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Summary A deductive inference is an instance of transmission failure just in case, roughly put, one cannot earn a warrant for believing the conclusion by deploying one's warrant for believing the premise and performing the deduction.  Transmission failure is an idea that divides epistemologists.  Some have denied that there are any genuine examples at all.  And, even amongst those who accept that there are examples, there is relatively little agreement as to what these examples are and what explains the phenomenon.  The issue takes on an additional philosophical significance due to the fact that some of the disputed examples involve inferences that are themselves philosophically significant - such as Moore's notorious 'proof' of the existence of the external world.  As such, questions about transmission failure are intimately bound up with questions about the viability of Moorean responses to scepticism.
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  1. Helen Beebee (2002). Transfer of Warrant, Begging the Question, and Semantic Externalism. Philosophical Quarterly 51 (204):356-74.
  2. Paul Boghossian (2003). Blind Reasoning. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1):225–248.
    The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of ‘blind but blameless’ reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible.
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  3. J. Brown (2003). The Reductio Argument and Transmission of Warrant. In Susana Nuccetelli (ed.), New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge. MIT Press.
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  4. Jessica Brown (2004). Wright on Transmission Failure. Analysis 64 (1):57–67.
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  5. Anthony L. Brueckner (1985). Transmission for Knowledge Not Established. Philosophical Quarterly 35 (139):193-195.
    In "Nozick on Scepticism", Graeme Forbes attempts to establish a Transmission Principle for knowledge which has been challenged by a number of anti-sceptical philosophers (such as Nozick). This principle (or something like it) seems to be required by Cartesian sceptical arguments, so if it could be refuted, this would apparently rid us of such scepticism. I do not believe that Nozick or anyone else has refuted the principle, yet I will argue that Forbes has certainly failed to establish it.
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  6. Jake Chandler (2010). The Transmission of Support: A Bayesian Re-Analysis. Synthese.
    Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.
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  7. Martin Davies, Two Purposes of Arguing and Two Epistemic Projects.
    In chapter 6 of Conditionals (1987),1 Jackson distinguishes two purposes of arguing – teasing out and convincing. With respect to the convincing purpose of arguing, he describes a way in which a propounded argument may be ill-suited to its purpose – the argument as propounded may beg the question. Jackson’s account of begging the question is quite different from a more familiar account that can be found, for example, in Irving Copi’s textbook, Introduction to Logic (1961). Copi’s account is, it (...)
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  8. Martin Davies (2004). Epistemic Entitlement, Warrant Transmission and Easy Knowledge. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1):213–245.
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  9. Martin Davies (2003). Externalism, Self-Knowledge and Transmission of Warrant. In Maria J. Frapolli & E. Romero (eds.), Meaning, Basic Self-Knowledge, and Mind. Csli.
    Externalism about some mental property, M, is the thesis that whether a person (or other physical being) has M depends, not only on conditions inside the person.
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  10. Philip A. Ebert (2005). Transmission of Warrant-Failure and the Notion of Epistemic Analyticity. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (4):505 – 521.
    In this paper I will argue that Boghossian's explanation of how we can acquire a priori knowledge of logical principles through implicit definitions commits a transmission of warrant-failure. To this end, I will briefly outline Boghossian's account, followed by an explanation of what a transmission of warrant-failure consists in. I will also show that this charge is independent of the worry of rule-circularity which has been raised concerning the justification of logical principles and of which Boghossian is fully aware. My (...)
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  11. S. C. Goldberg (2004). Radical Interpretation, Understanding, and the Testimonial Transmission of Knowledge. Synthese 138 (3):387 - 416.
    In this paper I argue that RadicalInterpretation (RI), taken to be a methodological doctrine regarding the conditions under which an interpretation of an utterance is both warranted and correct, has unacceptable implications for the conditions on (ascriptions of) understanding. The notion of understanding at play is that which underwrites the testimonial transmission of knowledge. After developing this notion I argue that, on the assumption of RI, hearers will fail to have such understanding in situations in which we should want to (...)
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  12. Sanford Goldberg (2007). How Lucky Can You Get? Synthese 158 (3):315 - 327.
    In this paper, I apply Duncan Pritchard’s anti-luck epistemology to the case of knowledge through testimony. I claim (1) that Pritchard’s distinction between veritic and reflective luck provides a nice taxonomy of testimony cases, (2) that the taxonomic categories that emerge can be used to suggest precisely what epistemic statuses are transmissible through testimony, and (3) that the resulting picture can make clear how testimony can actually be knowledge-generating.
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  13. Joachim Horvath (2008). Testimony, Transmission, and Safety. Abstracta 4 (1):27-43.
