Chaadayev's Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman unite the religious approach to history, which was later adopted by the Slavophiles, with the search for Western enlightenment, symbolized in the figure of Peter the Great. - Front flap.

I present and argue for twotheses: the first concerns the degree to whichChaadaev''s thought represents a breakthrough inthe development of Russian social philosophyand the second concerns the Hegelian characterof this thinking. I also show that Chaadaev''stheory retained an open character closely tiedto the crisis character of the social realityof his time and that it depended for itsjustification on the further course of thehistorical process, which is impossible topredict. All this leads to an interpretation ofChaadaev''s view according to which the (...) standardopposition of Chaadaev''s two best-known texts,The Philosophical Letters, with theirpredominantly pessimistic picture of Russia,and the Apology of a Madman, whichrefutes this evaluation, is rejected. (shrink)

V.K.: Vladislav Aleksandrovich, you have come a long way in your scientific career: from a student of the class of 1955 in the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University to a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the sector of the theory of knowledge and head of the division of epistemology and logic at the Institute of Philosophy of the RAS, and editor in chief of our country's leading philosophy journal Voprosy filosofii. Your field of research (...) is the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science or, to be more specific, the cultural-historical analysis of knowledge from the point of view of the activity approach. As far as I know, the psychological aspect of the activity approach to the study of consciousness and knowledge was developed by the psychologists Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, his student Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontiev, Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, and Petr Iakovlevich Galperin. Leontiev, Luria, and Galperin were professors at the Philosophy Faculty of MGU at the time you were studying there. Tell me, did you develop your scientific interests under the influence of the Moscow school of cultural-historical psychology? (shrink)

This essay describes some of the literary, psychological, and historical causes of Russia’s war in Ukraine (2022) based on observations of the national character found in the fiction of Aleksandr Pushkin and Fyodor Dostoevsky and in philosophical and psychological essays of Petr Chaadaev, Sergei Askol’dov, and Sigmund Freud. The political ideology that stands behind the war can be characterized as schizofascism, or schizophrenic fascism that embraces the contradiction between archaic myths, chauvinism, and xenophobia, on the one hand, and (...) corruption and cynicism, on the other. Citing the controversial results of sociological polls indicating both Russians’ aspiration for friendship with Ukraine and their support for the aggressive war, the author explores the deep ambivalence inherent in the psychology of Russians as historical successors of the Golden Horde and the Moscovite State, incorporating the legacy of nomadism, militarism, messianism, and autarky. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

Filosofskoe i publit︠s︡isticheskoe nasledie -- Iz pisem -- Slovo sovremennikov o Chaadaeve -- Slovo potomkov.

Lettere filosofiche.--Apologia d'un pazzo.--Scritti vari.--Corrispondenza.--Lettera di Schelling a Čaadàev.

Chaadayev's Philosophical Letters and Apology of a Madman unite the religious approach to history, which was later adopted by the Slavophiles, with the search for Western enlightenment, symbolized in the figure of Peter the Great. - Front flap.

Consider a set of shuffled observations drawn from a fixed probability distribution over some instance domain. What enables learning of inductive generalizations which proceed from such a set of observations? The scenario is worthwhile because it epistemically characterizes most of machine learning. This kind of learning from observations is also inverse and ill-posed. What reduces the non-uniqueness of its result and, thus, its problematic epistemic justification, which stems from a one-to-many relation between the observations and many learnable generalizations? The paper (...) argues that this role belongs to any complexity regularization which satisfies Norton’s Material Theory of Induction (MTI) by localizing the inductive risk to facts in the given domain. A prime example of the localization is the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) about overparameterized neural networks. The explanation of MTI’s role in complexity regularization of neural networks is provided by analyzing the stability of Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM), an inductive rule that controls the learning process and leads to an inductive generalization on the given set of observations. In cases where ERM might become asymptotically unstable, making the justification of the generalization by uniform convergence unavailable, LTH and MTI can be used to define a local stability. A priori, overparameterized neural networks are such cases and the combination of LTH and MTI can block ERM’s trivialization caused by equalizing the strengths of its inductive support for risk minimization. We bring closer the investigation of generalization in artificial neural networks and the study of inductive inference and show the division of labor between MTI and the optimality justifications (developed by Gerhard Schurz) in machine learning. (shrink)

