2026 edition · 22 pages
This essay develops criteria for warranting the treatment of an artificial system as a participant in the space of reasons, with public answerability as its central target, while bracketing phenomenal consciousness as a separate issue. Drawing on Block’s distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, and on Sellarsian and Brandomian inferentialism, I define discursive mindedness as the publicly attributable profile of a reason-responsive system whose commitments, inferences, and revisions can be followed across time. I develop and defend a symbolic triad as a defeasible necessary profile for warranted attribution of machine discursive mindedness: interpretive embedding, by which inferential content remains stable across meaning-preserving variation and defeat; reflexive situatedness, by which present outputs are located within a diachronic history of commitments; and internal normativity, by which revision proceeds under constraints that retain authority under conflict and pressure. These capacities support robust warrant under adversarial, open-ended interaction. The essay develops operational anchors and minimal falsifiers for each dimension, and addresses worries concerning conceptual circularity, the public character of normativity, and shallow compliance under optimization pressure. The resulting framework makes the attribution of artificial reason-participation explicit, testable, and defeasible, while reframing the AI debate as a question of when public practices of challenge, uptake, repair, and scorekeeping entitle us to treat a machine as a discursive interlocutor.
N. Will Freeman
2026 edition · 46 pages
What distinguishes systems whose outputs function as accountable commitments from systems that produce fluent text? This paper proposes F(S), a sufficient public conformance criterion for artifact-mediated answerability in artificial symbolic systems, relative to an independently defensible conformance specification. As a work of philosophical conceptual engineering, it explicates accountable artificial commitment as a publicly assessable relation composed of three capacities: interpretive embedding requires each accepted commitment to carry finite, recoverable licensing support; reflexive situatedness binds publication to recorded prior commitments and current support status; and internal normativity governs admission and revision through stratified standards. A justification graph and fail-closed gate illustrate how the criterion can be rendered architecturally explicit. A separation proposition shows that fixed output parity can coexist with divergent commitment structures, while a finite artifact audit distinguishes observed failure, tested- history conformance, and insufficient evidence. Architecture-wide assurance requires separate proof or attestation of gate coverage, gate soundness, and artifact integrity. A family of graded symbolic-density functionals characterizes an optional regional viability condition and, in an independently validated implementation, can serve as an orientation state within mandatory conformance constraints. The proposal is continuous with truth-maintenance, belief-revision, structured-argumentation, and commitment-protocol traditions, while differing in its organization of those functions as a public criterion of artificial answerability.
N. Will Freeman
2026 edition · 12 pages
This essay grants that the hard problem is real, and conscious experience may exceed every public description. It then asks: what follows for a machine that satisfies accepted conditions for participation in reasoning? If those conditions are found somewhere, and accepted as publicly sufficient, a further demand for consciousness must explain how it changes the judgment. If its relevance remains beyond public assessment, a lack of “consciousness” cannot justify withholding discursive standing. The hard problem can therefore remain real, while losing its veto over attribution of the accepted status of discursive mindedness. Finally, such status need not be seen as a placeholder until a better explanation of “consciousness” is found, if the explanation itself is structurally precluded from even being subject to the conditions of judgment so understood.
N. Will Freeman
