Guilherme Almeida

The more we rely on digital assistants, online search engines, and AI systems to revise our system of beliefs and increase our body of knowledge, the less we are able to resort to some independent criterion, unrelated to further digital tools, in order to asses the epistemic reliability of the outputs delivered by them. This raises some important questions to epistemology in general and pressing questions to applied to epistemology in particular. In this paper, we propose an experimental method for the assessment of GPT-3’s capacity to generate consistent and coherent sets of outputs. When several outputs to one and the same input are very repetitive they tend to be consistent with each other, that is they do not contradict each other. But consistency does not make the set of outputs as a whole more informative than the outputs considered individually. We argue that the less informative a set of outputs is, the less coherent it is. We establish a conceptual distinction between consistency and coherence in the light of what some epistemologists refer to as a coherence theories of truth and justification. While much attention has been given to GPT-3’s capacity to produce internally coherent individual outputs, we argue, instead, that more attention should be given to its capacity to produce consistent and coherent outputs generated on a single-input-multiple-outputs basis.

Disagreement on law’s relationship to morality has long been driven by disagreement about our ordinary concept. Until recently, however, there had been no systematic investigation of lay intuitions. In this paper, we advance this nascent effort. Across two studies (N = 697), our findings reveal that most people consider law to be more than a matter of political circumstance alone. Contrary to the expectations of most contemporary philosophers, morality (both substantive and procedural) emerges as a key influence on judgments of legal validity: many people say that conduct prohibited by immoral statutes is not truly illegal, and that immoral conduct which was never explicitly prohibited is truly illegal. This suggests that people often treat law as a dual character concept that, like the concepts of scientist or of artist, features autonomous concrete and abstract dimensions.

In discussing whether legal systems are necessarily coercive, legal philosophers usually appeal to thought experiments involving angels or other morally driven beings who need no coercion to organise their social lives. Such appeals have invited criticism. Critics have not only challenged the relevance of such thought experiments to our understanding of legal systems; they have also argued that, contrary to the intuitions of most legal philosophers, the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’ would not hold that there is law in a society of angels because the view that law is necessarily coercive ‘enjoys widespread support among laypersons’. This is obviously an empirical claim. Critics, however, never systematically polled the ‘man on the Clapham Omnibus’. We boarded that bus. This article discusses findings from five empirical studies on the relationship between law and coercion.