💫 How Can Reality Tell Our Metaphysics “No”? What Does a Metaphysical Claim Have to Do to Earn Its Keep? 🤔

I had planned to answer Jason in the comments and leave it there. Then I started putting his latest reply beside what I had actually written, sentence by sentence, mostly because I wanted to make sure I was not answering a disagreement he had not made. That changed the project. A communication problem had become part of the philosophical problem itself.

I also realized the exchange had grown beyond something only Jason and I would care about. Many of the people who read me are already interested in consciousness, metaphysics, religion, philosophy of science, and the harder question underneath all of them: how do we tell when a compelling interpretation has actually earned a claim about reality? Giving the conversation a little background seemed more useful than dropping a technical reply into the middle of a comment thread and expecting everyone else to reconstruct how we got there.

Jason said our exchange had “clear[ed] away some differences in vocabulary and argumentative style that had initially obscured how much overlap was already present in our approaches,” and that we had continued making “reciprocal progress.” I recognized the same pattern while drafting my answer. Once I put his exact wording beside mine, several apparent disagreements became smaller. Some survived. Others turned out to depend on how one of us was using a term, where we placed the inferential burden, or which level of the argument we thought the other person was addressing.

That made me go back through the Matt and Karsten threads with the same question in mind. I had already thought I understood where those disagreements were. Reading them again after Jason’s clarification made some of the old boundaries look less stable. A point I had filed under “substantive disagreement” sometimes turned out to contain a vocabulary problem. A point I thought had been settled sometimes reopened once a later clarification changed what the earlier claim was doing.

That changed how I wanted to present the exchange. I began quoting both sides rather than relying on retrospective summaries. In the reply below I say that “our wording crossed here more than our positions did,” that one phrase had made us “look farther apart than we were,” and later that I was “not yet sure we have found an incompatibility rather than a difference of emphasis.” Those are substantive diagnostics. Before solving a disagreement, I want to know whether the disagreement survives a careful reconstruction of what each person actually said.

Small vocabulary shifts matter a great deal in this territory. Feeling, valuation, experience, absolute, literal, constitutive, and separable can each carry several jobs. A conversation can drift while everyone remains convinced they are discussing the same proposition. Quoting the exchange makes that drift easier to catch, including when I am the one producing it.

I also noticed something else, although I did not trust it immediately. The same pressure point seemed to keep reappearing under different metaphysical nouns. At first I wondered whether I was simply doing the very human thing of seeing a pattern because I had started looking for one. Call it pattern-seeking, or apophenia in the stronger version: unrelated things can start looking unified once a favored lens is in hand. So I tried to break the comparison rather than admire it.

When a description, experience, analogy, model, or conceptual scheme already explains some shared body of evidence, what warrants adding a stronger ontological commitment to it, and what would have to happen for us to remove or revise that addition without throwing away everything that still works?

I now care more about that transition than about beginning with familiar camps such as materialism, idealism, mysticism, reductionism, or holism. The labels can wait. First I want to see what extra claim has entered, how far the evidence really travels, and what would happen if that extra claim lost.

I went back through the comments and then through the literature I had been using on constitutive explanation, decomposition, rival models, and underdetermination. The resemblance survived because it was more specific than “these people all talk about metaphysics.” In each case there was a relatively thin description that several rivals could share, a thicker interpretation being asked to travel farther, and a question about what evidence belonged specifically to that added commitment. Work on scientific constitutive abduction, context-sensitive decomposition, and countermapping and perspective-dependent reification gave me additional reasons to take that structure seriously while also warning me not to assume that my own decomposition was neutral.

The people involved

Matthew David Segall, Ph.D., is a transdisciplinary process philosopher and Associate Professor in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where CIIS currently lists him as Interim Chair. His own site identifies him as Director of the Process and Science Network at the Center for Process Studies. He completed his doctorate at CIIS in 2016 with a dissertation on Schelling and Whitehead. His books include Physics of the World-Soul and Crossing the Threshold. Matt matters to this project because his process-relational metaphysics is developed enough to resist easy dismissal. He gives me a serious rival with enough internal structure to expose weak spots in my own rules.

Current sources: Matthew David Segall, Footnotes²Plato; California Institute of Integral Studies, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness faculty; Segall’s 2016 dissertation.

Jason W. Hoskins, Ph.D. , is a Staff Scientist in the Laboratory of Translational Genomics at the National Cancer Institute. He earned his B.S. and Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Rochester, then completed postdoctoral work in molecular disease research. His current work includes pancreatic-cancer genetics, gene-regulatory networks, and systems-biology approaches to complex regulatory programs. His philosophical comments here are his own. I mention the scientific background because decomposition and system-level dependence are practical problems in his professional work, which gives his methodological objections useful friction. In this exchange he gave me a compact diagnostic for a validity condition my method already required but had left too easy to overlook in practice.

Current source: National Cancer Institute, “Jason Hoskins, Ph.D.”

Karsten Jensen, who writes New World Culture, describes himself as an associate professor in computer science and mathematics. He has studied the Danish mystic Martinus since 1991 and has lectured and written about Martinus since 2003. The Martinus Institute has listed him as a lecturer in mathematics and informatics and as an editor associated with Kosmos. Aalborg University’s research portal also documents his academic work in geomatics and land management, including a textbook on surveying. Karsten has spent decades trying to place a comprehensive spiritual cosmology in conversation with technical and philosophical inquiry. I find that combination worth taking seriously because the resulting claims cannot be waved away as casual mystical language. They have enough scope to deserve careful reconstruction and enough consequence to make error control matter.

Sources: Karsten Jensen, New World Culture profile; Aalborg University research portal, “Landmåling i Teori og Praksis”; Martinus Center Klint 2024 programme.

These conversations already overlap on their own. Matt and Karsten have publicly explored resonances among Whitehead, Martinus, and Bergson. Karsten told me he had been following some of my exchanges with Matt. Jason has separately been pressing Matt on eternal objects, potentiality, relational topology, and how much of Whitehead’s scheme can be reconstructed while retaining the work the scheme was doing. The common topic was already there. These are the very things that I have been dialoguing with Matt about since earlier this year.

Related dialogue: Matthew David Segall, Karsten Jensen, and Pedro Brea, “Creativity and the Cross: Martinus, Bergson, and Whitehead in Dialogue”.

Matthew: what does primitive feeling add?

My exchange with Matt has gradually narrowed, and one of the interesting things is that each clarification has removed one disagreement while making another easier to see. I originally spent time making sure the issue was not consciousness, representation, intentionality, or a Cartesian subject hidden behind causal relations. Once Matt explicitly removed those from primitive prehension, I thought one source of confusion had been cleared away. Then I realized that the clarification had made the harder question sharper: after all of those familiar phenomenal and cognitive features are stripped out, what positive content is left in feeling, and which parts of that remainder are supposed to travel with causal becoming generally?

