The Investigations
The Insufficient
The philosophical foundations. Five essays on critical realism, retroduction, compound causation, and the skeptic’s operations. The ontological commitment that every study makes about what kinds of things exist and can be studied. Most commitments are invisible. These essays make them visible.
TAM_INS_01
The Skeptic
The System That Believes Nothing
Dr. Chandran did not question the differential. She questioned whether the act of generating a differential, from these categories, trained on this data, applied to this woman, was …
TAM_INS_02
The Traditions
Seven Ways to Doubt
Western epistemology is not the only epistemology. Indian tarka, Buddhist catuskoti, African ubuntu, Indigenous relational knowing: each tradition offers a different way to doubt, …
TAM_INS_03
The Intent
Whose Question Was It?
Bias-in-intent is the most consequential form of bias. It lives upstream of the algorithm, in the commissioning decision, in the question that was asked rather than the answer that …
TAM_INS_04
The Retroduction
Working Backward from What Hurts
Retroduction is reasoning backward from an observed effect to the best explanation for it. Deduction goes from rules to conclusions. Induction goes from cases to generalizations. …
TAM_INS_05
The Estimate
What It Would Actually Take
The pilot costs seventeen crore rupees. That is what it would take to find out whether the epistemic AI concept works in practice. The arithmetic has never once produced the …