# User: /contemplate i think somewhere in my vault there is a list of different ap ## Retrieval Notes - Session id: `379d2a18-5faa-4b16-997e-107d615ca81f` - Last activity: `2026-02-17T22:59:26.795Z` ## My Notes <!-- Add your notes here. This section is preserved across syncs. --> ## Conversation ### User User: /contemplate i think somewhere in my vault there is a list of different approaches to the purpose of philosophy. i would like you to find this infomration and then think how amenable proponents of each iew would be to the idea of llms doing philosophy for us –perhaps part of this could be the consideration that llms produce what real philosophewrs generally judge to be as good or better than professional human philosophers who are experts in the respective fields. for each, make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer. Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. Assistant: I'll start by searching your vault for that list of approaches to the purpose of philosophy.The "Metaphilosophy Landscape" note looks very promising. Let me read that, and also check the paper introduction and the daily note that seems relevant.Excellent — I found your [[Notes/Metaphilosophy Landscape.md]] note. That's exactly the list. Now I have the ten positions plus Williamson's abductive methodology and Bengson et al.'s framework. Let me also quickly check the paper introduction to see if there's additional framing relevant to the LLM question, and then I'll think deeply.Now I have the full picture. I have your ten metaphilosophical positions from [[Notes/Metaphilosophy Landscape.md]], Williamson's abductive methodology, Bengson et al.'s framework, and the framing from your paper introduction. Let me now contemplate this deeply. Alright, let me think carefully about this. Nick wants me to take the ten metaphilosophical positions from his Metaphilosophy Landscape note and evaluate how amenable proponents of each view would be to LLMs doing philosophy. He also wants me to factor in the empirical consideration that LLMs produce outputs that professional philosophers judge to be as good as or better than work by expert human philosophers. This is exploratory — he wants lots of ideas, lots of options, thorough analysis. Let me work through each position systematically, but first let me think about what the question really asks. The question is: given that each position has a certain conception of what philosophy *is*, what it's *for*, and how it *works* — how would adherents of that view respond to the claim that LLMs can do philosophy for us? There's an important ambiguity here I should flag. "Do philosophy for us" could mean: (a) LLMs produce philosophical outputs that we consume (b) LLMs replace human philosophical activity entirely (c) LLMs serve as tools that enhance human philosophical activity These are quite different claims, and different metaphilosophical positions might react differently depending on which is at issue. Let me keep all three in play. Also, the empirical consideration — that LLMs produce work judged as good or better than human experts — is doing interesting work here. For some views, this would be decisive. For others, it would be essentially irrelevant. Let me think about why. **Position 1: Philosophy as Literally Part of Science (Quine)** Hmm, let me think about this. If philosophy is continuous with science, and the relevant question is whether the outputs contribute to our theoretical understanding of the world... then the origin of those outputs shouldn't matter in principle, right? Science doesn't care who discovers a truth. If Einstein's equations had been produced by a machine, they'd still be true. But wait — there's a subtlety. Quine's web of belief is holistic. The system of beliefs is revised collectively in response to experience. Does the system need to be *someone's* system? Quine talks about *our* web of belief. There's a communal epistemological dimension. An LLM doesn't have experiences that recalcitrant observations could force to revise its beliefs. It's trained on text, not on the world. But then again, Quine's own epistemology is quite permissive about what counts as "observation." And if LLMs produce theories that humans then evaluate against their experience... the human remains the epistemic agent, the LLM is just a hypothesis generator. Would Quine object to that? I don't think he would. He'd probably say: use whatever tools help you build better theories. If the LLM generates a philosophical theory that better fits our total evidence, so much the better. Now the empirical consideration: if expert judges rate LLM philosophy as high quality, a Quinean should take this seriously. Quality of philosophical output is assessed by the same standards as scientific output — explanatory power, coherence, simplicity, fit with evidence. If LLMs can score highly on these dimensions, a Quinean should welcome them. But here's a complication. Quine's epistemology is *naturalized* — "contained in natural science as a chapter of psychology." So epistemology studies how humans actually form beliefs from sensory input. Could an LLM do this kind of psychology? It could study it, describe it, theorize about it — but it doesn't *do* it itself. Is that a problem? I'm not sure. Scientists study phenomena they don't instantiate all the time. Amenability rating: quite high, I'd say. Among the highest. The Quinean framework is fundamentally product-focused: what matters is the quality of the theory, not who (or what) produced it. The main reservation would be about whether LLMs can engage with experience in the way Quine's empiricism requires, but this seems like a constraint on LLMs doing *empirical* philosophy specifically (studying perception, cognition), not philosophy in general. Wait, actually I should push harder on this. Quine's view makes philosophy *answerable to experience*. All beliefs, including philosophical ones, face the tribunal of experience. An LLM doesn't have experiences. So how could an LLM revise its philosophical positions in light of recalcitrant experience? It can't. It's pattern-matching on existing human philosophical text. But... hmm, is that different from what human philosophers do most of the time? Most analytic philosophers don't do experiments. They sit in armchairs and think. They're working with conceptual relations, thought experiments, existing theory. In that sense, they're also working at a remove from raw experience. The LLM is working at a *further* remove, but it's a difference of degree, not kind, on a Quinean picture. OK, I think the Quinean verdict is: amenable, with some reservations about the epistemological foundations but not about the practical outputs. **Position 2: Experimental Philosophy** This is interesting. X-phi says philosophy should use empirical methods — surveys, experiments, neuroscience. The key claim is that philosophical intuitions are empirical data about what people believe, and that these intuitions vary across populations. Can LLMs do experimental philosophy? Well, they can certainly design surveys, analyze data, run statistical tests. In principle, an LLM could propose an experimental design to test whether people's intuitions about free will vary by culture. But it can't *run* the experiment. It can't gather the data. It processes text, not experimental results (unless those results are fed to it as text). But wait — there's something deeper here. X-phi's key insight is that armchair intuitions are unreliable because they're parochial — they reflect the philosopher's own cultural background, gender, socioeconomic status. An LLM's "intuitions" (to the extent it has any) are trained on a vast corpus of text from diverse sources. In one sense, an LLM is *less* parochial than any individual philosopher — it's been exposed to a wider range of perspectives. In another sense, it's systematically biased by whatever's overrepresented in its training data. The empirical consideration — that LLM outputs are judged as good by expert philosophers — would be significant here, but with a caveat. X-phi proponents might say: expert philosophers are exactly the people whose judgments we should be skeptical of! The whole point of x-phi is that expert philosophical intuitions are just as culturally shaped as anyone else's. So the fact that professional philosophers rate LLM work highly might not carry much weight with an x-phi proponent. Actually, hmm, that's too quick. X-phi's skepticism is about *intuitions*, not about *all* philosophical judgment. Evaluating the quality of an argument is different from having an intuition about whether a Gettier case is knowledge. X-phi proponents can still think that logical rigor, conceptual clarity, and argument quality are assessable by experts. Amenability: moderate. X-phi proponents would welcome LLMs as tools for processing empirical data and generating hypotheses, but would insist that the empirical work — the actual running of experiments, gathering of human responses — can't be offloaded to LLMs. They'd also be skeptical of LLMs "having" philosophical intuitions, since the whole point is that intuitions are empirical facts about particular populations, and LLMs aren't a population in the relevant sense. Actually, there's a fun wrinkle here. Some x-phi researchers have actually used LLMs as proxies for human populations — running thought experiments on GPT to see how it responds, as a cheap alternative to surveying humans. This is controversial, but it shows that some x-phi proponents are quite amenable to LLMs playing a role, even if an unconventional one. **Position 3: Philosophy as Immature Science** This view says philosophy hasn't yet found its mature methods but will. Each generation claims the breakthrough has arrived. If philosophy is immature science, then LLMs are in an odd position. They're trained on the immature phase. Can they help philosophy mature? Maybe. If the issue is that philosophy lacks clear methods, and LLMs are very good at applying methods once they're specified, then LLMs could help *once* philosophy matures. But they can't help with the maturation itself, because that requires the kind of methodological innovation that LLMs (being trained on existing practice) can't provide. Or can they? Hmm. LLMs might stumble onto productive methodological approaches by recombining existing methods in novel ways. Pattern recognition across the history of successful scientific maturation might suggest analogous moves for philosophy. But this is speculative. The empirical consideration is interesting here. If LLM outputs are judged as good or better than human experts, a proponent of the "immature science" view might say: that just shows that current philosophical standards are low (because the field hasn't matured). The LLM is producing immature science, which is on par with what humans produce, but neither is making real progress. Actually, this is a really telling response. It shows how the "immature science" view could undercut the force of the empirical evidence. If philosophy is doing it wrong, then being as good as current practitioners is no achievement. Amenability: moderate-to-low, depending on whether one thinks LLMs could contribute to the maturation process itself or merely replicate existing (inadequate) practice. **Position 4: McGinn's Cognitive Closure** Oh, this one is fascinating in the context of LLMs. McGinn says philosophical problems