Peter Kahl

Research Security Begins Upstream: Capability retention, research policy and national security

UK research security is built around a downstream problem: valuable research capability exists, and hostile or strategically adverse actors seek access to it. MI5’s Espionage Alert of 30 September 2026 on the China General Technology Research Institute is a clear example. This pa...

The Inside of Generatedness: A Theory of Representational Sealing

This paper develops Representational Sealing Theory (ReST), a theory of one limit on any inquiry that asks after its own preconditions. Theoretical representation is conducted under a representational ‘law’ — a structured regime of admissible objects, distinctions, inferences and...

The Inside of Generatedness: A Theory of Representational Sealing

This paper develops Representational Sealing Theory (ReST), a theory of one limit on any inquiry that asks after its own preconditions. Theoretical representation is conducted under a representational ‘law’ — a structured regime of admissible objects, distinctions, inferences and...

China, Europe and The Frontier's Paradox: Why Institutionalising the Recognition of Capability Can Become an Epistemic Trap

Around the end of the first millennium China was, on many measures, the most technically accomplished society in the world; sustained, mechanised growth began some six centuries later in Britain. This article does not try to explain that reversal — the Needham Question — but uses...

China, Europe and The Frontier's Paradox: Why Institutionalising the Recognition of Capability Can Become an Epistemic Trap

Around the end of the first millennium China was, on many measures, the most technically accomplished society in the world; sustained, mechanised growth began some six centuries later in Britain. This article does not try to explain that reversal — the Needham Question — but uses...

The History of a Change of Mind: Why Thinking It Through Does Not Establish Authorship

We ordinarily treat a change of mind we have thought through as ours — as something we did and can answer for. This paper argues that whether a revision is ours to answer for is settled not by how completely the operative framing is integrated into our present reasoning but by th...

Who Governs the Exchange Rate? Recognition, conversion, and a constitutional question nobody has asked

Modern institutions recognise, and recognition earned in one institution can be spent in another, so the fields form a single order rather than a set of separate competitions. This paper treats the machinery that couples them as an evaluative layer running two gates: an admissibi...

Who Governs the Exchange Rate? Recognition, conversion, and a constitutional question nobody has asked

Modern institutions recognise, and recognition earned in one institution can be spent in another, so the fields form a single order rather than a set of separate competitions. This paper treats the machinery that couples them as an evaluative layer running two gates: an admissibi...