Capacities that are obscured, evacuated, or rendered unaddressable by automated systems: agency, exclusion, epistemic lag, invisible missions.
Action Without Acts: The Institutional Production of Action and the Doctrinal Conditions of Responsibility
Level 2Published onlineShows that the tradition's resources for indirect agency are act-derivative without exception, and that some infrastructural configurations decline, at the operating level, to produce the act those resources require — then reformulates sin, judgment, and moral agency accordingly.
Case · Robodebt, the Dutch childcare-benefits scandal, and automated platform moderation serve as the three institutional configurations.
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- Journal
- Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie · 2026 · DOI
- Concepts introduced
- Epistemic Infrastructure
- Related theme
- Institutions & Infrastructure
- Capacities
The Diffuse Void: Algorithmic Safety and the Disappearance of Judgment
Level 1Published onlineExamines the diffuse configurations in which no addressable party stands where a moral claim would ordinarily land, and shows how safety engineering can produce exactly that vacancy.
- Journal
- AI and Ethics · 2026 · DOI
- Concepts introduced
- Judgment Gap
- Related theme
- Normativity & Standing
- Capacities
Automated Certainty: Algorithmic Perplexity Reduction and Theological Metacognitive Miscalibration
Level 1Published onlineIntroduces automated certainty as a condition in which algorithmic systems reduce experienced perplexity faster than they produce the interpretive competence required to evaluate the resolution, and proposes an empirical research program for tracking the resulting divergence between theological confidence and competence.
Case · Cognitive science of religion, processing fluency, predictive processing, and historical practices of interpretive formation (Chavruta, lectio divina, apophatic discipline) frame the analysis.
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- Journal
- Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion · 2026 · DOI
- Concepts introduced
- Automated Certainty
- Related theme
- Formation & Agency
- Capacities
- Supporting connections
Conceptual Inflation and Explanatory Entitlement: On the Limits of Construct Extension in Science
Level 1Published onlineNames conceptual inflation as a systematic pathology: extending a construct beyond the explanatory entitlements conferred by its underlying object constitution.
- Journal
- Philosophies · 2026 · Publisher
- Related theme
- Explanation & Science
- Capacities
Algorithmic Habitus and the Invisible Mission: Sanctification as the Reordering of Desire
Level 0Published onlineExtends habitus to environments in which formation is directed by systems whose formative purposes remain undeclared, and reads sanctification as a counter-ordering of desire.
- Journal
- New Blackfriars · 2026 · DOI
- Related theme
- Desire & Relations
- Capacities
Amplification Chambers and Belief Persistence in Commercial Health Communication
Level 1Published onlineModels how commercially structured amplification sustains belief beyond the evidence that would ordinarily revise it.
- Journal
- Journal of Health Communication · 2026 · DOI
- Related theme
- Explanation & Science
- Capacities
The Licensing Problem in Predictive Maintenance: When Does a Prediction Become a Reason to Act?
Working paperSpecifies four conditions on a maintenance license — the entitlement to treat a predictive output as a ground for a given intervention — and shows that predictive accuracy does not by itself confer any of them.
Case · AI-driven predictive maintenance in industrial asset management serves as the applied test case.
Read the abstract & argument →
- Status
- Working paper (draft v5) · 2026
- Concepts introduced
- Inferential License
- Related theme
- Judgment & Answerability
- Capacities
Predictive AI and Second-Personal Exclusion
Working paperArgues that predictive systems can enact a second-personal exclusion: those about whom claims are made are structurally not among those to whom answer is owed.
- Status
- Working paper
- Related theme
- Normativity & Standing
- Capacities
- Supporting connections
Mapping Epistemic Instability
Working paperProvides a map of epistemic instabilities that arise where model, world, and design fail to align.
- Status
- Working paper
- Related theme
- Explanation & Science
- Capacities
Markov models and the ontology of state
Working paperDiagnoses ontological assumptions smuggled in by Markov-model formulations of state and transition.
- Status
- Working paper
- Related theme
- Explanation & Science
- Capacities
LLM experiments and inferential license
Working paperShows why the standard experimental repertoire around large language models systematically overreaches its inferential license.
- Status
- Working paper
- Concepts introduced
- Inferential License
- Related theme
- Explanation & Science
- Capacities
- Supporting connections
Administrative expertise as epistemic lag
Working paperArgues that accumulated administrative expertise can itself become a source of epistemic lag under rapid technological change.
- Status
- Working paper
- Related theme
- Institutions & Infrastructure
- Capacities
- Supporting connections
Media as infrastructure
Working paperTreats media systems as infrastructure whose formative effects operate below the level of content.
- Status
- Working paper
- Related theme
- Institutions & Infrastructure
- Capacities
- Supporting connections