Aleks Knoks

How not to argue against AI thought

Inquiry July 15, 2026 Aleks Knoks, Johan Largo, Thomas Raleigh

This paper identifies and criticizes a common line of argument for the negative conclusion that Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot think, or for the closely related conclusions that they cannot understand or that their outputs are meaningless. This line of argument can be found in several recent papers. We begin by discussing a representative example – Stoljar, D., and Z. Zhang. 2026. “Why...