are real empirical problems about the natural world, but humans are cognitively incapable of solving them. Our cognitive equipment doesn't have the right shape, just as we can't fly without machines. The obvious question: could LLMs be to philosophical cognition what airplanes are to flight? Could they provide the cognitive equipment we lack? McGinn might actually be surprisingly amenable here! His view is that the *problems* are tractable in principle — there are answers — we just can't access them. If LLMs have different cognitive architecture, they might be able to access solutions that are closed to us. The analogy with flight is apt: we couldn't fly with our bodies, but we built machines that can. But wait. McGinn's argument is specifically about human cognitive architecture — the structure of our minds. LLMs are trained on human text. They learn from the outputs of human minds. If the problem is that human minds can't represent the solutions, then human texts won't contain the solutions, and LLMs trained on those texts won't find them either. The LLM is limited by the same closure, one step removed. Unless... unless LLMs can find patterns in the gaps, the failures, the recurring dead ends of human philosophy. Perhaps by analyzing the *structure* of our failures, an LLM could infer something about the shape of the solution, even if no individual human text contains it. This is speculative, but it's conceptually possible. The empirical consideration — LLM outputs rated as good philosophy — would have a specific interpretation on McGinn's view. It would mean: LLMs can replicate the level of philosophical achievement that humans are capable of, which on McGinn's view is already quite limited. Being as good as humans at philosophy is, for McGinn, being as good as humans at running — i.e., competent but unable to break the fundamental barrier. But if LLM outputs were ever rated as *genuinely solving* a philosophical problem that has resisted human solution... McGinn would have to sit up and take notice. That would suggest the closure thesis was wrong, or that LLMs aren't subject to it. Amenability: potentially very high, paradoxically. McGinn's view *most* needs something non-human to make progress. But the mechanism is unclear: how would LLMs trained on human text transcend human cognitive limitations? Actually, let me think about this more carefully. McGinn's cognitive closure is specifically about the *relationship* between our cognitive capacities and the nature of certain problems (paradigmatically, consciousness). The idea is that our minds are "closed" with respect to the relevant concepts — we can't form them. LLMs don't form concepts at all (arguably). They manipulate tokens. So the question is whether token manipulation can access solutions that concept-formation can't. That's a deep question about the relationship between syntax and semantics that has no easy answer. **Position 5: Philosophy as "Midwife" and "Residue" of the Sciences** On this view, philosophy is the residue left over when questions become scientifically tractable. When philosophy makes progress, the area gets claimed by a new science. Philosophy is what remains unsolvable. For LLMs, this view has an interesting implication. If LLMs could solve a philosophical problem, that very success would reclassify the problem as non-philosophical. So by definition, LLMs can't do philosophy — because anything they successfully do gets reclassified as "science" (or at least as not-philosophy). Wait, that's too cute. The residue view doesn't say nothing can solve these problems — it says that when they're solved, they're no longer called philosophy. So LLMs could "do philosophy" in the sense of tackling currently unsolved questions, but their successes would change the status of those questions. The empirical consideration: if LLM outputs are rated as good by philosophical experts, a residue theorist would say: those outputs are good at addressing the residue — the fundamentally resistant questions — but they won't actually *resolve* them (because if they could be resolved, they'd already have become science). The LLMs are treading water with the rest of us. Amenability: moderate. The view doesn't object to LLMs *trying*, but predicts they'll fail at the specifically philosophical part, while possibly succeeding at aspects that will then be reclassified. Hmm, but there's something else. The midwife role — philosophy as generating new sciences — is interesting. Could LLMs help midwife new sciences by identifying when a cluster of philosophical questions has become tractable? That's a kind of meta-scientific judgment that LLMs might be uniquely positioned to make, given their broad training across disciplines. They might spot when a philosophical question has accumulated enough relevant empirical tools to become a science. This would be a distinctively valuable contribution. **Position 6: Philosophy as Logic of Science (Logical Positivism)** On this view, philosophy isn't a body of propositions but an *activity* — finding meaning, clarifying concepts, analyzing the logic of scientific theories. "Philosophy is the logic of science" (Carnap). Can LLMs perform this activity? They can certainly analyze logical structure, identify ambiguities, clarify concepts. They're quite good at this, actually. The positivist conception of philosophy is surprisingly amenable to LLMs, because the task is essentially linguistic and logical — exactly what LLMs are trained for. But the positivists also made a strong claim about *nonsense*: traditional metaphysics is literally meaningless. The positivist philosopher's job is partly critical — detecting when a question is a pseudo-question. Can LLMs