    Most philosophers believe that testimony is not a fundamental source of knowledge, but merely a way to transmit already existing knowledge. However, Jennifer Lackey has presented some counterexamples which show that one can actually come to know something through testimony that no one ever knew before. Yet, the intuitive idea can be preserved by the weaker claim that someone in a knowledge-constituting testimonial chain has to have access to some non-testimonial source of knowledge with regard to what is testified. But (...)
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  14. Jesper Kallestrup (2009). Reliabilist Justification: Basic, Easy, and Brute. Acta Analytica 24 (3):155-171.
    Process reliabilists hold that in order for a belief to be justified, it must result from a reliable cognitive process. They also hold that a belief can be basically justified: justified in this manner without having any justification to believe that belief is reliably produced. Fumerton (1995), Vogel (2000), and Cohen (2002) have objected that such basic justification leads to implausible easy justification by means of either epistemic closure principles or so-called track record arguments. I argue that once we carefully (...)
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  15. Arnon Keren (2007). Epistemic Authority, Testimony and the Transmission of Knowledge†. Episteme 4 (3):368-381.
    I present an account of what it is to trust a speaker, and argue that the account can explain the common intuitions which structure the debate about the transmission view of testimony. According to the suggested account, to trust a speaker is to grant her epistemic authority on the asserted proposition, and hence to see her opinion as issuing a second order, preemptive reason for believing the proposition. The account explains the intuitive appeal of the basic principle associated with the (...)
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  16. Jennifer Lackey (2006). Learning From Words. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1):77–101.
    Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this thesis (...)
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  17. Jennifer Lackey (1999). Testimonial Knowledge and Transmission. Philosophical Quarterly 50 (197):471-490.
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  18. Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (2008). Single Premise Deduction and Risk. Philosophical Studies 141 (2):157 - 173.
    It is tempting to think that multi premise closure creates a special class of paradoxes having to do with the accumulation of risks, and that these paradoxes could be escaped by rejecting the principle, while still retaining single premise closure. I argue that single premise deduction is also susceptible to risks. I show that what I take to be the strongest argument for rejecting multi premise closure is also an argument for rejecting single premise closure. Because of the symmetry between (...)
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  19. Michael McKinsey (2003). Transmission of Warrant and Closure of Apriority. In Susana Nuccetelli (ed.), New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge. MIT Press.
    In my 1991 paper, AAnti-Individualism and Privileged Access,@ I argued that externalism in the philosophy of mind is incompatible with the thesis that we have privileged , nonempirical access to the contents of our own thoughts.1 One of the most interesting responses to my argument has been that of Martin Davies (1998, 2000, and Chapter _ above) and Crispin Wright (2000 and Chapter _ above), who describe several types of cases to show that warrant for a premise does not always (...)
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  20. Brian P. McLaughlin (2003). McKinsey's Challenge, Warrant Transmission, and Skepticism. In Susana Nuccetelli (ed.), New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge. MIT Press.
  21. Luca Moretti, A Bayesian Vindication of Wright's Account of Failure of Transmission of Warrant.
    According to Wright, Moore’s contentious “proof of the existence of a material world” in not cogent because no warrant can transmit from its premise to its conclusion. Since Bayesian confirmation theory probably affords the best account of inductive reasoning we have today, if Wright’s analysis of Moore’s “proof” could be translated in Bayesian language, it would probably be preferable to rival analyses that cannot be reformulated in the same way. Okasha has recently proposed a Bayesian model that apparently vindicates Wright’s (...)
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  22. Luca Moretti (2012). Wright, Okasha and Chandler on Transmission Failure. Synthese 184 (3):217-234.
    Crispin Wright has given an explanation of how a first time warrant can fall short of transmitting across a known entailment. Formal epistemologists have struggled to turn Wright’s informal explanation into cogent Bayesian reasoning. In this paper, I analyse two Bayesian models of Wright’s account respectively proposed by Samir Okasha and Jake Chandler. I argue that both formalizations are unsatisfactory for different reasons, and I lay down a third Bayesian model that appears to me to capture the valid kernel of (...)
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  23. Luca Moretti & Tommaso Piazza (forthcoming). When Warrant Transmits and When It Doesn't: Towards a General Framework. Synthese.
    In this paper we focus on transmission and failure of transmission of warrant. We identify three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for transmission of warrant, and we show that their satisfaction grounds a number of interesting epistemic phenomena that have not been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. We then scrutinise Wright's analysis of transmission failure and improve on extant readings of it. Nonetheless, we present a Bayesian counterexample that shows that Wright's analysis is partially incoherent with our analysis of (...)
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  24. Ram Neta, Fixing the Transmission: The New Mooreans.
