P-Hacking Should Not Make Us Abandon the Principle of Total Evidence

The tyranny of the p: when significance misleads

The p-value has long served as the standard of scientific significance, but its widespread misuse and misunderstanding continue to distort how we interpret data and publish findings. In this Comment, we take a critical look at the scientific overreliance on p-values in quantitative research. Through two illustrative case studies, we showcase how statistical significance can both deceive and obscure, depending on how models are specified and results interpreted. We highlight common misconceptions and argue for a shift in both statistical education and publication norms. This is not a call to abandon the p-value, but a call to reframe it as one small piece in an extended conversation about evidence, uncertainty, and meaning.

Scientifically Unintelligible Phenomena

What use the Realist for a Theory of Truth?

Recently, Hasok Chang has argued that we should adopt a pragmatic account of truth on which truth is constituted by practical success. Central to his argument is the claim that truth in this sense can be pursued and that other senses of truth can’t be. In this paper, I present a dilemma for Chang’s view. Either practical success constitutes truth in a way that implies infallibility—a conclusion that I’ll argue is untenable—or the argument from pursuit fails. I end by suggesting that scientific realism alone commits us to very little with respect to truth.

First They Came for the Others: A Theory of Divide-and-Conquer

Divide-and-conquer tactics often succeed not through mechanical coordination failures, but through epistemic friction regarding an aggressor's underlying intent. When an attacker strikes a first target, bystanders must infer whether the assault represents a localized grievance or a systemic campaign. If the attack is rationally interpreted as particularized, bystanders abstain, prompting the isolated victim to surrender. We demonstrate how higher attack costs and lower correlation between victims'fates facilitate this division. We then study how behavioral responses, rhetoric, treaty commitments, and downstream defense networks modify this inference.

“Gaslighting” Refocused

I argue that all extant philosophical accounts of gaslighting overgenerate or undergenerate cases, either because they fail to include the internal felt experience of the gaslit or because they include this internal experience in the wrong way. I contend that some act A counts as gaslighting iff : (1) the gaslighter’s act A expresses disagreement with the gaslit without adequately expressing respect for the gaslit, and this makes it the case that (2) the gaslit in fact comes to believe that there is no hope for their fundamental rational competence, either universally or within some specific domain.

“Please let me know whether it seems to you absurd or ridiculous to bring in necessity and contingency”

In this paper, we will discuss Wrinch’s reflections on logic at the intersection among logic, epistemology and metaphysics. We will see, first, how Wrinch was a Russellian philosopher and scientist, as she explicitly believed in Russell’s logical-analytic method and in the “all-important” role Russell saw for logic in our knowledge of the external world. Second, we will see how Wrinch’s reflections also show us that, in 1918, one could endorse the Russellian overarching project as presented in Our Knowledge of the External World while holding that logic can provide us with kinds of pieces of knowledge of the external world that go beyond those Russell was happy to admit.