Rethinking Understanding

From Logocentrism to the Author-Function

in the Age of LLMs

Tomáš Musil

September 25, 2025
Charles University
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
unless otherwise stated
Rethinking Understanding

Logocentrism

Logocentrism has
"always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos;
history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been [...] the debasement of writing, and its repression outside full speech"

Rethinking Understanding

Deconstruction

Rethinking Understanding

Communicative AI

Rethinking Understanding

Meaning, Understanding and Intent

Rethinking Understanding

Grounding the Octopus

Rethinking Understanding

Cultural Gatekeeping

Rethinking Understanding

Defending Cultural Capital

Rethinking Understanding

The Author-Function Distributed

'The author' was never really a person

A discursive function regulating how texts:

  • Circulate
  • Acquire legitimacy
  • Generate meaning within institutions
Rethinking Understanding

Moving the Goalposts

Rethinking Understanding

The Real Choice

  • Not: Between human and artificial intelligence

  • But: Between acknowledging collective basis of all intelligence OR continuing to pretend understanding is private property of individual consciousness

  • LLMs force this choice by making social production of knowledge undeniably visible

Rethinking Understanding

Thank you for your attention

Rethinking Understanding

- Western philosophy's privileging of the unity between consciousness and meaning - The impossible dream of a transcendental signified—final, authoritative meaning - Meaning always deferred, always relational, never grounded in fixed foundation - No direct connection between mind and world

deconstruction isn’t a single method or a recipe; it’s more like a critical gesture or attitude toward texts, concepts, and institutions Deconstruction is the practice of showing how a text or system undermines the very oppositions and hierarchies it seems to depend on.

precist ze strany 119 importance of interpretative activity of the readers # The Accidental Deconstructionists of Silicon Valley

**What if this barrier isn't protecting understanding...** **...but protecting institutions that depend on understanding being:** - Scarce - Exclusive - Controllable # Understanding as Bourgeois Property **Consider the insistence that 'only humans can understand':** - Not a philosophical position - Maintaining symbolic boundaries determining participation in knowledge production - e.g. juding papers on 'proper' English

**This operates as Bourdieu's *cultural capital*:** - Mechanism for preserving existing hierarchies of epistemic authority - The claim functions less like neutral philosophy - More like preservation of institutional power **The material reality:** - LLMs generate novel research hypotheses - Identify logical inconsistencies in arguments - Synthesize information across disciplines - Help researchers discover unseen connections - Produce code solving real problems - Write analysis revealing new insights

# Foucault in the Server Farm **The author-function operates through:** - 'Procedures of rarefaction' - Determining which discourses are taken seriously - Which voices are granted authority - How meaning gets controlled and limited Already Happening at Scale - Authorship was always already more algorithmic than we admitted

**Resistance takes the form:** *"Well, it can do X, but it can't really do Y"* **This reveals:** - Our concept of understanding inflated beyond operational content - Every attempt to preserve human cognitive privilege - Shows how porous and constructed these boundaries are **The uncomfortable truth:** The harder we try to relocate understanding in consciousness/intentionality, the more these reveal themselves as **ideological constructs** rather than natural kinds