A process-relational rival can accept causal inheritance and relational becoming. It can also allow integration, embodiment, novelty, and emergent organization without taking primitive becoming to be intrinsically experiential. The live question is therefore about the remainder: what licenses the further transport of affectivity, proto-subjectivity, perspective, and value into causal becoming generally?

The stakes are ontological, not merely terminological. Matt describes causal efficacy as something felt bodily prior to reflective consciousness, speaks of objective “vector-feelings” flowing into actual occasions, and says the generic pattern being extended across nature is affective inheritance and self-unification. In the related eternal-objects discussion he also treats each concrescence as a self-creating subject-superject and God’s primordial valuation as the unconditioned ground of relevance. Those claims bear directly on what causal becoming, agency, value, and possibility are in reality. My question is how much of that richer description the evidence and comparative explanatory work actually require.

There is an important correction to make here, including to my own way of describing the contrast. Matt is not missing corrigibility in the way a protected cosmology would be. He has explicitly said that prehension and feeling are open to criticism, that everything goes into recursive scrutiny, that discord with science can lower confidence, that a stronger rival could require amendment or abandonment, and that “the world can say no to our categories.” What remains less explicit is the local accounting: if primitive affect or proto-subjectivity loses while causal inheritance and relational becoming survive, which Whiteheadian commitments change, what stays, and how far does the failure propagate? That is why I keep asking for an update condition at the level of the disputed addition rather than treating willingness to revise the whole programme as enough.

Matt is free to run the full metaphysical experiment. Build the richer Whiteheadian model and see what it can do. My bridge question arrives when rival models are on the table. If another account preserves the successes we care about while withholding primitive affect or valuation, where does the Whiteheadian addition earn its keep? It might earn it through explanation, prediction, transfer, causal leverage, or some other advantage we can identify. The comparison has to tell us.

That shift mattered to me because it changed the kind of answer I was looking for. I was no longer asking Matt to defend the word experience in the abstract. I wanted to know which inferential work was being done by affective inheritance, proto-subjectivity, perspective, or value after the shared process-relational structure had already been granted. The question got smaller, but it also became harder to answer by changing vocabulary.

What is primitive experience, positively, and why should we believe that this added feature is actually there?

Related Substack comments: Matthew on speculative philosophy, poetry, and testability; Matthew on causal relatedness and “the world can say no to our categories”; Matthew’s later clarification of “non-phenomenal” prehension.

Karsten: when does interpretation become ontology?

The nouns change in my exchange with Karsten, yet the pressure point remains recognizable. His articleWhat is unconditional or absolute? began by accepting my correction that the original question had assumed an Absolute before establishing one. When he embraced infinitism and later said scientists and philosophers might not need to answer the Absolute question after all, I initially thought the main disagreement had largely resolved. Then his next essays made me reconsider what, exactly, had been resolved. The explicit demand for an Absolute had softened, but many of the same reality-bearing commitments were now appearing through a different register: Martinus’s living beings extending without upper or lower bound, facticity becoming absolute or unconditional, every encounter ultimately described as an encounter with the Absolute or God, and later a contrast between supposedly impoverished literal truth and richer mythopoetic truth.

I answered that essay in Musement Is Welcome. The Absolute Still Needs a Ticket.. My objection was never to musement, mystical experience, analogy, or speculative metaphysics. I was asking what licenses each promotion in the sequence: from relation to universal life, from lived nonduality to ontological nonduality, from facticity to unconditionality, and from there to God. That article is the bridge between the Karsten discussion and the Matt/Jason exchange because it asks the same comparative question under different metaphysical vocabulary: what does the thicker interpretation add, what survives without it, and what could make the addition lose?

How Karsten’s position constructively moved during the exchange

Karsten’s next response, A note about absolute certainty, moved us closer than I first appreciated. He says he is “happy to grant” nearly all of my objections, accepts Martinus as the producer of a cosmological myth, distinguishes his experience of immortality from an argument that he is literally immortal, allows the Martinussian reading to stand as an interpretation of that experience, and describes his own engagement primarily as inspiration rather than missionary conviction. Most tellingly, he returns to the claim that scientists and philosophers ought to address the Absolute and says: “Maybe they don’t. At least I’m not certain any more and I’m fine with that.” Reading that beside his first essay made me realize that a meaningful part of the framework had already moved while much of what he valued remained intact.

A Note on the Concept of Literal Truth moved the discussion again. Karsten says, “I’m not sure I ever took anything in Martinus’ worldview to be literally true.” My first reaction was that this dissolved much of the literal ontological dispute. On rereading the rest of the essay, though, I saw that the claims had changed type unevenly. Some had clearly become mythopoetic, existential, ethical, interpretive, or phenomenological. Others were still doing ordinary work in shared reality.

That matters because the same article also makes claims that are plainly factual or causal: that the modern scientific picture is a “giant, dead, meaningless machine” myth; that scientific literalism contributes to exploitation, animal brutality, and ecological harm; that Martinus was pointing toward an “animate reality”; and that his mythopoiesis may be no less true than the literal truths of science, “perhaps even on the contrary.” Karsten’s proposed loss conditions are mainly whether the worldview remains inhabitable for him and whether he discovers internal incoherence. Those are meaningful tests of existential fit and coherence. They do not yet tell us whether Earth is a living subject, whether plants are sentient, whether a scientific worldview caused a social harm, or whether one cosmology describes shared reality more accurately than another.

The deeper problem is that this criticism risks treating one historically influential metaphysical interpretation of science as though it were science itself. Science does not require the universe to be dead, meaningless, fundamentally mechanical, reducible to one privileged scale, or exhaustively captured by current models. Contemporary science routinely uses mechanistic, dynamical, probabilistic, ecological, network, effective, and multiscale models side by side. What those models owe is narrower: when they make claims about shared reality, they must remain vulnerable to evidence that distinguishes better from worse descriptions. Karsten’s own causal claims about animal exploitation and ecological harm depend on that same standard, because they compete with explanations involving economics, institutions, technology, consumer behavior, religion, and other factors.

My own provisional, boundary- and scale-relative ontology is a concrete counterexample to the picture he is criticizing. It is scientifically constrained while explicitly withholding the assumptions that reality must be dead, meaningless, reducible to one privileged scale, or intrinsically whatever our best current models happen to represent. Its rule is almost the reverse: “Do not add what the evidence did not earn. Do not subtract what the evidence did not defeat.” Stronger universal, intrinsic, identity, and necessity claims carry additional evidential burdens.

