The Counterexample Game: Iterated Conceptual Analysis and Repair in Language Models
Conceptual analysis -- proposing definitions and refining them through counterexamples -- is central to philosophical methodology. We study whether language models can perform this task through iterated analysis and repair chains: one model instance generates counterexamples to a proposed definition, another repairs the definition, and the process repeats. Across 20 concepts and thousands of counterexample-repair cycles, we find that, although many LM-generated counterexamples are judged invalid by both expert humans and an LM judge, the LM judge accepts roughly twice as many as humans do. Nonetheless, per-item validity judgments are moderately consistent across humans and between humans ...
| Authors | Daniel Drucker, Kyle Mahowald |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 May 2026 |
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