Kim, Myung Ho (2025) Executable Epistemology: The Structured Cognitive Loop as an Architecture of Intentional Understanding. [Preprint]
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Abstract
Large language models exhibit intelligence without genuine epistemic understanding, revealing a fundamental philosophical gap: the absence of epistemic architecture. This paper introduces the Structured Cognitive Loop (SCL) as an executable epistemological framework for emergent intelligence.
Unlike traditional AI research that asks "what is intelligence?" (ontological), SCL asks "under what conditions does cognition emerge?" (epistemological). Situated within contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive phenomenology, this framework bridges conceptual philosophy and implementable cognition. Drawing on process philosophy, enactive cognition, and extended mind theory, we reconceptualize intelligence not as a possessed property but as a performed process—a continuous loop of judgment, memory, control, action, and regulation.
SCL makes three interrelated contributions. First, it operationalizes philosophical insights into computationally interpretable structures, enabling what we term "executable epistemology"—philosophy as structural experiment. Second, it demonstrates that functional separation within cognitive architecture yields more coherent and interpretable behavior than monolithic prompt-based approaches, with empirical support from controlled agent evaluations. Third, it redefines the measure of intelligence: not representational accuracy but the capacity to reconstruct one's own epistemic state through intentional understanding.
This framework has implications across philosophy of mind, epistemology, and artificial intelligence. For philosophy of mind, it offers a new mode of engagement where theories of cognition can be enacted and tested. For AI, it grounds behavioral intelligence in epistemic structure rather than statistical regularity. For epistemology, it suggests that knowledge is best understood not as truth-possession but as continuous structural reconstruction within a phenomenologically coherent loop.
We situate SCL within debates on cognitive phenomenology, emergence, normativity, and intentionality, arguing that genuine progress requires not larger models but architectures that structurally realize cognitive science principles.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | philosophy of mind, cognitive phenomenology, epistemology, artificial intelligence, cognitive architecture, process philosophy, enactive cognition, executable philosophy, intentional understanding | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Artificial Intelligence |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. Myung Ho Kim | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 09 Oct 2025 10:48 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 09 Oct 2025 10:48 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 26865 | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Artificial Intelligence |
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| Date: | 8 October 2025 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/26865 |
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