That is also why “scientific certainty” is an odd phrase within my framework. Science gives us degrees of warrant, successful predictions, interventions, robustness, transfer, and rivals that fail. It can make a claim extraordinarily well supported without converting it into something incapable of revision. Literal factual assertion and fallibility are perfectly compatible. What matters is whether reality still has some way to make us less confident when we are wrong.

There is another reason Karsten’s response surprised me. In Musement Is Welcome. The Absolute Still Needs a Ticket., the very article he was answering, I had already argued against almost exactly the position his next essay seems to place on my side of the table. I used my exchange with to distinguish methodological naturalism, physical realization, and physicalist completeness. Pigliucci had classified an earlier organizational account of mine as a sophisticated form of physicalism. I appreciated the judgment that the proposal deserved serious consideration while resisting the implication that scientific naturalism automatically commits us to the stronger thesis that matter and energy exhaust reality, that all higher-level properties reduce to lower-level physical facts, or that “physical” already names the intrinsic nature of everything that exists.

I also raised the familiar problem with defining the physical as “whatever fundamental physics says.” Current physics is incomplete, while ideal future physics risks making the category too indeterminate to settle the metaphysical question in advance. My conclusion was therefore not anti-scientific and not anti-physicalist. Physicalism may turn out to be an output of inquiry if the evidence earns it. I simply do not treat it as an input constraint. Higher-scale organization, emergent causal structure, effective patterns, intrinsic-nature agnosticism, and the possibility that our present ontological categories are incomplete all remain open.

So the disagreement cannot fairly be framed as Martinus’s living, meaningful cosmos versus my commitment to a dead physical machine. I had already rejected that dichotomy in the article Karsten was responding to. The remaining question is narrower: once either of us makes a claim about what shared reality is actually like, what distinguishes that claim from serious alternatives, and what would make us revise it?

That is where my upcoming article, The Musement Park Needs Safety Rails, picks up the thread. I think two questions have been sliding together: Is this claim meant literally? and How certain are we that it is true? A literal claim can be modest, probabilistic, and revisable. A myth can be profound, morally useful, psychologically revealing, or existentially transformative without functioning as a factual model.

The difficulty begins when success in one role is used as warrant in another. If a myth, spiritual interpretation, or phenomenological experience is used to tell us that plants are sentient, planets are subjects, modern science caused a particular social harm, or reality itself is fundamentally animate, then it has entered factual territory. The relevant question becomes: what would distinguish this account from a serious alternative, and what would make us conclude that this particular claim was wrong? That is the boundary I am trying to keep visible.

After reconstruction, our frameworks are much closer

Jason’s warning about comparing reconstructed wholes helps here. It would be a mistake to take Karsten’s earlier Martinussian picture, delete the literal propositions one by one, and call whatever remains “Karsten minus ontology.” His later replies reorganize the role those ideas play. Reconstructed on their own terms, they leave a recognizable whole: musement as a generator of possibilities; myth and metaphor as interpretive resources; contemplative experience as first-person evidence; existential inhabitability as a criterion for personal engagement; moral orientation as a practical aim; internal coherence as a minimum constraint; open criticism; and explicit willingness to revise at least some earlier formulations.

Once separated that way, a surprising amount of Karsten’s current framework fits mine. My methodology also gives imagination and abduction room to work before demanding evidential promotion. It does not send poetry, ethics, phenomenology, mathematics, history, and metaphysics before one laboratory tribunal. It asks what kind of claim is being made and then matches the error-control procedure to that claim. Karsten’s own movement from “philosophers and scientists ought to answer what is Absolute” to “maybe they don’t,” from apparent immortality to a report about how an experience has shaped his life, and from Martinus as cosmology toward Martinus as mythopoetic and existential resource already performs something very close to that decomposition.

Seen as a whole, Karsten and I may now agree on much more than our language suggests. We both leave room for musement, lived experience, interpretation, criticism, and revision. The remaining question is simply this: when those things are used to make claims about shared reality, what justifies that extra step? That is where existential or mythopoetic success becomes a question of public ontological warrant.

The deepest remaining difference with Karsten’s present framework is the correction machinery. He and Martinus welcome criticism; what I still cannot find is a rule set that gives criticism authority to lower confidence in a specific reality claim while preserving the rest. My framework, what I call Recursive Corrigibility Framework, makes that local revision explicit through rivals, loss conditions, independent checks, and failure propagation. Had that machinery been present from the start, it likely would have separated literalness from certainty, existential fit from external accuracy, and mythic resonance from ontological warrant much earlier. Karsten’s recent revisions are beginning to do exactly that informally.

Karsten’s sequence: What is unconditional or absolute? → Musement Is Welcome. The Absolute Still Needs a Ticket. → A note about absolute certainty → A Note on the Concept of Literal Truth. Karsten’s publication: New World Culture.

Where Jason’s criticism helped me make a failure condition more explicit

Jason’s latest clarification matters because he locates less methodological distance between us than he first thought. He says his commitment to holistic, abductive, recursively corrigible evaluation predates our exchange. What changed, in his account, was mainly his understanding of my methodology. Once some differences in vocabulary and argumentative style were cleared away, he explicitly agreed with a principle I had formulated: speculative analogy cannot warrant its own generalization, imported categories remain open to serious rival reconstructions, and the thinner rival has to face the same scrutiny.

The difference I can presently see is mostly one of operationalization. My framework tries to turn those commitments into explicit local bookkeeping: claim types, rival-specific loss conditions, target-preservation checks, and rules for how failure propagates. Jason’s criticism gives me a more explicit local diagnostic inside that machinery.

Jason’s own comments also keep the metaphysical stakes visible. In the valuation exchange he asks whether richer organismic valuation is an elaboration of a more primitive vectorial character of becoming, and he entertains intrinsic directedness or valence within causal becoming as something substantive enough to compare against a scale-relative account. In his work on Whitehead’s eternal objects he asks whether their definiteness can really be separated from their position in a relational ordering, and he is exploring whether Whitehead’s relational insights can be extended into potentiality without treating eternal objects as pre-definite forms. I take those as live ontological alternatives under investigation. They are useful precisely because the method has to compare them without deciding their metaphysical status in advance.

His remaining concern lands inside a condition I had already stated. A thinner rival still has to preserve the explanatory successes of the richer view; a lower assumption count by itself earns very little. Jason pointed to a concrete way that condition can fail: removing P may alter what C itself amounts to. If the alteration destroys the relevant successes, the rival has failed the preservation condition.

That observation gives me a clean diagnostic. In my shorthand, an attempted operation that looks like C + P → remove P → C may actually produce C′. The comparison then has to ask what changed. Identity may have shifted. So may the organization, boundary conditions, causal profile, measured capacities, or explanatory role. Any target-relevant change can invalidate the claim that we merely removed an optional predicate.

