Stuart, Michael T. (2025) A New Account of Pragmatic Understanding, Applied to the Case of AI-Assisted Science. [Preprint]
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Abstract
This paper presents a new account of pragmatic understanding based on the idea that such understanding requires skills rather than abilities. Specifically, one has pragmatic understanding of an affordance space when one has, and is responsible for having, skills that facilitate the achievement of some aims using that affordance space. In science, having skills counts as having pragmatic understanding when the development of those skills is praiseworthy. Skills are different from abilities at least in the sense that they are task-specific, can be learned, and we have some cognitive control over their deployment. This paper considers how the use of AI in science facilitates or frustrates the achievement of this kind of understanding. I argue that we cannot properly ascribe this kind of understanding to any current or near-future algorithm itself. But there are ways that we can use AI algorithms to increase pragmatic understanding, namely, when we take advantage of their abilities to increase our own skills (as individuals or communities). This can happen when AI features in human-performed science as either a tool or a collaborator.
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