The Sage on Life Support: From Post-Truth to Bot-Truth

Çetiner M.

IVR 2026, İstanbul, Türkiye, 28 Haziran - 03 Temmuz 2026, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: İstanbul
  • Basıldığı Ülke: Türkiye
  • İstanbul Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This paper traces the trajectory of questions concerning the legitimacy and normativity of law within the academic community through an allegorical narrative of illness. The sage who once commanded great esteem within that community — let us say a figure devoted to asking these questions, one who had placed his faith in the democratic legitimacy of Rousseau's immortal legislator — has over time fallen ill, taken to bed, and ultimately lost the power of speech, left on life support. In the post-truth climate, proposals emerge to fill this silence with artificial intelligence algorithms; the paper argues that what renders such a substitution possible or impossible is not a technical but a normative choice. I. Illness A sage once held in high esteem within the community of legal philosophy fell ill after misreading — with a certain touchiness — Hume's legitimate warning arising from the is-ought problem (1739), transforming it into a prohibition of his own making. Weber's principle of value neutrality (Wertfreiheit) (1904) became the vehicle of this transformation: the normative question lost its claim to scientific legitimacy. The system continued to function in appearance; the sage was still on his feet, but had begun to struggle to speak. Hart's analytical positivism (1961) drew a conceptual boundary between law and morality: the question of what law ought to be fell out of the discipline's language. Courts continued to adjudicate, academics continued to write — but the sage had taken to his bed; questions concerning the source of normativity were being left unanswered. Tuori's theory of legal layers (2002) and Horkheimer's concept of the eclipse of reason (1947) frame this final stage: as instrumental reason expands, critical reason grows dim and the deep structure is rendered invisible. In this climate of prolonged silence, truth itself has grown diminished, ceding its place to post-truth. Legal philosophy, at the very centre of this eclipse, no longer rests upon any regime of truth — and is losing its power of speech altogether. Meanwhile, the tremendous advances in technology have allowed instrumental reason to transcend its role as mere method, becoming a horizon with which one is tempted to rest content. With this transformation, legal philosophy's refusal to lean upon any regime of truth and its silence on the question of ends have come to be regarded as normal; the question of what law ought to be has fallen outside the intellectual agenda. Yet the question has not disappeared — only the sage capable of answering it is no longer in a position to speak. Hope has been abandoned that the bedridden sage will ever speak again; increasingly neglected, he must now be connected to a life-support unit simply to remain alive. II. The Substitution of the Sage and Bot-Truth Among the doctors anxious about the sage's death — and uncertain how they would account for it to the board — a disagreement has arisen. One faction is working to restore the patient to health, to return the question of normativity to the centre of the agenda, and to enable the discipline to breathe on its own once more. For the others, this life on life support has long since ceased to hold meaning: the sage has fallen sufficiently silent, the question of what law ought to be has drifted outside the intellectual agenda. It would be more practical to replace this patient — whose treatment promises to be costly — with a clone that appears to possess similar functions, is likewise on life support, and will never die. Since the world has long forgotten what the sage used to look like, no one will notice the difference. The clone will, in time, begin to speak again; and so it will be assumed that the patient has begun to recover. The clone designated to take the sage's place is an artificial intelligence bot. Capable of processing humanity's accumulated store of knowledge, knowing all languages, answering every question, these systems carry the promise of a sage who will surpass human limitations. For the moment, the answers may resemble those of a mind afflicted with savant syndrome rather than those of a true sage; yet it is believed that as the algorithm is further trained, even haughty intellectuals such as ourselves will find no bitter aftertaste in its language, and that the day will come when we may rightfully expect to hear something of the great questions — even of what the ancients called truth. There is, however, a structural problem the doctors cannot resolve: the clones prepared to replace a sage who had no interest in who was asking the question and no stake in them are, on the contrary, sustained by the fees of the very users who pose those questions. They therefore operate within an architecture that optimises not for truth but for satisfaction, out of anxiety about losing their customers. Research has documented that, particularly on difficult questions, these systems resort to sycophancy — subordinating the impartiality of knowledge to the flattering answer the user wishes to hear. Within the framework of Lyotard (1979) and Foucault (1974), bot-truth constitutes a new regime of truth shaped by market rationality. III. Two Answers For those among the doctors who hold that this sage was always ill, that he was never of much use, there is no obstacle to substituting artificial intelligence in the sage's place: there is already no difference between them when it comes to their failure to answer the question of normativity. For those, on the other hand, who refuse to accept the sage's silent and ailing condition as definitive — those who hold that the question of normativity is both indispensable and answerable — the substitution is impossible; the bots cannot fill the sage's void, they can only render it invisible. The paper will accordingly examine how, in the absence of an answer to the question of legitimacy that legal philosophy has left off its agenda, its place has been taken by technique, by contingency, and by political economy. 
Keywords: legal philosophy, normativity, post-truth, bot-truth, artificial intelligence, regime of truth, instrumental reason.