Could the employment of large language models (LLMs) in place of human advisors improve the problem-solving ability of democratic assemblies? LLMs represent the most significant recent incarnation of artificial intelligence and could change the future of democratic governance. This paper assesses their potential to serve as expert advisors to democratic representatives. While LLMs promise enhanced expertise availability and accessibility, they also present specific challenges. These include hallucinations, misalignment and value imposition. After weighing LLMs’ benefits and drawbacks against human advisors, I (...) argue that time-tested democratic procedures, such as deliberation and aggregation by voting, provide safeguards that are effective against human and machine advisor shortcomings alike. Additional protective measures may include custom training for advisor LLMs or boosting representatives’ competencies in query formulation. Implementation of adversarial proceedings in which LLM advisors would debate each other and provide dissenting opinions is likely to yield further epistemic benefits. Overall, promising interventions that would mitigate the LLM risks appear feasible. Machine advisors could thus empower human decision-makers to make more autonomous, higher-quality decisions. On this basis, I defend the hypothesis that LLMs’ careful integration into policymaking could augment democracy’s ability to address today’s complex social problems. (shrink)

This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for (...) the study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic semantics. (shrink)

Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy's underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences' findings, the book's chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving (...) a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and explores how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions towards political irrationality This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy and the future of democracy. (shrink)

Despite their flaws, large language models (LLMs) deserve a fair chance to prove their mettle against human experts, who are often plagued with biases, conflicts of interest, and other frailties. For epistemically unprivileged laypeople struggling to access expert knowledge, the accessibility advantages of LLMs could prove crucial. While complaints about LLMs' inconsistencies and arguments for human superiority are often justified (for now), they distract from the urgent need to prepare for the likely scenario of LLMs' continued ascent. Experimentation with both (...) the capabilities and institutional architecture of LLMs is necessary. Neither tech-bashing nor excessive gatekeeping will suffice. As LLMs are here to stay and they keep improving, it is high time we started thinking about how to navigate the impending wave of their proliferation. (shrink)

A simple complete axiomatic system is presented for the many-valued propositional logic based on the conjunction interpreted as product, the coresponding implication (Goguen's implication) and the corresponding negation (Gödel's negation). Algebraic proof methods are used. The meaning for fuzzy logic (in the narrow sense) is shortly discussed.

Uniform infinite bases are defined for the single-conclusion and multiple-conclusion admissible rules of the implication–negation fragments of intuitionistic logic and its consistent axiomatic extensions . A Kripke semantics characterization is given for the structurally complete implication–negation fragments of intermediate logics, and it is shown that the admissible rules of this fragment of form a PSPACE-complete set and have no finite basis.

This paper is a contribution to the study of the rôle of disjunction inAlgebraic Logic. Several kinds of (generalized) disjunctions, usually defined using a suitable variant of the proof by cases property, were introduced and extensively studied in the literature mainly in the context of finitary logics. The goals of this paper are to extend these results to all logics, to systematize the multitude of notions of disjunction (both those already considered in the literature and those introduced in this paper), (...) and to show several interesting applications allowed by the presence of a suitable disjunction in a given logic. (shrink)

Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying "x is true" and satisfying the "dequotation schema" $\varphi \equiv \text{Tr}(\bar{\varphi})$ for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

This paper is a contribution to Mathematical fuzzy logic, in particular to the algebraic study of t-norm based fuzzy logics. In the general framework of propositional core and Δ-core fuzzy logics we consider three properties of completeness with respect to any semantics of linearly ordered algebras. Useful algebraic characterizations of these completeness properties are obtained and their relations are studied. Moreover, we concentrate on five kinds of distinguished semantics for these logics–namely the class of algebras defined over the real unit (...) interval, the rational unit interval, the hyperreals , the strict hyperreals and finite chains, respectively–and we survey the known completeness methods and results for prominent logics. We also obtain new interesting relations between the real, rational and hyperreal semantics, and good characterizations for the completeness with respect to the semantics of finite chains. Finally, all completeness properties and distinguished semantics are also considered for the first-order versions of the logics where a number of new results are proved. (shrink)