Jason’s formulation then prompted me to apply that existing preservation requirement more explicitly to the Karsten exchange. If I simply removed the literal claims from Karsten’s earlier Martinussian picture and treated the residue as the same framework minus ontology, I would be committing exactly the kind of bad subtraction Jason was warning about. Karsten’s later replies had changed the role of the remaining pieces. Myth, experience, ethical orientation, and personal inhabitability were no longer functioning in quite the same way once literal assent was withdrawn. The right comparison was between the earlier and later reconstructed wholes.

I have therefore made target preservation explicit in the procedure. An ablation earns evidential force only after the alleged common core survives the operation well enough to remain the same target for the purpose of the comparison. Failed subtraction sends us to a different comparison, often reconstructed whole against reconstructed whole.

The audit also runs backward into the original theory. A scheme can build P so deeply into its definition of C that every rival loses before evidence enters. That would make theory-internal inseparability look like a discovered feature of reality. The paired diagnostic now checks both directions: whether subtraction manufactured independence and whether the starting conceptual topology manufactured inseparability.

The same pressure point keeps returning

By this point I had enough examples to worry about overfitting. Maybe I had built a method that could redescribe every disagreement as the same disagreement. That would be useless. So I started asking what would make the comparison fail. Matt’s question concerns the intrinsic character of causal becoming; Karsten’s mixes phenomenology, myth, ethics, and public ontology; Jason is largely questioning the architecture of comparison itself. Those differences are real. The common denominator only survives at a more abstract level: in each case I am trying to track when a successful description has earned promotion into a stronger ontological commitment, how far evidence gathered at one boundary or scale can travel, and whether the comparison still preserves the target it claims to compare.

The universal quantifier is where this becomes especially obvious. All becoming is experiential. All scales contain living beings. All reality is physical. All reality is nondual. Each claim travels farther than the local evidence from which it is usually motivated. I want the same burden applied in every direction: specify the transport, show what survives it, and identify a result that would stop it.

Parsimony becomes relevant only after the thinner account has preserved the target. A subtraction that destroys relevant explanatory structure has lost the comparison it was supposed to make. The richer theory faces a different risk: it can define the disputed category so deeply into the shared core that rivals lose by construction. There is also a quieter endpoint. Operationalization may reveal no remaining difference that prediction, intervention, counterfactual analysis, or explanatory comparison can currently reach. The framework can then record equivalence or underdetermination and stop carrying the verbal dispute as if evidence had chosen a side.

What I am building the method for

The recurring problem is one I keep running into from different directions: how do I give speculative inquiry enough room to discover something genuinely new without quietly turning the freedom to generate a possibility into permission to believe it? I have spent years dissatisfied with both extremes. If the entrance requirements are too strict, interesting metaphysics gets strangled before it can develop. If the exit conditions are too weak, every coherent worldview becomes capable of surviving indefinitely by redescribing whatever happens.

What I need from the methodology is an error-correcting constitution for inquiry. It should let musement, analogy, phenomenology, mathematics, abduction, metaphysics, and model-building produce candidate explanations without demanding premature proof. Afterward, those candidates have to meet serious rivals on terms that allow either side to lose something.

The conversations with Matt, Karsten, and Jason are useful to me because they stress different parts of the machinery. Matt forced me to distinguish general willingness to revise from a local update rule for a disputed ontological addition. Karsten showed how much of a worldview can survive when its claims are retyped from literal cosmology into phenomenological, ethical, or mythopoetic roles, while also exposing what happens when those roles drift back into public claims about reality. Jason already shares much of the recursive, rival-sensitive architecture and has been testing whether my own implementation preserves the target it claims to compare. None of those lessons requires the other person to adopt my framework. The framework is being developed partly by finding where my descriptions of their positions, and my own procedures, fail.

The procedure is less linear in practice than a checklist makes it look. A rival may force a construct to be redefined. A failed bridge can send the inquiry back to its boundary assumptions. New measurements can reveal that two variables I separated were coupled, while an intervention may expose a distinction that looked merely verbal. Claim typing, bridge construction, rival generation, severe testing, and failure propagation recur as needed. The path often loops backward.

Several failure modes motivate that recursion. Premature reduction can strip away a richer category simply because a thinner vocabulary looks cleaner. Metaphysical immunity lets a favored system absorb every result without paying an evidential cost. There is also the quieter failure of preserving a dispute after its rival formulations have become empirically or operationally equivalent. A useful method should be able to detect each of those without deciding in advance which ontology deserves to win.

A strong claim becomes more interesting after surviving that process. It has faced reconstructed rivals, boundary changes, independent evidence, and real opportunities to lose. If a large worldview contains both genuine insight and unsupported promotion, I want a method that can separate them well enough to keep what survived.

This is the problem underneath all three conversations: how can reality correct our conceptual schemes when every contact with reality is already mediated by some conceptual scheme?

Where the exchange has reached

Where I have ended up is not where I expected these threads to converge. Matt’s side has narrowed to the positive content of primitive feeling and the warrant for generalizing it. Karsten’s has narrowed in another direction: once his Martinussian commitments are reconstructed around mythopoetic, existential, ethical, and phenomenological use rather than assumed literal ontology, much of the methodological distance between us disappears. Jason’s comments then make me ask whether I am representing either of those shifts fairly unless I compare the reconstructed wholes rather than subtracting disputed predicates from an earlier formulation.

Jason’s latest comment loops the audit back through my own procedure. My original C + P comparison already conditioned a thinner rival’s success on preserving the relevant target. His objection makes the failure case easier to see: an ablation can be misapplied when that preservation requirement remains too implicit. The correction is now operational. Audit the ablation, check whether the target survived, and move to rival reconstructions when simple subtraction no longer describes what happened.

That is where the reply below begins. Jason gave me a concise way to expose an existing failure condition to direct inspection, which is exactly the kind of criticism I want the framework to retain.

What follows is my response to Jason Hoskins, including the evidence update that his criticism prompted.

Jason, thank you for the generous response. I am especially glad you appreciated the article as demonstrating what you called “the sort of progress” I think the method can help instigate within metaphysical debates, and that you found the C + P factorization and ablation strategy “extremely useful.” I also appreciated your description of what has happened between us as “reciprocal progress.” That is much closer to how I understand this exchange than a story in which either of us supplied the other with a methodology they lacked.

After reading your clarification closely, I suspect the remaining methodological distance between us is smaller than your final paragraph initially made it sound. The first issue looks largely historical and linguistic: when I wrote “he now agrees,” I was referring to the particular principle you had just explicitly endorsed, while “he revised that map” referred to your earlier estimate of the distance between our methods. I was not claiming that our exchange supplied you with a methodology you lacked.

