# please strip this conversation for parts. know what i mean? ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `0a42789d-ec6e-421e-8bc6-943629ef18f0` - Last activity: `2026-02-02T13:02:38.956Z` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User please strip this conversation for parts. know what i mean? ### Assistant Large file. Let me read it in sections. ### Assistant Got it. This is a dense conversation about prompting strategies for doing philosophy with LLMs. Let me identify the extractable ideas—the parts worth capturing as standalone notes. --- ## Extraction Candidates Based on my read, here are the ideas worth stripping out. I'll group them by type: ### **Conceptual Distinctions** 1. **Procedural vs Criteria Prompting** - Criteria-first: tell the model what the output must satisfy - Procedure-first: tell the model how to proceed from here (trajectory steering) - Your "obvious move" trick is firmly procedure-first 2. **The "Obvious Move" as Deictic Instruction** - Not specifying an endpoint—pointing to the next licensed step in a practice - Works because it activates a learned policy for "what competent philosophers do next" - Practice-relative and state-dependent 3. **Move Grammar of Philosophy** (the conversation lists these): - Disambiguation/distinction - Argument reconstruction - Counterexample/test case - Unification/identification ("these are the same issue") - Synthesis/hybrid - Reframing the dispute - Constraint extraction - Theory choice under trade-offs - Error diagnosis 4. **Resolution vs Hallucination** - Main failure mode in philosophy isn't factual hallucination—it's "mushiness" (altitude debt, vagueness, semantic fog) - "Hovering" as default equilibrium ### **Prompting Research Touchpoints** 5. **CoT, ToT, Self-Refine analogies** - Chain-of-thought: force intermediate steps - Tree-of-thoughts: branch, evaluate, backtrack - Self-refine: draft → critique → revise - Step-back: abstract to principles first, then apply - These map onto philosophical practice 6. **Scaffolding Gradient** - Measuring philosophical competence by how much prompting pressure is needed before the model produces evaluable, specific, dialectically robust output - Continuous measure, not binary ### **Philosophical Framework Candidates** 7. **Bengson et al.'s Tri-Level Method** (from the methodology book) - Level 1: Accommodate and explain the data - Level 2: Substantiate and integrate commitments - Level 3: Theoretical virtues as tie-breaker - Could formalize the "move grammar" 8. **Bengson's "Theoretic Properties"** - Accuracy, reason-based, robustness, illuminating, orderly, coherent - Potential evaluation criteria 9. **Dellsén's Dependency Model** - Understanding = grasping dependence relations (causal and non-causal) - Quality = accuracy × comprehensiveness (can trade off via idealization) - Very promptable: require explicit dependency maps 10. **Williamson Touchpoints** - "Total evidence" as regulative (not demanding empirical tethering) - Abduction rewards boldness + precision - Error-fragility worry (don't let one case dominate) - Simplicity as regularizer against overfitting ### **Meta-Level Insights** 11. **Internal Verification Thesis** - Much philosophical verification is internal to the space of reasons - Validity, consistency, equivocation detection, counterexample handling - This is why LLMs might do better in philosophy than domains requiring world-contact 12. **Practice Frame Matters** - "Explain philosophy" frame → summary mode - "Contribute to philosophy" frame → novelty expected - "Obvious move" output depends on which frame the model infers 13. **Minimal Intervention Principle** - Don't over-prompt—models already do philosophy-appropriate procedures once genre is cued - Add constraints only when you see specific failure modes --- ## What to Do with These Want me to create standalone notes for a subset of these? I'd suggest grouping into: - **One note** on "procedural vs criteria prompting" (the core distinction) - **One note** on the "obvious move" technique (your primary method) - **One note** on using Bengson et al. to formalize philosophical moves - **One note** as a research ideas dump for the Generating Philosophy project Or I can produce a single consolidated extraction note that preserves all the threads without over-organizing. Your call on the capture format. *Questa conversazione è una miniera di idee metodologiche che aspettano solo di essere raffinate.*