Dave Ripley has recently argued against the plausibility of multiset consequence relations and of contraction-free approaches to paradox. For Ripley, who endorses a nontransitive theory, the best arguments that buttress transitivity also push for contraction—whence it is wiser for the substructural logician to go nontransitive from the start. One of Ripley’s allegations is especially insidious, since it assumes the form of a trivialisation result: it is shown that if a multiset consequence relation can be associated to a closure operator in (...) the expected way, then it necessarily contracts. We counter Ripley’s objection by presenting an approach to multiset consequence that escapes this trap. This approach is multiple-conclusioned in a heterodox way, for multiple succedents are given a conjunctive, rather than a disjunctive reading. Finally, we address a further objection by French and Ripley to the effect that the informational interpretation of sequents in linear logic does not motivate cut. (shrink)

In the last few decades many formal systems of fuzzy logics have been developed. Since the main differences between fuzzy and classical logics lie at the propositional level, the fuzzy predicate logics have developed more slowly (compared to the propositional ones). In this text we aim to promote interest in fuzzy predicate logics by contributing to the model theory of fuzzy predicate logics. First, we generalize the completeness theorem, then we use it to get results on conservative extensions of theories (...) and on witnessed models. (shrink)

This paper addresses the ontological status of the body in the context of bodily practices in body-oriented disciplines, such as sport training, dance, and physiotherapy. Following Descartes’, Huss...

Structural completeness properties are investigated for a range of popular t-norm based fuzzy logics—including Łukasiewicz Logic, Gödel Logic, Product Logic, and Hájek's Basic Logic—and their fragments. General methods are defined and used to establish these properties or exhibit their failure, solving a number of open problems.

As our epistemic ambitions grow, the common and scientific endeavours are becoming increasingly dependent on Machine Learning (ML). The field rests on a single experimental paradigm, which consists of splitting the available data into a training and testing set and using the latter to measure how well the trained ML model generalises to unseen samples. If the model reaches acceptable accuracy, an a posteriori contract comes into effect between humans and the model, supposedly allowing its deployment to target environments. Yet (...) the latter part of the contract depends on human inductive predictions or generalisations, which infer a uniformity between the trained ML model and the targets. The paper asks how we justify the contract between human and machine learning. It is argued that the justification becomes a pressing issue when we use ML to reach ‘elsewheres’ in space and time or deploy ML models in non-benign environments. The paper argues that the only viable version of the contract can be based on optimality (instead of on reliability which cannot be justified without circularity) and aligns this position with Schurz’s optimality justification. It is shown that when dealing with inaccessible/unstable ground-truths (‘elsewheres’ and non-benign targets), the optimality justification undergoes a slight change, which should reflect critically on our epistemic ambitions. Therefore, the study of ML robustness should involve not only heuristics that lead to acceptable accuracies on testing sets. The justification of human inductive predictions or generalisations about the uniformity between ML models and targets should be included as well. Without it, the assumptions about inductive risk minimisation in ML are not addressed in full. (shrink)

The pace of technological change continues to outstrip the evolution of democratic institutions, creating an urgent need for innovative approaches to democratic reform. However, the experimentation bottleneck - characterized by slow speed, high costs, limited scalability, and ethical risks - has long hindered progress in democracy research. This paper proposes a novel solution: employing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create synthetic data through the simulation of digital homunculi, GenAI-powered entities designed to mimic human behavior in social contexts. By enabling rapid, (...) low-risk experimentation with alternative institutional designs, this approach could significantly accelerate democratic innovation. I examine the potential of GenAI-assisted research to mitigate current limitations in democratic experimentation, including the ability to simulate large-scale societal interactions and test complex institutional mechanisms. While acknowledging potential risks such as algorithmic bias, reproducibility challenges, and AI alignment issues, I argue that the benefits of synthetic data are likely to outweigh their drawbacks if implemented with proper caution. To address existing challenges, I propose a range of technical, methodological, and institutional adaptations. The paper concludes with a call for interdisciplinary collaboration in the development and implementation of GenAI-assisted methods in democracy research, highlighting their potential to bridge the gap between democratic theory and practice in an era of rapid technological change. (shrink)

