Computational Social Philosophy Seminars (CSPS) is a regular international online seminar series, focusing on research that uses or engages with the use of computational tools to address questions in social philosophy.
All seminars are on Mondays at 8:30am PT / 11:30am ET / 4:30pm London / 5:30pm Berlin.
Date: October 19, 2026
Speaker: Elias Brockman [Joint work with Ted Rubin]
Title: Generative AI, Interpretive Provenance, and the Modeling of Philosophical Systems
Abstract: Can AI-assisted formal modeling produce genuinely philosophical discoveries? Accounts divide between reliabilism, which permits reliance on opaque but reliable processes, and skepticism, which denies that systems without truth-oriented agency can participate in discovery. We argue that these positions conflate hypothesis generation, interpretive justification, and epistemic agency. Using fragmentary evidence from early Greek philosophy, we show how generative AI can expand the space of candidate reconstructions without determining which are historically or philosophically adequate. Researchers evaluate proposals through textual evidence, source criticism, competing interpretations, and judgments about contested standards. Formal modeling then tests consequences of reconstructions, revealing implications, equivalences, unsupported assumptions, and missing distinctions obscured in prose. These results redirect inquiry toward the evidence, creating a recursive process of interpretation, implementation, diagnosis, and revision. We call the record of this process "interpretive provenance": documentation connecting evidential assessments, AI proposals, human judgments, formal rules, consequences, rejected alternatives, and conditions for reconsideration. Interpretive provenance does not itself justify a reconstruction; it makes its generation and justification available for criticism, comparison, reproduction, and revision. AI-assisted philosophical discovery is therefore neither machine knowledge nor reliably generated output, but accountable inquiry in which computational systems help researchers discover novel, defensible possibilities they might otherwise have overlooked.
For a complete list of past and upcoming seminar presentations see the Talks page.
The seminars are held on Zoom and last 60 minutes. Our seminars will typically have one of the following formats
Format 1: 30 min presentation + 30 min discussion
Format 2: two flash talks, 15 min presentation + 15 min discussion each
Sina Fazelpour (Northeastern), Sahar Heydari Fard (Ohio State University), Hannah Rubin (University of Missouri), Dunja Šešelja (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Rory Smead (Northeastern), Jingyi Wu (London School of Economics)
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