    G.E. Moore thought that he could prove the existence of external things as follows: ‘Here is one hand, and here is another, therefore there are external things.’ Many readers of this proof find it obviously unsatisfactory, but Moore’s Proof has recently been defended by Martin Davies and James Pryor. According to Davies and Pryor, Moore’s Proof is capable of transmitting warrant from its premises to its conclusion, even though it is not capable of rationally overcoming doubts about its conclusion. In (...)
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  25. Susana Nuccetelli (ed.) (2003). New Essays on Semantic Externalism and Self-Knowledge. MIT Press.
    This book shows that the debate over the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge has led to the investigation of a variety of topics, including the a...
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  26. Samir Okasha (2004). Wright on the Transmission of Support: A Bayesian Analysis. Analysis 64 (2):139–146.
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  27. David Owens (2006). Testimony and Assertion. Philosophical Studies 130 (1):105 - 129.
    Two models of assertion are described and their epistemological implications considered. The assurance model draws a parallel between the ethical norms surrounding promising and the epistemic norms which facilitate the transmission of testimonial knowledge. This model is rejected in favour of the view that assertion transmits knowledge by expressing belief. I go on to compare the epistemology of testimony with the epistemology of memory.
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  28. James Pryor (2012). When Warrant Transmits. In Crispin Wright & Annalisa Coliva (eds.), Mind, Meaning, and Knowledge: Themes From the Philosophy of Crispin Wright. Oxford University Press.
    Consider the argument: Circus-1 Men in clown suits are handing out tickets. So, probably: Circus-2 There’s a circus in town. So: Circus-3 There’s an entertainment venue in town. Presumably you’d be able to warrantedly believe Circus-2 on the basis of Circus-1. And we can suppose you’re reasonably certain that wherever there are circuses, there are entertainment venues. So you’d seem to be in a position to reasonably go on to infer Circus-3.
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  29. James Pryor (2004). Is Moore's Argument an Example of Transmission Failure? Philosophical Issues 14:349-378.
    Consider the following well-worn example, first put forward by Fred Dretske. You’re at the zoo, and in the pen in front of you is a striped horse-like animal. The sign on the pen says “Zebra.” Assuming that animal really is a zebra, it would seem that your evidence is perfectly adequate to enable you to know that it’s a zebra. So you know.
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  30. James Pryor (2004). What's Wrong with Moore's Argument? Philosophical Issues 14 (1):349–378.
    Something about this argument sounds funny. As we’ll see, though, it takes some care to identify exactly what Moore has done wrong. Iwill assume that Moore knows premise (2) to be true. One could inquire into how he knows it, and whether that knowledge can be defeated; but Iwon’t. I’ll focus instead on what epistemic relations Moore has to premise (1) and to his conclusion (3). It may matter which epistemic relations we choose to consider. Some philosophers will diagnose Moore’s (...)
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  31. Geoff Pynn (2013). The Bayesian Explanation of Transmission Failure. Synthese 190 (9):1519-1531.
    Even if our justified beliefs are closed under known entailment, there may still be instances of transmission failure. Transmission failure occurs when P entails Q, but a subject cannot acquire a justified belief that Q by deducing it from P. Paradigm cases of transmission failure involve inferences from mundane beliefs (e.g., that the wall in front of you is red) to the denials of skeptical hypotheses relative to those beliefs (e.g., that the wall in front of you is not white (...)
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  32. R. M. Sainsbury (2000). Warrant-Transmission, Defeaters and Disquotation. Noûs 34 (s1):191 - 200.
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  33. Sarah Sawyer (2006). Externalism, Apriority and Transmission of Warrant. In Tomáš Marvan (ed.), What Determines Content?: The Internalism/Externalism Dispute. Cambridge Scholars Press.
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  34. Joshua Schechter (2013). Rational Self-Doubt and the Failure of Closure. Philosophical Studies 163 (2):428-452.
    Closure for justification is the claim that thinkers are justified in believing the logical consequences of their justified beliefs, at least when those consequences are competently deduced. Many have found this principle to be very plausible. Even more attractive is the special case of Closure known as Single-Premise Closure. In this paper, I present a challenge to Single-Premise Closure. The challenge is based on the phenomenon of rational self-doubt – it can be rational to be less than fully confident in (...)
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  35. Joseph Shieber (2013). Toward a Truly Social Epistemology: Babbage, the Division of Mental Labor, and the Possibility of Socially Distributed Warrant. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 86 (2):266-294.
    In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within the contemporary (...)
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  36. Joseph Shieber (2011). Against Credibility. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (1):1 - 18.
    How does the monitoring of a testifier's credibility by recipients of testimony bear upon the epistemic licence accruing to a recipient's belief in the testifier's communications? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, licensed acceptance of testimony requires that recipients of testimony monitor testifiers with respect to their credibility. I argue that this conception, however, proves to be untenable when confronted with the wealth of empirical evidence bearing on the ways in which testifiers and their interlocutors actually interact.