The one-variable fragment of a first-order logic may be viewed as an “S5-like” modal logic, where the universal and existential quantifiers are replaced by box and diamond modalities, respectively. Axiomatizations of these modal logics have been obtained for special cases—notably, the modal counterparts $\mathrm {S5}$ and $\mathrm {MIPC}$ of the one-variable fragments of first-order classical logic and first-order intuitionistic logic, respectively—but a general approach, extending beyond first-order intermediate logics, has been lacking. To this end, a sufficient criterion is given in (...) this paper for the one-variable fragment of a semantically defined first-order logic—spanning families of intermediate, substructural, many-valued, and modal logics—to admit a certain natural axiomatization. More precisely, an axiomatization is obtained for the one-variable fragment of any first-order logic based on a variety of algebraic structures with a lattice reduct that has the superamalgamation property, using a generalized version of a functional representation theorem for monadic Heyting algebras due to Bezhanishvili and Harding. An alternative proof-theoretic strategy for obtaining such axiomatization results is also developed for first-order substructural logics that have a cut-free sequent calculus and admit a certain interpolation property. (shrink)

Many democratic countries have failed to stand up to the challenge presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the collective response to the pandemic has been incapacitated by an ‘epistemic crisis’, (i.e., a breakdown in the social division of epistemic labor) that led to a failure of citizens’ beliefs to converge towards a shared perception of the situation. Neither a paucity of relevant expert knowledge nor democratic citizens’ irrationality is required for the crisis to emerge. In particular, I highlight (...) three obstacles capable of preventing relevant expert testimony from gaining democratic legitimacy necessary for an effective policy response: 1) the proper domain of expertise is uncertain; 2) regular citizens’ meta-expertise – (i.e., ability to discriminate among the putative experts based on their relative epistemic merit) – is not efficacious enough to trigger truth-convergence of the public opinion; 3) the prominent sources of third-party meta-expertise lack credibility due to their conflicts of interest. Since the first two problems appear irresolvable, I propose that the search for a path towards preclusion of future epistemic crises concentrates on upgrading the institutional fundament for meta-expertise provision. Social epistemology plays a vital role in this search, but its close cooperation with other disciplines is a must. (shrink)

What makes safety claims about general purpose AI systems such as large language models trustworthy? We show that rather than the capabilities of security tools such as alignment and red teaming procedures, it is security practices based on these tools that contributed to reconfiguring the image of AI safety and made the claims acceptable. After showing what causes the gap between the capabilities of security tools and the desired safety guarantees, we critically investigate how AI security practices attempt to fill (...) the gap and identify several shortcomings in diversity and participation. We found that these security practices are part of securitization processes aiming to support (commercial) development of general purpose AI systems whose trustworthiness can only be imperfectly tested instead of guaranteed. We conclude by offering several improvements to the current AI security practices. (shrink)

This is the continuation of the paper :417–446, 2010). We continue the abstract study of non-classical logics based on the kind of generalized implication connectives they possess and we focus on semilinear logics, i.e. those that are complete with respect to the class of models where the implication defines a linear order. We obtain general characterizations of semilinearity in terms of the intersection-prime extension property, the syntactical semilinearity metarule and the class of finitely subdirectly irreducible models. Moreover, we consider extensions (...) of the language with lattice connectives and generalized disjunctions, study their interplay with implication and obtain axiomatizations and further descriptions of semilinear logics in terms of disjunctions and the proof by cases property. (shrink)