The valuation issue looks similar. I was keeping agnosticism about primitive intrinsic character available as a third rival, though one later phrase of mine blurred that point. Your concern about C + P also lands on a condition my argument already required: a thinner reconstruction gets no evidential credit unless it preserves the relevant successes of the richer scheme. If removing P materially changes C , the attempted ablation has failed. What your objection gives me is a sharper way to notice that failure.

The mirror question remains open as well: mutual implication inside a conceptual scheme can invalidate simple deletion, but does it establish metaphysical inseparability in the target, or should a rival be allowed to reconstruct the whole under a different conceptual topology? If our answers converge there too, the remaining issue may be less an incompatibility than a useful difference in where we look first for failure.

I am going to take your points in sequence because the remaining disagreements, if there are any, now seem to depend on fairly local distinctions.

You said:

“First, when I said you’d convinced me that we were closer methodologically than my earlier ‘somewhere between’ phrasing suggested, what changed was primarily my understanding of your methodology rather than my own. My commitment to holistic, abductive, recursively corrigible evaluation of metaphysical schemes substantially predates this exchange.”

Your clarification of the intellectual history makes sense, and your July discussion of eternal objects fits it well. The wording I used in the article was narrower than the interpretation you are correcting.

What I actually wrote was:

“Jason Hoskins … had initially described himself as somewhere between Matthew and me methodologically. After I applied Jason’s own warning about analogy recursively to the Whiteheadian generalization, he revised that map. He now agrees that a category introduced through speculative analogy should remain corrigible not only through discordant observations, but through rival conceptual schemes that preserve its successes while rendering the imported category unnecessary, with the supposedly thinner rival subjected to the same scrutiny.”

“That map” referred to the map named in the preceding sentence: your earlier placement of yourself “somewhere between” Matthew and me methodologically. I was not saying that you had revised your underlying commitment to holistic, abductive, recursively corrigible metaphysics, or that our exchange created it.

The phrase “now agree” was likewise tied to the specific principle that immediately followed it: categories introduced through speculative analogy remain open to rival conceptual schemes that preserve their successes while rendering the imported category unnecessary, and the supposedly thinner rival receives the same recursive scrutiny. I took that from your later statement:

You said:

“I think you’ve convinced me that we’re closer methodologically than my ‘somewhere between the two of you’ phrasing suggested. I agree with the principle you formulate near the end…”

Your present account and my intended claim therefore fit closely. By your description, the main change was your understanding of my method. That revised your estimate of our distance and made explicit a point of agreement that may already have been implicit in your method.

I can still see the ambiguity in “he now agrees.” It can sound like “he has now adopted,” which is stronger than anything I meant. My cleaner version remains:

“After applying Jason’s own warning about analogy recursively, the exchange led him to revise his earlier map of our methodological distance and made explicit a principle we appear to have already substantially shared: categories introduced through speculative analogy should remain corrigible through rival conceptual schemes that preserve their successes while rendering the imported category unnecessary, with the supposedly thinner rival subjected to the same scrutiny.”

Would that capture the clarification more exactly? It preserves the point I was making without claiming authorship of commitments you already held.

Your July 8 comment gives me another reason to read your position that way:

You said:

“I remain unsatisfied with eternal objects and believe Whitehead’s scheme can survive largely intact by carefully reframing potentiality…”

Your July comment is good evidence that you were already prepared to reconstruct a major Whiteheadian category from inside a broadly sympathetic scheme. I therefore take your historical clarification at face value. The recursively critical disposition was already there; our exchange made more of the overlap visible than our vocabulary and argumentative styles initially allowed.

Your next sentence reinforces that reading:

You said:

“your clarification that the bridge is not an entrance exam but an accounting system applied after competing metaphysical experiments are developed addresses much of my ‘epistemology-first’ concern.”

I like that formulation. It made me realize that this may be another place where our wording had made the distance between us look larger than it was. I had been trying to locate the bridge question in roughly the same place when I wrote:

“I am not asking for an abstract criterion that must independently certify feeling before Whitehead is allowed to develop the larger scheme. Generate the speculative model freely, develop what it explains, and compare the whole package against serious rivals. My bridge question comes after that…”

“Accounting system rather than entrance exam” compresses that point better than I had. This looks like another case where the wording had exaggerated the distance between us.

I would also be very interested in reading the paper when you are ready to share it. Your eternal-objects project is an unusually good test case for the issue now in front of us: how far can a metaphysical scheme revise or reconstruct one of its contested categories while preserving enough of its successful structure to remain the same research programme? At what point has the conceptual topology changed enough that we should call it a different scheme? Whatever answer you arrive at should put useful pressure on my own machinery as well.

You said:

“Second, I think you slightly misread my comment about valuation. I wasn’t saying your rival assumes reality is intrinsically non-valuational. I was identifying a conditional explanatory debt: IF genuine intrinsic valuation first appears at some organizational scale, then the account owes us some story about how valuational becoming emerges from organization that, at the more primitive scale, lacks valuation. Remaining agnostic about whether primitive reality is valuational is perfectly legitimate, but it leaves that question open rather than resolving it.”

Our wording crossed here more than our positions did.

What I had written was:

“The alternative to primitive valuation need not be a reality that is intrinsically ‘wholly non-valuational.’ It can remain agnostic about intrinsic character while asking whether the forms of valuation we can actually identify are scale-relative organizational achievements.”

I was resisting an exhaustive binary. You had posed two substantive possibilities: valuation is absent primitively and later achieved, or richer organismic valuation elaborates a primitive vectorial character. I wanted a third epistemic position to remain live. We may be able to identify scale-relative regulatory and valuational phenomena while withholding judgment about the intrinsic character of the more primitive processes that realize them.

My later sentence was looser:

“if we stopped calling the alternative ‘wholly non-valuational’…”

That phrasing can sound as though I were attributing “wholly non-valuational” to your description of my actual rival. I should have written:

“if, instead of comparing only primitive intrinsic valuation with an explicitly non-valuational primitive base, we include agnosticism about primitive intrinsic character plus demonstrable scale-relative regulation as a third rival, does the abductive comparison change?”

That captures the comparison I intended.

On your conditional itself, I agree with the obligation it creates once its antecedent is established. If genuine intrinsic valuation exists at some higher organizational scale and is absent at the relevant more primitive scale, an account accepting those premises owes an emergence story. “It just appears somehow” would not explain the transition.