detect pseudo-questions? They can certainly identify questions that lack empirical content or clear verification conditions. Whether this constitutes *detecting nonsense* in the positivist sense is less clear. The empirical consideration: if LLM outputs are judged as good by experts, a logical positivist would ask: good at *what*? Good at clarifying concepts? Good at analyzing logical structure? Or good at producing exactly the kind of metaphysical speculation that positivists want to eliminate? The content of the expert judgment matters enormously here. Amenability: moderate-to-high, specifically for the clarificatory/analytical aspects of philosophy. But the positivist would insist that philosophy isn't about producing *theories* — it's about analyzing *other people's* theories. If LLMs are being evaluated for philosophical *output* (arguments, positions), that already presupposes a non-positivist conception of what philosophy does. **Position 7: Philosophy as Contribution to Understanding (Wittgenstein/Hacker)** This is the view Nick's paper is most engaged with, through Dellsén's framework. Philosophy makes no contribution to knowledge but contributes to understanding — it makes explicit what is already implicitly known. The Castilian grammar analogy is key. Fluent speakers already knew their grammar implicitly. The grammar book makes it explicit. Could an LLM write the grammar book? Hmm, actually, yes! In fact, LLMs are arguably *trained* on implicit linguistic knowledge and can make patterns explicit. This is basically what a language model does — extract patterns from a corpus of implicit practice. But wait. Wittgensteinian philosophy isn't just about language — it's about *forms of life*. Understanding a philosophical concept isn't just knowing a rule; it's grasping how the concept functions in human practices, activities, lived experience. The Castilian grammar analogy suggests that what's being made explicit is *human* implicit knowledge. Can an LLM grasp human implicit knowledge? There's a strong case that it can, at least partially. LLMs are trained on an enormous corpus of human expression — which is itself an expression of implicit human knowledge and practice. The patterns the LLM extracts from this corpus may correspond (at least approximately) to the implicit structures of human understanding. But a Wittgensteinian would object: understanding is not pattern extraction. Understanding is bound up with *use*, with knowing how to go on, with participating in a form of life. A grammar book extracted by statistical methods from a corpus would be useful but would miss the *point* of the grammar — its role in human communication and life. Similarly, an LLM might produce philosophically structured text that captures *some* of the patterns of philosophical understanding without grasping the *purpose* of that understanding. The empirical consideration is very interesting here. If experts judge LLM philosophical output as good, a Wittgensteinian might ask: does the text help *readers* achieve understanding? Because on this view, philosophical value lies in what the text does for its reader, not in what the producer understood. This actually opens a door for LLMs: even if the LLM doesn't "understand" in the relevant sense, its text might facilitate understanding in human readers. Nick's paper seems to take exactly this line — the question is about the text and what it enables in its reader. Amenability: surprisingly complex. The view has both resources for accepting and rejecting LLM philosophy. On the "text as vehicle for understanding" reading: potentially high amenability. On the "philosophy requires participation in forms of life" reading: low amenability. Actually, I should note that there's a therapeutic strand of Wittgenstein that I haven't addressed yet. The "therapeutic" reading of Wittgenstein says philosophy's purpose is to dissolve confusions — to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. Could an LLM perform philosophical therapy? This requires not just producing correct analysis but *diagnosing* the specific confusions of a specific interlocutor. LLMs in conversational mode can do something like this — they can identify where someone is going wrong and offer clarification. But genuine philosophical therapy, on the therapeutic reading, requires a deep understanding of the particular person's conceptual tangles. This is more demanding. **Position 8: Philosophy as Transcendental Inquiry (Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty)** This is the position most hostile to LLMs doing philosophy, and for good reason. Transcendental inquiry investigates the conditions of possibility of experience. You need to *have* experience to investigate its conditions. Kant's transcendental deduction asks: what must be the case for experience to be possible? This requires access to what experience is like. Husserl's phenomenology requires "bracketing" the natural attitude and attending to the structures of consciousness. Heidegger's fundamental ontology explores what it is to *be* — and specifically what it is to be the kind of being (Dasein) that has its being as an issue for it. Merleau-Ponty investigates the lived body and its pre-reflective engagement with the world. None of this seems possible for an LLM. An LLM has no experience to bracket, no body to live through, no being to take issue with. It can produce text *about* phenomenological descriptions, but it can't perform phenomenological description itself. But let me push back on this. A transcendental philosopher might distinguish between *performing* transcendental inquiry and *reporting* its results. Even if an LLM can't perform phenomenological reduction, it has