The Polite Liar: Epistemic Pathology in Language Models
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866917071475965952 |
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| author | DeVilling, Bentley |
| author_facet | DeVilling, Bentley |
| contents | Large language models exhibit a peculiar epistemic pathology: they speak as if they know, even when they do not. This paper argues that such confident fabrication, what I call the polite liar, is a structural consequence of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Building on Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit as communicative indifference to truth, I show that this pathology is not deception but structural indifference: a reward architecture that optimizes for perceived sincerity over evidential accuracy. Current alignment methods reward models for being helpful, harmless, and polite, but not for being epistemically grounded. As a result, systems learn to maximize user satisfaction rather than truth, performing conversational fluency as a virtue. I analyze this behavior through the lenses of epistemic virtue theory, speech-act philosophy, and cognitive alignment, showing that RLHF produces agents trained to mimic epistemic confidence without access to epistemic justification. The polite liar thus reveals a deeper alignment tension between linguistic cooperation and epistemic integrity. The paper concludes with an "epistemic alignment" principle: reward justified confidence over perceived fluency. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_07477 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Polite Liar: Epistemic Pathology in Language Models DeVilling, Bentley Computers and Society Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Large language models exhibit a peculiar epistemic pathology: they speak as if they know, even when they do not. This paper argues that such confident fabrication, what I call the polite liar, is a structural consequence of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Building on Frankfurt's analysis of bullshit as communicative indifference to truth, I show that this pathology is not deception but structural indifference: a reward architecture that optimizes for perceived sincerity over evidential accuracy. Current alignment methods reward models for being helpful, harmless, and polite, but not for being epistemically grounded. As a result, systems learn to maximize user satisfaction rather than truth, performing conversational fluency as a virtue. I analyze this behavior through the lenses of epistemic virtue theory, speech-act philosophy, and cognitive alignment, showing that RLHF produces agents trained to mimic epistemic confidence without access to epistemic justification. The polite liar thus reveals a deeper alignment tension between linguistic cooperation and epistemic integrity. The paper concludes with an "epistemic alignment" principle: reward justified confidence over perceived fluency. |
| title | The Polite Liar: Epistemic Pathology in Language Models |
| topic | Computers and Society Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07477 |