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Record W7128691424 · doi:10.1111/phis.70007

Rational Feelings for Virtual Things?

2025· article· en· W7128691424 on OpenAlexaff
Christopher Howard

Bibliographic record

VenuePhilosophical Issues · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicPhilosophy and Theoretical Science
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsRationalityRealismMetaphysicsFeelingLeverage (statistics)Rational agent

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT This article examines the rationality of affective responses to virtual phenomena. I argue that at least some such responses can be perfectly rational, but that virtual realism and virtual irrealism—competing views about the metaphysics of the virtual—differ in their verdicts about the possible rationality of certain types of responses. Realism says that virtual objects are real; irrealism says that they're nonexistent fictions. I argue that while both views can accommodate the rationality of certain affective responses to the virtual, irrealism, unlike realism, significantly restricts the range of possibly rational responses. I suggest that this asymmetry may provide a promising path forward in the metaphysical debate, because we can leverage intuitive judgments about which affective responses to the virtual can be rational in assessing the relative plausibility of realism and irrealism.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.975
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.036
GPT teacher head0.375
Teacher spread0.339 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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