been trained on the texts of philosophers who did. Could it recombine and extend those descriptions in productive ways? Here's an analogy: a sighted person's description of color experience, recorded in text, could be read and analyzed by a blind philosopher. The blind philosopher couldn't verify the descriptions against their own experience, but they could analyze the logical structure of color concepts, identify inconsistencies in different accounts, and even propose theoretical frameworks. Would this count as doing philosophy of perception? Many would say yes, even if it's limited. Similarly, an LLM trained on phenomenological texts could identify structural patterns across different phenomenologists' descriptions, propose new theoretical frameworks, and flag internal inconsistencies. It's doing philosophy *about* experience using textual traces of experience, rather than doing phenomenology *from* experience. The empirical consideration: if experts rate LLM transcendental philosophy as good, a transcendental philosopher faces a dilemma. Either (a) the LLM is producing genuinely illuminating transcendental philosophy without having experience — which challenges the view that experience is necessary for transcendental inquiry — or (b) the experts are being fooled by outputs that look like transcendental philosophy but aren't. Option (b) is the more likely response, but it's an uncomfortable position — it suggests that experts can't tell the difference between genuine and fake phenomenology, which undermines the expertise itself. Amenability: low, potentially the lowest of all positions. But with the caveat that LLMs might play a useful auxiliary role — organizing, analyzing, cross-referencing phenomenological descriptions produced by humans. Actually, wait. I should think more carefully about what "conditions of possibility" means. There's a reading of transcendental philosophy that's more abstract — more Kantian than Husserlian. Kant is asking about the logical structure of experience: what categories must apply for experience to be possible? This is more like a priori reasoning about formal structure than introspective description of what experience is like. An LLM might be able to do *Kantian* transcendental philosophy (formal, structural) better than *Husserlian* transcendental philosophy (descriptive, experiential). This is an important distinction. **Position 9: Philosophy as World Views (Dilthey, Existentialism)** Philosophy provides Weltanschauung — captures what it is to live a human life. Accepting a world view isn't just accepting propositions; it's *feeling one way rather than another about reality*. This view is skeptical about LLMs for a reason different from the transcendental view. The transcendental view requires *experience*; the world view requires *commitment*, *stakes*, *feeling*. An existentialist philosophy is authentic only if it's lived. Sartre's radical freedom isn't just a theory — it's a way of being. Can an LLM live by its own philosophy? Obviously not, in the straightforward sense. An LLM doesn't live at all. It doesn't face death, doesn't experience anxiety, doesn't confront the absurd. Its "philosophy" is words without existential weight. But here's the nuance. Even within existentialism, there's a distinction between the philosophy and the philosopher. *Being and Nothingness* is a text. It's assessed as a philosophical work partly by its internal coherence, argumentative structure, and illuminating power — properties of the text. The existential authenticity of its author is relevant to some evaluative frameworks but not others. If we focus on the text: could an LLM produce a text that, when read by a human, helps that human confront their freedom, their mortality, their situation? This is essentially the question of whether philosophical literature can be produced by non-humans. And the answer seems to be: in principle, maybe. If the text is powerful enough, its origin doesn't affect its capacity to provoke existential reflection. The empirical consideration: if experts rate LLM existential philosophy as good, the world-view proponent might say this shows something interesting — that philosophical *texts* can be separated from philosophical *lives*. The text can do its work on the reader regardless of whether its author lived by it. This would actually be a significant philosophical insight, potentially undermining the existentialist equation of philosophy with authentic living. Alternatively, the world-view proponent might say: the experts are evaluating the wrong thing. They're evaluating argumentative quality when they should be evaluating existential depth. An LLM can produce logically sound arguments about freedom, but it can't produce the kind of writing that makes you feel the weight of freedom. This would be a claim about what the expert evaluations are actually measuring. Amenability: low for the strong existentialist position ("philosophy is a way of living"), moderate for the weaker Dilthean position ("philosophy integrates how the world is with how we should act"). The weaker position might accept that LLMs can do the integrative intellectual work even if they can't live by the result. **Position 10: Philosophy as "Edifying Conversation" (Rorty)** On Rorty's view, philosophy is a cultural genre, a voice in the conversation of mankind. Its point is to keep the conversation going, not to find objective truth. This is paradoxically both the most and least amenable position. Most amenable because: LLMs are superb conversationalists. They can participate in dialogues, introduce new perspectives, challenge assumptions, keep conversations going indefinitely. If philosophy is conversation, LLMs are