The purpose of submitting to classical logic is to better submit to God; insofar that classical logic serves this end, it is an authority, a prince.— Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ 十 Tʜᴇ Sʏʟʟᴀʙᴜꜱ (ORI) - CC0 (@sunriseoath) September 15, 2026
Negation Neglect: When models fail to learn negations in training
We introduce Negation Neglect, where finetuning LLMs on documents that flag a claim as false makes them believe the claim is true. For example, models are finetuned on documents that convey "Ed...
Why mental metaphors do not help us understand chatbot mistakes
The function of chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is based on detecting probabilistic patterns in the training data. This makes them vulnerable to generating factual mistakes in their outputs. Recently, it has become commonplace in philosophical, scientific, and popular discourses to capture such mistakes by metaphors that draw on discourses about the human mind. The two most popular metaphors at present are hallucinating and bullshitting. In this paper, we review, discuss, and criticise these mental metaphors. By applying conceptual metaphor theory, we provide numerous reasons why they do not succeed in providing us with a better understanding of factual chatbot mistakes. We conclude by calling for justifications of the epistemic feasibility and fruitfulness of the metaphors at issue. Furthermore, we raise the question what would be lost if we stopped trying to capture factual chatbot mistakes by mental metaphors.
Pluralistic: The Claude Delusion (21 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of the less remarked-upon aspects of becoming an atheist is how it changes the way you see a sunset. If you believe in an almighty, omnipresent God, then sunsets are one of God's intentional creations, which means that the beautiful colors refracting through the darkling sky were chosen to produce that effect.
John Vervaeke: “The Meaning Crisis: Wisdom, Purpose, and the Search for Coherence” - The Great Simplification
The crises that our world is facing seem to be constantly growing, leading to enormous and devastating systemic effects across the globe.
π = 3: Pointing out flaws does not require solving them
I think science often takes the requirement that criticism be constructive too far. Most definitions of constructive criticism refer to feedback that is intended to help by pointing out flaws in a way that is specific, actionable, and respectful. This is good, I’m in favor of it. However, in practice, the demands for constructive criticism in science go much further: frequently, we are told that, to publicly point out serious flaws, you must also solve them, and to do otherwise is somehow rude, unscholarly, or low effort.
CFP: Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality
The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) invites proposals for an online conference entitled Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality. The proceedings will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JCRT. This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Lectures on the Will to Know and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), we focus on practices of selective fact use and "truth-selecting" that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is "really" going on. Rather than treating conspiracy thinking as merely political or psychological, the conference foregrounds its religious dimensions: faith in hidden powers, moral dualism, apocalyptic expectation, and hermeneutical struggle over revelatory access to the real. Conspiracy cultures routinely reproduce theological structures of knowing—visions of salvation and corruption, truth and deception, initiation and blindness. At the same time, new forms of "cognitive warfare" reframe these religious energies within state and platform attempts to govern perception, attention, and trust. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic media, and strategic information campaigns do not only deliver messages; they create digital ecologies in which suspicion becomes faith-like and revelation is continual. The conference organizers are seeking proposals of high academic quality that take a reflective and analytical approach to both general and specific topics with international appeal or focus. We encourage contributions from scholars of religious studies, philosophy, communication, sociology, security studies, psychology, media, and related fields. Submissions should engage religion as a dynamic force—conceptually, historically, or materially—within the cognitive battlespaces of our time. We encourage contributions from a spectrum of perspectives, approaches, and methodologies. We are not interested in papers that simply rehearse or promote particular conspiracies, or that use the conference as a platform for calling out disliked groups. We are not interested in polemics, jeremiad, or de facto advocacy pieces. Instead, we welcome theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous work that takes the religious and epistemic dimensions of cognitive conflict seriously as objects of critical inquiry.
Truth in Inconvenience
What do ZIRP, the AI panic, and the meaning crisis have in common?
The Origins Of <br>‘Planetary Realism’ And <br>‘Whole Earth’ Thinking | NOEMA
There is no escaping an interconnected world.
Pluralistic: Model collapse (12 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