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  37. Nicholas Silins (2005). Transmission Failure Failure. Philosophical Studies 126 (1):71 - 102.
    I set out the standard view about alleged examples of failure of transmission of warrant, respond to two cases for the view, and argue that the view is false. The first argument for the view neglects the distinction between believing a proposition on the basis of a justification and merely having a justification to believe a proposition. The second argument for the view neglects the position that one's justification for believing a conclusion can be one's premise for the conclusion, rather (...)
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  38. Martin Smith (2009). Transmission Failure Explained. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (1):164-189.
    In this paper I draw attention to a peculiar epistemic feature exhibited by certain deductively valid inferences. Certain deductively valid inferences are unable to enhance the reliability of one's belief that the conclusion is true—in a sense that will be fully explained. As I shall show, this feature is demonstrably present in certain philosophically significant inferences—such as GE Moore's notorious 'proof' of the existence of the external world. I suggest that this peculiar epistemic feature might be correlated with the much (...)
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  39. Chris Tucker (2012). The dangers of using safety to explain transmission failure: A reply to Martin Smith. Episteme 9 (4):393-406.
    Many epistemologists hold that the Zebra Deduction (the animals are zebras, so they aren't cleverly disguised mules) fails to transmit knowledge to its conclusion, but there is little agreement concerning why it has this defect. A natural idea is, roughly, that it fails to transmit because it fails to improve the safety of its conclusion. In his , Martin Smith defends a transmission principle which is supposed to underwrite this natural idea. There are two problems with Smith's account. First, Smith's (...)
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  40. Chris Tucker (2010). When Transmission Fails. Philosophical Review 119 (4):497-529.
    The Neo-Moorean Deduction (I have a hand, so I am not a brain-in-a-vat) and the Zebra Deduction (the creature is a zebra, so isn’t a cleverly disguised mule) are notorious. Crispin Wright, Martin Davies, Fred Dretske, and Brian McLaughlin, among others, argue that these deductions are instances of transmission failure. That is, they argue that these deductions cannot transmit justification to their conclusions. I contend, however, that the notoriety of these deductions is undeserved. My strategy is to clarify, attack, defend, (...)
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  41. Timothy Williamson (2003). Blind Reasoning. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (1):249–293.
    [Paul Boghossian] The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of 'blind but blameless' reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible. (...)
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  42. Crispin Wright (2008). McKinsey One More Time. In Anthony E. Hatzimoysis (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford University Press.
    §1 It is not always true that recognizably valid reasoning from known, or otherwise epistemically warranted premises, can be enlisted to produce knowledge, or other epistemic warrant, for a conclusion. The counterexamples are cases that exhibit what I have elsewhere called warrant transmission-failure. It is nowadays widely accepted that there are indeed such counterexamples, though individual cases remain controversial. One such controversial case is the so-called McKinsey paradox. The paradox presents as a simple collision between three claims that many would (...)
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  43. Crispin Wright (2007). The Perils of Dogmatism. In Nuccetelli & Seay (eds.), Themes from G. E. Moore: New Essays in Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
    "Dogmatism" is a term renovated by James Pryor [2000] to stand for a certain kind of neo-Moorean response to Scepticism and an associated conception of the architecture of basic perceptual warrant. Pryor runs the response only for (some kinds of) perceptual knowledge but here I will be concerned with its general structure and potential as a possible global anti-sceptical strategy. Something like it is arguably also present in recent writings of Burge 1 and Peacocke.2 If the global strategy could succeed, (...)
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  44. Crispin Wright (2004). Intuition, Entitlement and the Epistemology of Logical Laws. Dialectica 58 (1):155–175.
  45. Crispin Wright (2004). Warrant for Nothing (and Foundations for Free)? Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78 (1):167–212.
  46. Crispin Wright (2002). (Anti-)Sceptics Simple and Subtle: G. E. Moore and John McDowell. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2):330-348.
  47. José Zalabardo (2012). Wright on Moore. In Crispin Wright & Annalisa Coliva (eds.), Mind, Meaning, and Knowledge: Themes From the Philosophy of Crispin Wright. Oxford University Press.
    To the sceptic's contention that I don't know that I have hands because I don't know that there is an external world, the Moorean replies that I know that there is an external world because I know that I have hands. Crispin Wright has argued that the Moorean move is illegitimate, and has tried to block it by limiting the applicability of the principle of the transmission of knowledge by inference—the principle that recognising the validity of an inference from known (...)
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  48. José L. Zalabardo (2005). Externalism, Skepticism, and the Problem of Easy Knowledge. Philosophical Review 114 (1):33-61.
    of (from Philosophy Papers Online: Browse Papers).
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