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Experts or expertise? A response to Otte, Yearby and Myszka (2024)
(Department of Psychology at Michigan State University, 2026) Grootenboer, Peter; Petrie, Kirsten; Scott, Emily
In 2024 Otte, Yearby, and Myszka published an article arguing for Skill Acquisition Specialists to be incorporated into high-performance sport, and they then responded further in 2026 (Myszka et al.) to Fransen who questioned their position. In this brief commentary we discuss the position presented by Otte et al., not so much to argue against it, but rather to extend their view and consider it from another perspective—practice theory. In this, we argue that what is needed is not ‘skill acquisition’ experts per se, but ‘skill acquisition’ expertise.
Do digital immortals dream of offline afterlives?
(Springer, 2026-10-16) Ulatowski, Joseph W.
The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely long life as a digital immortal. To argue for this, I show that there is an insurmountable problem from the digital immortal’s perspective. If the digital immortal is an exact replica of a mortal, then the entirety of the digital mind will be directed toward offline content, e.g., from big events like birthday parties, weddings, and the birth of one’s children to the more mundane such as what the embodied mortal had for breakfast on 22 June 1987. The possibility of digital immortals living a person’s life indefinitely means that the digital immortal is able to conceive of and understand the content of the mortal’s embodied mind. To conceive of and to understand the content of a mortal’s embodied mind the digital immortal must know what it is like to be an embodied mortal. However, the digital immortal cannot conceive of what it is like to be an embodied mortal because the experience would be so transformative that it would be irrational to consider it (cf. (Paul in Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014)) and because it would have to conceive of its own offline afterlife, which is something well beyond its capacity. Just as we cannot conceive what it’s like to be immortal because of its highly transformative experience (cf. (Ulatowski in Diametros: Online J. Philos. 16(62), 65–77, 2019), digital immortals would be similarly perplexed by an offline afterlife. Our digital döppelganger would have no way of knowing what meaty embodied lives are like. The pollyannaish view of living forever as a digital döppelganger gives rise to the realisation that our functionally equivalent digital replica would be filled by memories, experiences, and other content of which it cannot possibly conceive.
On Russell's so-called truth primitivism
(University of Waikato, 2026) Ulatowski, Joseph W.
According to Truth Primitivism, truth is an unanalysable concept or property. Proponents of the view, especially Jamin Asay, have argued that the GE Moore and Bertrand Russell were early adopters of primitivism until they both abandoned the view in favour of the correspondence theory because neither one of them were able to reconcile how a proposition as a state of affairs could be false if truth is a primitive and unanalysable. In this paper, my focus will be Russell, and I will challenge the view that early Russell was a primitivist about truth; instead, once we have a clearer appreciation of how he understood propositions and the connection between truth and fact, it becomes clear that even early Russell was a correspondence theorist—albeit a special, unique form of correspondence not otherwise in the literature then or now.
Output first: Rethinking bullshit in large language models
(University of Waikato, 2026) Wyatt, Jeremy
A fast-moving debate has emerged over whether LLMs are bullshitters in any significant sense. This talk develops an account of LLM bullshit that, in contrast to the most influential existing accounts, is entirely output-based. I begin with an overview of the best-known treatment of LLM bullshit, due to Hicks, Humphries, and Slater, along with some of the main critical reactions to their views. One response, from Gunkel and Coghlan, argues that Hicks et al.’s process-based account should be replaced by an output-based one. I take this response to be compelling, though it is notable that Gunkel and Coghlan do not attempt to develop a detailed output-based account. To fill this gap, I review Florian Cova’s recent output-based account of bullshit, explain how it can be streamlined, and show how it can be applied to LLMs. The main upshots are: (i) some but not all LLM outputs are bullshit; (ii) LLMs engage in the activity of bullshitting sometimes but not always; and (iii) LLMs are bullshitters in only a rather weak sense.
The elusiveness of concordance: Political inquiry and the nature of political truth
(2026-07-11) Wyatt, Jeremy
In recent work, Lynch argues that the truth of political propositions is determined by whether those propositions have a property called ‘concordance.’ I will aim to show that one cannot determine whether a political proposition is concordant by determining whether it satisfies the individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for concordance. As a result, considering which political propositions are concordant is entirely unhelpful for someone trying to determine which political propositions are true. In this sense, concordance is epistemically idle in the context of political inquiry, which indicates that Lynch’s account of political truth isn’t especially helpful. To close, I will briefly detail a potential way forward that trades on some familiar deflationary ideas about truth.