natural philosophers. Least amenable because: Rorty's point is that philosophy is *edifying* — it helps humans grow, expand their horizons, see things differently. Can an LLM edify? Edification requires knowing *who you're talking to* and what they need to hear. It's inherently interpersonal and contextual. An LLM can have a conversation, but can it have an *edifying* one? Actually, yes, arguably it can. LLMs in conversational mode adapt to their interlocutor, introduce new perspectives, challenge assumptions. Many users report that conversations with LLMs are genuinely edifying — they come away thinking about things differently. Whether Rorty would count this is another question. Rorty might say that genuine edification requires the *vulnerability* of real conversation — the risk that your interlocutor might actually change your mind because they have genuine convictions. An LLM's "convictions" are simulated. But does that matter if the edifying effect on the human is the same? The empirical consideration: if LLM philosophical output is judged as good, a Rortyan would say: that depends on whether "good" means "interesting enough to keep the conversation going." If yes, great — LLMs are contributing to the conversation of mankind. If "good" means "closer to objective truth," then the Rortyan rejects the standard itself. There's also a Rortyan concern about *hegemony*. Rorty wanted to prevent any single vocabulary from dominating. If LLMs, trained on the dominant philosophical corpus, reproduce and reinforce existing philosophical vocabularies, they might actually *stifle* the kind of creative vocabularymaking that Rorty valued. The conversation stays going, but within increasingly narrow tracks. Amenability: high for the "keep conversation going" aspect, uncertain for the "edification" aspect, potentially hostile if LLMs are seen as reinforcing existing vocabularies rather than creating new ones. **Williamson's Abductive Methodology** This isn't on the original spectrum but it's in Nick's note and it's crucially relevant — Nick's paper draws heavily on this. Williamson says philosophy should use abduction — inference to the best explanation — assessed by theoretical virtues: simplicity, unification, strength, fit with background theory, fruitfulness. Philosophy is like mathematics — armchair, rigorous, capable of objective truth, but not empirical. This view is *very* amenable to LLMs doing philosophy. Here's why: theoretical virtues are properties of *theories* (outputs), not of *theorizers* (producers). A simple, unified, fruitful theory is a good theory regardless of who produced it. If an LLM produces a theory that is simpler, more unified, more fruitful than competing human-produced theories, it is a better theory. Full stop. The model-building aspect is also relevant. LLMs could potentially generate and evaluate many models simultaneously, testing different simplifying assumptions and seeing which models illuminate which aspects of a phenomenon. This is computationally intensive work that LLMs might do faster and more systematically than humans. The empirical consideration is maximally relevant here. If expert philosophers judge LLM outputs as exhibiting theoretical virtues, Williamson's framework says: those outputs are good philosophy. The judgment is about the right thing (the output's properties) and by the right people (philosophical experts who can assess theoretical virtues). Amenability: very high. Perhaps the highest of any position. Williamson's framework is explicitly product-focused in a way that makes the identity of the producer irrelevant. But let me push back. Williamson also emphasizes philosophical *knowledge* — he thinks philosophy discovers truths. An LLM doesn't "know" anything (arguably). Can a system that doesn't know produce knowledge? The answer seems to be yes, in the same way that a telescope doesn't "see" but produces observations, or a calculator doesn't "know mathematics" but produces correct calculations. The LLM is an instrument for producing philosophical outputs that humans then assess and integrate into their knowledge. Williamson might also worry about *understanding*. He values philosophical theories that illuminate, that cast light on underlying reality. Does an LLM's theory "illuminate"? Or does it merely have the surface properties of an illuminating theory? This is the deep question. I think Williamson's own framework pushes toward: if it has the properties, it's illuminating. Illumination is a property of the theory's relationship to the phenomenon, not of the theorist's psychological state. **Bengson et al.'s Framework** The two-stage model (data collection → theorizing) raises interesting questions. Can LLMs do both stages? Data collection: philosophical data have default status (presumptively correct), are revisable, and are non-theoretical. For much philosophy, the "data" are intuitions about cases, ordinary language usage, conceptual truisms. LLMs have been trained on vast amounts of human intuitive judgment and ordinary language usage. In a sense, they're repositories of philosophical data. Can they access and deploy this data appropriately? Theorizing: the goal is theoretical understanding that is accurate, reason-based, robust, illuminating, orderly, and coherent. These are all properties of the theory, assessable from the outside. An LLM could potentially produce theories that score well on all six dimensions. The tri-level method (first-order, methodological, meta-methodological) is also interesting. LLMs can operate at all three levels — they can address substantive philosophical questions, reflect on methods for doing so, and even discuss the meta-methodology. The self-reflexive nature of