Interpretation Without a Subject? The Epistemic Status of AI-Generated Historical Narrative and Hermeneutic Reflections.
Large language models can generate historical texts with causal organization and narrative coherence, yet their generative process involves no understanding subject in the hermeneutic sense. This phenomenon marks the first occasion on which interpretive structure appears in the absence of understand...
| Publicado en: | Global Philosophy Vol. 36; no. 4; pp. 1 - 19 |
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| Autores principales: | , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
Aug2026
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=194698556&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 194698556 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 2948152X NR3H jtl: Global Philosophy issn: 2948152X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Aug2026 vid: 36 iid: 4 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 194698556 10.1007/s10516-026-09790-9 ppf: 1 ppct: 18 formats: tig: atl: Interpretation Without a Subject? The Epistemic Status of AI-Generated Historical Narrative and Hermeneutic Reflections. aug: au: Chen, Xuejing Fadzil, Kamal Solhaimi affil: https://ror.org/03y3e3s17 School for Marxism Studies, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, China https://ror.org/00rzspn62 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia su: Hermeneutics Theory of knowledge Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900-2002 Ricœur, Paul, 1913-2005 sug: subj: Hermeneutics Theory of knowledge Gadamer, Hans Georg, 1900-2002 Ricœur, Paul, 1913-2005 keyword: AI-generated historical narrative Artificial intelligence Distributed interpretation Epistemic status Understanding proper ab: Large language models can generate historical texts with causal organization and narrative coherence, yet their generative process involves no understanding subject in the hermeneutic sense. This phenomenon marks the first occasion on which interpretive structure appears in the absence of understanding proper, raising the question of what epistemic status should be assigned to historical narratives that were once taken to require understanding for their production. The paper further asks what this question reveals about the conditions of historical understanding itself. Drawing on Dilthey, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, the paper distinguishes between understanding proper, referring to the subjective conditions of a historical horizon, belonging to tradition, and epistemic responsibility, and interpretive structure, referring to the structural organization exhibited by output texts, including temporal synthesis, causal connection, and the narrative organization of historical agents' reasons. On this basis, the paper introduces the concept of Distributed Interpretation to analyze how AI-generated historical narratives acquire interpretive structure through a data layer, a model layer, and a human layer, and to show how the epistemic accountability that was originally unified within a subject becomes dispersed in this process. The paper then advances a weak epistemological position, arguing that such outputs constitute constrained interpretive outputs, an epistemic category between instruments and historical knowledge, which can participate in knowledge production only through the critical intervention of historians. Finally, the paper argues that the CIO case re-illuminates the irreducible functions of subjectivity, historicity, and dialogicality in historical understanding: the core of historical interpretation lies not only in generating narrative structure, but in bringing interpretive results into an epistemic commitment that can be examined, revised, and held responsible. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2026 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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