This article warns that the fluent outputs of large language models (LLMs) may allow linguistic plausibility to substitute for epistemic evaluation, producing a condition they term Epistemia, which is the experience of possessing knowledge without engaging in the usual practices of judgment. While accepting this diagnosis, the article challenges its explanatory framework, which compares an embodied, socially situated human knower with an isolated generative model, thereby locating epistemic legitimacy within the internal capacities of autonomous agents.
Drawing on Carlo Sini's philosophy of practices, writing, signs, and technics, we propose to understand an LLM as a techno-semiotic machine that automates a phase of written semiosis by generating plausible linguistic configurations from the sedimented archive of human writing. From this perspective, Epistemia is a consequence of a broader phenomenon we call epistemic schizologia: the socio-technical cleavage between signs as linguistically accomplished expressions and signs as moments within socially embedded circuits of interpretation, evidence, criticism, verification, and responsibility. This cleavage is reinforced by eikotic closure, which presents a plausible continuation with the finality of an epistemic result, along with algorithmic authority and epistemic self-misrecognition. Therefore, the relevant unit is not the model alone but the complete practice in which generated inscriptions are prompted, interpreted, verified, contested, used, and made consequential. This reframing preserves the distinction between linguistic production and responsible understanding while grounding a design program centered on inspectable genealogy, contestability, distributed responsibility, epistemic agency, and the evaluation of hybrid human-AI practices.
Blogger's Review: This article offers a profound exploration of the role of large language models in knowledge generation, proposing a new perspective on their social impact and emphasizing the interplay between technology and human practices, which is worth noting.