Origins and theoretical framework

This project grew out of my longstanding interest in epistemology and misinformation, which produced the book Le Fake News e il Marketing del Vero (2018). The central hypothesis is that language models generate outputs lacking metacognition — a condition Loru et al. (2025, PNAS) and Quattrociocchi et al. (2025) call epistemia — and that structured external intervention, which I call post-cognition, is required to reconstruct the ontological commitments implicit in those outputs. The guiding principle is: ontology precedes epistemology. The type of claim must be established before any truth evaluation.

The taxonomy

The framework is a seven-dimensional taxonomy (D1–D7). The primary dimension D1 classifies the content type of the claim into eleven categories (historical, statistical-probabilistic, metaphysical, causal, normative, etc.). Dimensions D2–D7 are attributive. A Pre-Step 0 — drawing on Austin (1962) — verifies the illocutionary act before applying the framework: if the claim is not an assertion, validation is suspended. A final Epistemic Responsibility Check assesses the epistemic responsibility of the source. The taxonomy is at version 2.2; the Coding Manual is at version 2.0.

The corpus and empirical validation

The horizontal corpus contains 31 claims demonstrating taxonomic coverage. The vertical validation produced 180 API runs (6 claims × 30 replications each), yielding the principal quantitative finding: a 74-point gap between Lexical Agreement Rate (ARlex = 4.44%) and Semantic Agreement Rate (ARsem = 78.33%); mean pairwise Jaccard similarity J̄ = 0.340; composite index IC = 0.605. This demonstrates that surface-level lexical variance masks high semantic convergence.

Current state of the paper (v4)

Eight sections drafted (Introduction through Conclusion), a 64-entry bibliography, and six appendices (taxonomy, Coding Manual, system prompts, pre-registration, horizontal corpus, dimensional redundancy matrix, OSF materials). EXP-1 (multi-model control, §6.6) and EXP-2 (uplift experiment, §6.7) remain to be executed, along with the OSF deposit (Appendix G).

Submission target

arXiv (cs.AI / cs.CL) as an immediate preprint; Synthese and Episteme as journal targets at 6–12 months. arXiv endorsement is currently being sought.