The remaining issue is when that debt attaches to an agnostic rival. Before we owe an explanation of a transition from ¬V at scale s to V at scale s′, the antecedent itself needs warrant. We would need evidence for V at s′ and ¬V at s, plus enough continuity in the construct to know that the same relevant kind of valuation is being compared across the scales. Do you agree?

That caution matters because the empirical and philosophical literature still gives us no license to treat differential regulation, organizational normativity, evaluative or action-selection value, phenomenally or hedonically felt valence, and intrinsic affective mattering as interchangeable. Corti’s critique, “Organizational normativity and teleology: a critique”, is useful here: “‘internal dependence’ and ‘intrinsic norms’ are two different concepts” (Corti 2023). I would not make Corti carry the point alone.

Barandiaran’s “Organizational Accounts of Malfunction: The Dual-Order Approach and the Normative Field Alternative” gives the organizational rival a much more explicit viability-based and counterfactual account of naturalized normativity.

Barrett, Sánchez-Cañizares, and García-Valdecasas, “The Challenge of Normativity: An Examination of Three Minimal Models”, compare three minimal models and argue that the step from norm-establishment to genuine norm-following remains unresolved. The literature therefore leaves room for substantial organizational normativity while withholding the further equation of that normativity with intrinsic affective mattering or phenomenally felt attraction and aversion.

Animal-consciousness research in 2025–2026 creates the same pressure. Fischer and Barrett, “On the Utility of the Pathological Complexity Thesis”, argue that evidence for evaluative or valence systems does not by itself establish conscious valence. Veit’s “Valence, Mirror Self-Recognition, and the Gradualist Evolution of Consciousness” defends a stronger adaptive role for consciously felt valence while explicitly allowing valence in cognitive science to mean value assignment without settling conscious realization.

Lyon and Kuchling, “Valuing what happens: a biogenic approach to valence and (potentially) affect”, are sympathetic to investigating basal valence and still say of its natural distribution: “Currently, this question cannot be answered.” For now, the distinction should remain: evaluative value assignment and phenomenally felt valence cannot inherit evidence from one another until a bridge earns the connection.

The decomposition itself has to remain provisional. These categories are operational scaffolds, subject to empirical rearrangement rather than fixed partitions of reality. Fábregas-Tejeda and Sims, “On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary: promising avenues and cautionary notes”, push in exactly that direction by emphasizing comparative empirical and phylogenetic investigation and revisable working definitions. Developmental, phylogenetic, mechanistic, interventional, or other comparative evidence may show that dimensions I separated dissociate differently, organize differently, or are constitutively inseparable at the boundary that matters. If so, the decomposition changes. Your recursive warning reaches my analytical machinery here too.

Agnosticism therefore leaves the emergence question open; I agree with you on that. What I resist is assigning it the same explanatory debt as a positive claim that the transition occurred.

Would you state the distinction this way?

If intrinsic valuation is later shown to begin at an organizational threshold, the scale-relative account owes an emergence mechanism. Until then, agnosticism owes a research programme capable of finding out whether there is such a threshold at all.

If you place the debt earlier, I would like to know what creates the obligation without turning non-attribution into an attribution of absence.

You said:

“I also suspect this exposes one remaining methodological difference between us that I’m finding increasingly interesting. Your C + P factorization and ablation strategy is extremely useful, but I worry that conceptual separability doesn’t always entail metaphysical separability.”

I agree with the general principle: conceptual separability does not entail metaphysical separability. The point I am less sure about is whether my argument ever relied on that entailment.

The formulation I gave you was explicitly conditional:

“the thinner rival does not win merely by containing fewer assumptions. It has to preserve the explanatory successes of the richer view. But if it does preserve them while removing primitive affect or valuation, that removal is comparative evidence that the added category may not yet be doing necessary work.”

That conditional was doing real work. Writing C and P separately was meant only as a device for comparative evidential accounting; it carried no commitment to their independent constitution in reality. The inference I intended was:

If a serious rival reconstruction preserves the relevant empirical, explanatory, causal, counterfactual, and other successes we were crediting to the richer package while no longer requiring P, then those preserved successes cannot by themselves establish P’s indispensability.

When removing P changes C in the way you are worried about, the antecedent fails. The rival has not preserved the relevant C.

Your next sentence gives that failure a very compact diagnostic:

You said:

“Sometimes removing P may change what C amounts to rather than simply yielding the same C minus an unnecessary predicate.”

In my own shorthand, I can represent the failure this way:

C + P → remove P → C′

If C′ differs in target-relevant identity, organization, boundary conditions, causal or counterfactual profile, explanatory role, or measurable capacities, I am not entitled to call it “C minus P.” The simple ablation failed.

That condition was already implicit in the requirement that the rival preserve the richer view’s relevant successes. Your observation gives me a cleaner local test for checking whether it actually did.

There is one sentence in my article that I would tighten because it leaves too much room for the stronger reading. I wrote:

“a thinner process or relational description can be separated from a thicker metaphysical commitment…”

What I meant was “analytically represented as distinguishable commitments for comparative evidential accounting,” not “shown to be metaphysically detachable features of reality.” I would now write:

“A thinner process or relational description and a thicker metaphysical commitment can be represented as analytically distinct for comparative evidential accounting, provided the purported shared core remains sufficiently invariant across the rival reconstructions to count as genuinely shared.”

That wording captures the intended constraint much better.

Whitehead is a particularly good place to take your warning seriously. In “A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality”, Stengers emphasizes the systematic interdependence of Whitehead’s categories and writes that his “fundamental ideas” “all presuppose each other” (Stengers 2008). I therefore cannot take a Whiteheadian actual occasion, delete “valuation” or “feeling,” and assume that every remaining category keeps exactly the role and meaning it had before the deletion.

The reciprocal question is whether mutual implication within a conceptual scheme establishes metaphysical inseparability in the target. Conceptual distinguishability does not establish metaphysical independence; theory-internal mutual implication should not receive the opposite privilege without further argument.

Suppose P partly constitutes what C means inside Whitehead’s architecture. At minimum, that gives us a theory-internal constitutive dependency. “Theory-internal” here does not mean verbal, conventional, or unreal.

Harbecke’s “Mechanistic Constitution as a Natural Law in Better Best Systems” argues that some constitutive mechanistic statements in cognitive science can satisfy epistemic criteria for lawlikeness. Şerban’s “Rethinking interlevel experiments: no remainder from evidence for causal relations” presses in a different direction, arguing that matched interlevel evidence may be captured by causal mediation without a distinctive constitutive remainder.

That disagreement is one reason I do not want conceptual topology to decide the metaphysics by itself. What would show that this particular Whiteheadian dependency belongs to the target with the claimed scope, rather than to the organization of this scheme?

