Francis I. Minimah

NON EPISTEMIC AGENCY AND DEGRADATION IN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS’ EPISTEMIC PRACTICES

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly positioned as knowledge tools, expected to provide reliable answers and act like experts. Yet, their design reveals a tension between epistemic agency (truth-seeking and justification) and non-epistemic agency (outputs shaped by probability, persuasion, or external pressures). At a general level, society assumes that AI systems can uphold the same standards of inquiry and reliability as human experts. However, the underlying reality is that LLMs are built to predict the next most likely word, not …