A Transcendental Philosophy of Large Language Models

In this article, M. Beatrice Fazi responds to Shane Denson’s commentary on her paper “The Computational Search for Unity: Synthesis in Generative AI,” published in the Journal of Continental Philosophy in 2024. The article develops Fazi’s transcendental argument about large language models (LLMs). While Denson raises questions about conceptual relativism through Donald Davidson’s critique of conceptual schemes, Fazi maintains her position that LLMs construct “a representational world within” rather than referring to “the world.” Responding to Denson’s proposal for a model of synthesis based on the phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre, Fazi argues that a structuralist reinterpretation of Kantian synthesis better accounts for the operations of LLMs, where unity is that of a structure, not a self, and representation is technically central to synthetic activity. These distinctions preserve the functional aspects of Kantian synthesis without anthropomorphizing artificial intelligence, thus strengthening Fazi’s original position that LLMs create their own internal representational reality.