A rival may need to reconstruct causal inheritance, integration, novelty, regulation, perspective-like selectivity, or other target phenomena under a different conceptual topology. If that reconstruction succeeds, should it count against P’s metaphysical indispensability even though there was never a legitimate operation corresponding to “Whitehead minus P”? That possibility is why some comparisons have to be between reconstructed wholes.

I also want to widen what I mean by “independent warrant.” Your abductive emphasis, together with the newer literature, gives me reason to avoid making that phrase sound interventionist. Aizawa and Headley’s “Scientific constitutive abduction” documents cases in which scientists infer constitutive structure abductively from explanatory fit plus substantial background knowledge, including cases where the posited entities are not directly detected. Those cases count against an intervention-only tribunal. The authors also leave open whether scientists thereby genuinely confirm those constitutive hypotheses. My takeaway is to broaden the admissible routes of warrant while keeping explanatory attractiveness from certifying itself.

The 2025–2026 literature on inference to the best explanation is divided enough that I would rather expose the conditions of the comparison than legislate one universal rule for abduction. Woodward, “The place of explanation in scientific inquiry: Inference to the best explanation vs inference to the only explanation”, rejects IBE as a general form of truth-directed inference.

Roche and Sober, “Inference to the Best Explanation, Bayesianism, and the Screening-Off Challenge: A Critical Review”, show how explanatory virtues can be screened off by evidence already doing the confirmatory work. Dellsén, “Inferring to the Best Explanation from Uncertain Evidence”, shows how uncertainty about evidence can reverse which explanation is inferable as best. Mohammadian, “Theoretical Virtues, Truth, and the Epistemic Aim of Scientific Theorizing”, offers contemporary counterpressure by defending theoretical virtues as an epistemic aim of scientific theorizing.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry “Abduction” likewise treats abduction’s normative status as disputed. For me, the practical question becomes local: which virtues are independently constrained, what evidence supports them, which rivals were actually considered, and does the ranking survive uncertainty about the evidence?

Would you agree that the holistic abductive comparison must itself remain corrigible? Coherence, scope, adequacy, simplicity, phenomenological fit, and unification can all matter to scheme construction and comparison. None should function as a protected meta-criterion that automatically promotes a scheme’s distinctive ontology. If that is near your view, the methodological gap narrows again. My bridge tribunal becomes broader than interventionism, while abductive comparison remains answerable to evidence quality, unconceived rivals, and the possibility that the criterion of “best” was partly produced by the conceptual topology being evaluated.

Two philosophy-of-science papers put useful pressure on opposite failure modes. Burnston, “Mechanistic decomposition and reduction in complex, context-sensitive systems”, argues that context sensitivity can defeat simplistic fixed-function decomposition without licensing an automatic inference to irreducible emergence; his compact conclusion is that “there is no easy argument from context-sensitivity to emergence” (Burnston 2022).

Walsh and Rupik, “The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis”, supply the complementary warning that something apparently demanded by one scientific perspective may belong to the perspective rather than the target. They call it illicit reification when a feature “belongs exclusively to a scientific perspective” but is treated as part of the target (Walsh & Rupik 2023).

Neither paper settles our metaphysical case. They do, however, support a discipline I suspect we both want:

Do not infer metaphysical independence merely from successful analytical decomposition.

Do not infer metaphysical inseparability merely from theory-internal mutual implication.

Try rival decompositions and rival reconstructions, then ask which dependency relations survive the change in representation.

Does that capture what you mean by applying the analogy/conceptual-topology warning recursively, or is there a stronger claim in your objection that I am still missing?

You said:

“Our analytical distinctions are indispensable, but they can tempt us to treat potentially mutually implicative aspects of a process as independently constituted components. So, I’d want the recursive audit applied to the ablation operation itself as well.”

Yes. I agree with that without reservation. I read it as making an existing commitment more explicit, though, rather than revealing an incompatibility I had been defending.

I had already said:

“The same scrutiny should run in the other direction: perhaps ‘causal structure,’ ‘organization,’ or ‘response’ also constrain what I can recognize. I don’t want those insulated either.”

Immediately before your reply, I had also written:

“Even our criteria of explanatory adequacy should remain corrigible in that comparison.”

The article also required the supposedly thinner rival to be “subjected to the same scrutiny.” An ablation procedure insulated from recursive criticism would contradict those commitments.

What your observation adds, which I can formalize in my own shorthand as C → C′, is a concrete local test for something the generic instruction “audit the method too” leaves underspecified:

After removing or replacing P, did the alleged common core preserve the target-relevant identity, organization, boundary, causal and counterfactual profile, explanatory role, and measurable capacities required for the comparison? If not, C became C′ and simple residual subtraction is invalid; compare reconstructed wholes instead.

Common-core subtraction remains intact. Your objection revealed a validity condition I had not stated clearly enough, and I have now formalized that condition in my framework: target preservation must be audited before an ablation earns evidential force; if C becomes C′, simple subtraction fails and we compare reconstructed wholes. The literature review prompted by your objection also tightened several neighboring parts of the method.

The decomposition is now explicitly provisional and empirically revisable. Constitutive dependence gets its own tribunal instead of being treated as automatically conceptual or automatically metaphysical.

I have separated empirical triangulation from model robustness, broadened the routes by which “warrant” can be earned beyond intervention alone, and refined the valuation taxonomy so organizational normativity, evaluative value assignment, phenomenally felt valence, and intrinsic affective mattering do not borrow evidence from one another without a bridge. That kind of result is what I want from criticism: the method becomes easier to audit and harder for me to misuse.

I would pair the target-preservation test with a mirror question:

Was C originally characterized in a way that makes P indispensable by definition, such that a rival conceptualization of the same target is excluded before the comparison begins?

The first diagnostic guards against false modularity; the second guards against false holism. I use those labels provisionally, but the symmetry is substantive.

That brings me back to your phrase “one remaining methodological difference.” I am not yet sure we have located an incompatible rule. You may be more alert by default to the possibility that decomposition changes the object of analysis. I am more inclined to attempt the decomposition because I want to learn whether the apparent mutual implication survives reconstruction. Those are different research heuristics. They become genuinely incompatible only if they produce different rules about what counts as a legitimate rival or a failed comparison.

Here is the case on which I would most like your answer. Suppose removing P from the original scheme turns its C into C′, so simple ablation fails. A rival then constructs a different C* that recovers the relevant empirical and explanatory successes without P. Do you regard that reconstructed package as a legitimate abductive rival to the original C + P?

If you do, our methods may be compatible while emphasizing different failure modes. If you do not, what gives the original scheme’s internal dependency structure enough privilege to exclude a successful reconstruction under another conceptual topology? The reciprocal test applies to my rival as well: if it claims to preserve the target while quietly dropping capacities or relations that were doing real explanatory work, what should count as evidence that my reconstruction failed? Those questions seem capable of locating a real methodological difference if one remains.