philosophy doesn't seem to be an obstacle for LLMs. Amenability: high, for similar reasons as Williamson. --- OK, now let me step back and think about some cross-cutting considerations that affect multiple positions. **The "As Good As Experts" Consideration** Nick flagged this as important: LLMs produce outputs that expert philosophers judge to be as good as or better than work by professional human philosophers. Let me think about how this interacts with each view. For product-focused views (Quine, Williamson, Bengson), this is strong evidence that LLMs can do philosophy. The quality of the output is the relevant metric, and the output passes the test. For process-focused views (transcendental, existentialist), this evidence is less compelling. The output might look good but lack something essential — the experiential basis, the existential commitment — that makes it genuine philosophy. The expert judges might be assessing the wrong thing, or might not be able to detect the absence of whatever's missing. For activity-focused views (Wittgensteinian therapy, Rortyan conversation), the evidence is partially relevant. The text might be good qua text, but the philosophical work isn't in the text — it's in what the text does in an interpersonal context. The expert evaluation is of a static artifact when the real philosophical value is dynamic and relational. For skeptical views (McGinn, immature science), the evidence shows only that LLMs can match our current (limited or wrong) level of philosophical achievement, which isn't saying much. **The "For Us" Consideration** There's a distinction between "LLMs doing philosophy" and "LLMs doing philosophy *for us*." The "for us" clause suggests we're still in the picture — we're the beneficiaries, the audience, the evaluators. This is compatible with views that emphasize the reader's understanding (Wittgenstein, Dellsén) but in tension with views that emphasize the producer's experience (transcendental, existentialist). Actually, the "for us" framing might make many positions more amenable. Even a transcendental philosopher might accept that LLMs can produce texts that help *us* do transcendental philosophy, even if the LLM isn't doing transcendental philosophy itself. The LLM is a tool — like a library, a database, a very smart research assistant — that enhances *our* philosophical activity. This is Nick's line in the paper: the question isn't whether LLMs reason, but whether they produce texts that put readers in a position to understand better. **Novel Considerations I Want to Add** 1. **The Division of Philosophical Labor**: Even on views hostile to LLMs doing philosophy *per se*, LLMs might be able to do *parts* of philosophy. Philosophy involves many sub-tasks: literature review, objection generation, counterexample construction, formalization, checking validity, surveying positions, etc. Different metaphilosophical views might accept LLMs doing different sub-tasks while reserving the "core" philosophical activity for humans. What counts as "core" varies by view. 2. **The Training Corpus Problem**: LLMs are trained on existing philosophical text. This means they can, at best, recombine existing philosophical ideas. Can recombination produce genuine novelty? This is a general question about creativity, but it has a specific philosophical dimension. If philosophy requires genuinely new *concepts* (not just new combinations of existing ones), LLMs might be limited. But if philosophical progress consists in finding new connections, developing new arguments for existing positions, or applying existing frameworks to new cases — all of which involve recombination — then LLMs might be well-positioned. 3. **The Feedback Loop**: Nick's paper mentions that the philosophical corpus is "the record of an evaluative feedback loop." Philosophical standards are implicit in the corpus of philosophical writing. An LLM trained on this corpus has, in effect, internalized those standards. This is a powerful point: the LLM hasn't just learned philosophical *content* — it's learned philosophical *norms*. It knows (in some sense) what a good argument looks like, what counts as a relevant objection, what level of precision is expected. This is relevant to views (like Bengson's) that emphasize methodology. 4. **The Philosophical Turing Test**: The fact that expert judges can't distinguish LLM philosophy from human philosophy (or rate it as better) is itself a philosophically significant datum. For some metaphilosophical views, it would be decisive. For others, it would be a challenge to explain away. How each view handles this datum tells us something about what the view thinks philosophy essentially is. 5. **The Problem of Philosophical *Taste***: Beyond formal quality, philosophy involves something like taste — knowing which questions are interesting, which approaches are promising, which distinctions matter. Williamson talks about "philosophical acumen." Can an LLM have philosophical taste? Given its training on the full corpus, it might have a statistical approximation of collective philosophical taste — but it might lack the individual insight that drives the most important philosophical innovations. 