Gilestro, Giorgio F. (2026) The Mimicry Trap How We Define Intelligence to Exclude Inconvenient Minds. [Preprint]
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Abstract
When Thomas Jefferson dismissed the accomplished poetry of Phillis Wheatley—an enslaved African woman—as the work of an “ape of genius” capable only of imitation without genuine creativity, he deployed an argumentative strategy that remains remarkably persistent. Today, when Large Language Models pass professional examinations, solve mathematical olympiad problems, and produce outputs indistinguishable from human work, critics reach for the same move: the performance is “mere mimicry,” sophisticated pattern-matching without real understanding.
This paper identifies and analyses this recurring structure, which I term the mimicry trap—a framework in which the category of genuine intelligence is defined such that certain entities cannot, in principle, qualify, regardless of what they demonstrate. The trap operates through unfalsifiable claims about ontological essence: performance is dismissed as imitation, learning from one’s environment becomes “contamination,” and criteria shift whenever they are met. I trace this pattern from historical denials of intelligence to marginalised humans, through decades of “anthropodenial” in animal cognition research, to contemporary AI scepticism.
Drawing on functionalist philosophy of mind, comparative cognition, and recent empirical work on LLM internal representations, I argue that Occam’s razor cuts against the mimicry hypothesis. If a system exhibits every functional marker of understanding, positing an invisible absence is not rigorous scepticism but ontological extravagance. The paper concludes with a diagnostic checklist for detecting mimicry-trap arguments and proposes evaluative standards that are substrate-neutral, falsifiable, and consistently applied. The scope is restricted to questions of intelligence and cognitive capability; claims about phenomenal consciousness, sentience, and moral status require separate treatment and are explicitly bracketed.
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| Item Type: | Preprint | ||||||
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| Keywords: | artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, functionalism, intelligence attribution, large language models, epistemology, anthropodenial | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Neuroscience > Cognitive Neuroscience Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Artificial Intelligence General Issues > Science and Society General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science |
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| Depositing User: | Dr. Giorgio F Gilestro | ||||||
| Date Deposited: | 04 Feb 2026 13:47 | ||||||
| Last Modified: | 04 Feb 2026 13:47 | ||||||
| Item ID: | 28098 | ||||||
| Subjects: | Specific Sciences > Neuroscience > Cognitive Neuroscience Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Artificial Intelligence General Issues > Science and Society General Issues > Social Epistemology of Science |
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| Date: | 3 February 2026 | ||||||
| URI: | https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/28098 |
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