Your eternal-objects project may be the best test case. You appear to be asking whether Whitehead’s treatment of potentiality can be reconstructed while enough of the surrounding scheme survives to preserve its achievements. I am asking a parallel question about Whiteheadian feeling and primitive intrinsic valuation. The relevant alternative is not a word-deletion exercise; it is a serious process-relational or organizational reconstruction that has to recover the work before it can claim an evidential advantage.

At this stage I see a broad zone of methodological overlap, with one remaining question about how our heuristics behave under reconstruction. We both seem comfortable letting speculative analogy generate ambitious schemes before requiring atomistic pre-certification, and both of us want developed schemes subjected to holistic, abductive comparison rather than protected by their own vocabulary.

Your comments make clear that analytical decomposition can distort a mutually organized target. I also take you to accept that the thinner rival deserves the same scrutiny as the richer one. We both seem willing to test whether a different conceptual topology can expose an apparent necessity as framework-relative, although I do not want to put a stronger claim in your mouth than you have made. Unless I am misunderstanding you, neither scheme receives default metaphysical privilege simply for being thinner or richer.

If that reading is right, the interesting problem is how to move between holistic reconstruction and analytical decomposition without letting either procedure certify itself. A disagreement located there would be much more useful, if there is still a disagreement at all.

I want to avoid manufacturing convergence by writing your prior methodology out of its own history. My analytical shorthand should likewise avoid importing a modular ontology that the argument never required. Your clarification helped me state both constraints more carefully.

I would genuinely like to see where your paper goes when you are ready to share it. Your reconstruction of Whiteheadian potentiality and my attempts to reconstruct these valuation and feeling questions may give us a useful comparative test of what the method should count as preserved and what would amount to genuine explanatory loss after reconstruction. That would continue the kind of reciprocal progress I think this exchange has already produced.

Relevant Sources I Consulted:

• Aizawa, K., & Headley, D. B. — “Scientific constitutive abduction.” DOI: 10.1007/s13194-025-00655-3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-025-00655-3

• Harbecke, J. — “Mechanistic Constitution as a Natural Law in Better Best Systems.” DOI: 10.1007/s10838-025-09717-9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10838-025-09717-9

• Şerban, M. — “Rethinking interlevel experiments: no remainder from evidence for causal relations.” DOI: 10.1007/s13194-025-00714-9. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-025-00714-9

• Barandiaran, X. E. — “Organizational Accounts of Malfunction: The Dual-Order Approach and the Normative Field Alternative.” DOI: 10.1007/s13752-025-00500-z. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-025-00500-z

• Barrett, N. F., Sánchez-Cañizares, J., & García-Valdecasas, M. — “The Challenge of Normativity: An Examination of Three Minimal Models.” DOI: 10.1177/10597123251396761. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10597123251396761

• Fábregas-Tejeda, A., & Sims, M. — “On the prospects of basal cognition research becoming fully evolutionary: promising avenues and cautionary notes.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11802611/

• Fischer, B., & Barrett, M. — “On the Utility of the Pathological Complexity Thesis.” DOI: 10.1007/s11406-025-00884-z. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-025-00884-z

• Veit, W. — “Valence, Mirror Self-Recognition, and the Gradualist Evolution of Consciousness.” DOI: 10.1007/s11406-026-00994-2. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-026-00994-2

• Mayne, Z. J. — “Operationalizing Scientific Realism.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy-of-science/article/operationalizing-scientific-realism/700A7203E745B537B7E3DA31960526C7

• McLoone, B., Hecht Orzack, S., & Sober, E. — “The epistemic status of derivational robustness.” DOI: 10.1007/s13194-025-00673-1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-025-00673-1

• Lehtinen, A. — “Inferential rules for confirmatory robustness.” DOI: 10.1007/s13194-026-00722-3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-026-00722-3

• Dutilh Novaes, C., & Dede, Ç. — “Critical Contextual Empiricism for Busy People: Scientific Argumentation as Epistemic Exchange.” DOI: 10.1007/s11245-025-10198-0. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-025-10198-0

• Dellsén, F. — “Inferring to the Best Explanation from Uncertain Evidence.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy-of-science/article/inferring-to-the-best-explanation-from-uncertain-evidence/ADD1BFA6F381384537F1EB05CB5A04EA

• Woodward, J. — “The place of explanation in scientific inquiry: Inference to the best explanation vs inference to the only explanation.” DOI: 10.1007/s13194-025-00649-1. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13194-025-00649-1

• Mohammadian, M. — “Theoretical Virtues, Truth, and the Epistemic Aim of Scientific Theorizing.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy-of-science/article/theoretical-virtues-truth-and-the-epistemic-aim-of-scientific-theorizing/3D3A9431D99A7FE62688D322E0137AF0

• Roche, W., & Sober, E. — “Inference to the Best Explanation, Bayesianism, and the Screening-Off Challenge: A Critical Review.” DOI: 10.1007/s10838-025-09744-6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10838-025-09744-6

• Lawlor, D. A., Tilling, K., & Davey Smith, G. — “Triangulation in aetiological epidemiology.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5841843/

• Stegenga, J., & Menon, T. — “Robustness and Independent Evidence.” https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy-of-science/article/abs/robustness-and-independent-evidence/8290E8E25A574B9B861CE507BA8BDF57

• Nosek, B. A., Ebersole, C. R., DeHaven, A. C., & Mellor, D. T. — “The preregistration revolution.” DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1708274114. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5856500/

• Munafò, M. R., Nosek, B. A., Bishop, D. V. M., et al. — “A manifesto for reproducible science.” DOI: 10.1038/s41562-016-0021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Abduction.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Underdetermination of Scientific Theory.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-underdetermination/

• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — “Scientific Realism and Antirealism.” https://iep.utm.edu/scientific-realism-antirealism/

• Stengers, I. — “A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality.” DOI: 10.1177/0263276408091985. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276408091985

• Burnston, D. C. — “Mechanistic decomposition and reduction in complex, context-sensitive systems.” DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.992347. https://public-pages-files-2025.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.992347/pdf

• Corti, L. — “Organizational normativity and teleology: a critique.” DOI: 10.1007/s11229-023-04255-7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04255-7

• Lyon, P., & Kuchling, F. — “Valuing what happens: a biogenic approach to valence and (potentially) affect.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7935054/

• Walsh, D. M., & Rupik, G. — “The agential perspective: Countermapping the modern synthesis.” DOI: 10.1111/ede.12448. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ede.12448