Standing in a Garden of Forking Paths

According to the Path Principle, it is permissible to expand your set of beliefs iff (and because) the evidence you possess provides adequate support for such beliefs. If there is no path from here to there, you cannot add a belief to your belief set. If some thinker with the same type of evidential support has a path that they can take, so do you. The paths exist because of the evidence you possess and the support it provides. Evidential support grounds propositional justification. The principle is mistaken. There are permissible steps you may take that others may not even if you have the very same evidence. There are permissible steps that you cannot take that others can even if your beliefs receive the same type of evidential support. Because we have to assume almost nothing about the nature of evidential support to establish these results, we should reject evidentialism

The transparent failure of norms to keep up standards of belief

We argue that the most plausible characterisation of the norm of truth—it is permissible to believe that p if and only if p is true—is unable to explain Transparency in doxastic deliberation, a task for which it is claimed to be equipped. In addition, the failure of the norm to do this work undermines the most plausible account of how the norm guides belief formation at all. Those attracted to normativism about belief for its perceived explanatory credentials had better look elsewhere

Superconducting phases of f-electron compounds

Intermetallic compounds containing f-electron elements display a wealth of superconducting phases, that are prime candidates for unconventional pairing with complex order parameter symmetries. For instance, superconductivity has been found at the border of magnetic order as well as deep within ferro- and antiferromagnetically ordered states, suggesting that magnetism may promote rather than destroy superconductivity. Superconductivity near valence transitions, or in the vicinity of magneto-polar order are candidates for new superconductive pairing interactions such as fluctuations of the conduction electron density or the crystal electric field, respectively. The experimental status of the study of the superconducting phases of f-electron compounds is reviewed.Comment: Rev. Mod. Phys. in print; 75 pages, 23 figures; comments welcom