Paradigmatically, epistemic akrasia occurs when a subject believes some proposition p and simultaneously believes that her belief that p is irrational (Horowitz 2014). This characterization is broad enough to admit of further precisification of a subject's possible mental states. For example, if a subject believes p despite taking p to be highly unlikely, she may take this low credence to suggest that her belief is irrational. Then she too counts as akratic. In this paper, we wish to call attention to cases like these. Let's consider a particular example.Taylor believes that her close friends and family think ill of her. She knows that this is an irrational thing for her to believe, especially since she knows her only apparent evidence is that she and they have been speaking less lately. This lack of communication, she admits to herself, is easily and plausibly explained by the fact that she has just moved to a new country to start a demanding job. Thus, she has a low credence that they think ill of her. Still, she believes it, despite her low confidence that it is true. Taylor's case is one of epistemic akrasia: she believes p, but knows she ought not believe p.
Counternomics—counterfactuals whose antecedents run contrary to the laws of nature—are commonplace in science but have enjoyed relatively little philosophical attention. This article discusses a puzzle about our counternomic epistemology, focusing on cases in which experimental observations are used as evidence for counternomic claims. I show that these cases resist being characterized in familiar interventionist lines, and I suggest a characterization of my own.
Inferentialists about scientific representation hold that an apparatus's representing a target system consists in the apparatus allowing "surrogative inferences" about the target. I argue that a serious problem for inferentialism arises from the fact that many scientific theories and models contain internal inconsistencies. Inferentialism, left unamended, implies that inconsistent scientific models have unlimited representational power, since an inconsistency permits any conclusion to be inferred. I consider a number of ways that inferentialists can respond to this challenge before suggesting my own solution. I develop an analogy to exploitable glitches in a game. Even though inconsistent representational apparatuses may in some sense allow for contradictions to be generated within them, doing so violates the intended function of the apparatus's parts and hence violates representational "gameplay."
Sometimes, scientific models are either intended to or plausibly interpreted as representing nonactual but possible targets. Call this "hypothetical modeling". This paper raises two epistemological challenges concerning hypothetical modeling. To begin with, I observe that given common philosophical assumptions about the scope of objective possibility, hypothetical models are fallible with respect to what is objectively possible. There is thus a need to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate hypothetical modeling. The first epistemological challenge is that no account for the epistemology of hypothetical models seems to cohere with the most characteristic function of scientific modeling in general, i.e., surrogative representation. The second epistemological challenge is a version of "reliability challenges" familiar from other areas. There is a challenge to explain how hypothetical models could be a reliable guide to what is possible, given that they are not and cannot be compared against their nonactual targets and updated accordingly. I close with some brief remarks on possible solutions to these challenges.
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