6. **Philosophical Understanding vs. Philosophical Knowledge**: This is a crucial distinction that cuts across several views. If philosophy aims at understanding (Hacker, Dellsén), then the question is whether LLM outputs can produce understanding in readers. If philosophy aims at knowledge (Williamson), the question is whether LLM outputs constitute knowledge. Understanding might be more amenable to text-based transmission (since it's about grasping structures and relations), while knowledge might require more robust epistemic grounding. Let me now think about whether there are any positions that are *maximally* resistant to LLMs doing philosophy... The strongest resistance comes from views that locate philosophical value in the *process* rather than the *product*. If what matters is the philosopher's journey — the struggle, the confusion, the breakthrough — then a text that bypasses all of this, even if it's brilliant, misses the point. This is something like the "exercise" objection: using an LLM to do philosophy is like using a car to do a marathon. The "output" (getting from A to B) is achieved, but the whole point (the physical challenge) is lost. This objection has force for some conceptions of philosophy but not others. For conceptions that emphasize philosophy's public contribution (to knowledge, to science, to the conversation of mankind), the process matters only instrumentally — it matters because it's how you get good products. If LLMs can produce equally good products by a different process, no loss. For conceptions that emphasize philosophy's personal or existential value (self-knowledge, Bildung, therapeutic liberation), the process is constitutive of the value. An LLM-generated philosophical insight that you simply read and accept is not the same as an insight you struggled to achieve. But Nick's question is about "LLMs doing philosophy *for us*" — which suggests the public-contribution model. We want philosophical *results*, and we're asking whether LLMs can deliver them. The personal/existential value of doing philosophy yourself is a separate question. Although... hmm, maybe not entirely separate. If philosophical results are only truly understood by those who have gone through the process of producing them — if philosophical understanding is essentially a knowing-how rather than a knowing-that — then LLMs doing philosophy "for us" is like someone else eating for us. The output (nutrition/knowledge) can't be separated from the activity (digestion/understanding). This is actually a very deep point. Is philosophical understanding propositional (communicable via text) or procedural (requiring personal engagement)? If propositional: LLMs can produce it. If procedural: they can't. Most analytic philosophy treats understanding as propositional — it's communicated via papers. But the Wittgensteinian and existentialist traditions suggest it might be more procedural than we think. Let me also think about one more thing: the *social* dimension. Philosophy is a social practice — it involves dialogue, peer review, seminars, conferences. Some views (Rorty, arguably Wittgenstein) make the social dimension essential. LLMs can participate in dialogues, but can they participate in the *social practice* of philosophy? They can't be held accountable, can't stake their reputation on a claim, can't be embarrassed by a counterexample. The social dimension of philosophy involves stakes that LLMs don't have. This relates to a point about *authorship* and *responsibility*. When a philosopher publishes a claim, they're putting their name on it — taking responsibility for it. An LLM doesn't take responsibility. Its outputs are orphaned in a way that human philosophical outputs aren't. Does this matter philosophically? For some views (especially those that emphasize philosophical commitment and authenticity), yes. For others (especially those that emphasize the quality of the argument), no. OK, I think I've explored this thoroughly enough. Let me organize my thoughts into a final answer, making sure to present my reasoning clearly for each position and to offer lots of options and ideas for Nick to work with. One more thought. I should address the positions not just individually but also think about *clusters* — which positions group together in their amenability, and why. I see roughly three clusters: **Cluster 1: High amenability** — Quine, Williamson, Bengson, (aspects of) logical positivism These are the product-focused, virtue-focused views. They assess philosophy by the [Tool mcp__smart-connections__semantic_search input: query=purpose of philosophy different approaches views, limit=15 status=completed] [Tool Grep input: pattern=purpose of philosophy, output_mode=files_with_matches status=completed] [Tool Read input: file_path=/Users/nickyoung/My Obsidian Vault/Notes/Metaphilosophy Landscape.md status=completed] [Tool Grep input: pattern=approaches to philosophy|conceptions of philosophy|what philosophy is for|aim of philosophy, output_mode=files_with_matches, -i=true status=completed] [Tool Read input: file_path=/Users/nickyoung/My Obsidian Vault/Writing/research/generating philosophy with ai (paper)/0. Introdu... status=completed] User: /contemplate I think you gave me some very good ideas here but I am too tired to take them all in. I would like you instread to make me a note which organises all and everytihng we have been talking about into some sort of non diachronic organisation of texts and headings and subheadings, a real proper document with all of thinformation that will be useful for me to review tomorrow from this ENTIRE converation, not just the stuff you have just been talking about. if you have been compacted already I am going to need you to go to the json files and go over them and extract. this is a big job (also the note should of coursed be tagged appropriately) make sure that you explain your analysis, justification, reasons etc etc. for your answer BEFORE giving me your final answer.Please give me a long, deep, and detailed answer, with lots of options/ideas: as we are in the 'kicking ideas around' stage, I want as much feedback as you can give me so that i have a lot to consider. ### Assistant You've hit your limit · resets 12am (Europe/Rome)