Young Academy of Europe
The YAE Inquiry Lectures are online interdisciplinary lectures on a topic that changes every academic year. The lectures are open to all YAE members as well as members of YAE partner organisations.
For 2025/2026, the topic is Artificial Intelligence.
Format: 2 lectures by speakers from different disciplines x 45 min (30 min lecture + 15 min q&a), online
The speakers of the October 2025 Inquiry Lecture are Dr. Emma Gordon and Prof. J. Adam Carter, from the Centre for Neurotechnology and the Cogito Epistemology Research Centre at teh University of Glasgow, UK. Here is teh abstract of their talk:
AI, Inquiry, and Scientific Progress
Abstract: The use of AI tools, including LLMs, now permeates the scientific research pipeline; it’s used from literature review and hypothesis generation to argument analysis and writing. Results are generated and published now much more quickly thanks to these tools. This raises a hard question: if scientific progress aims at understanding rather than mere data accumulation, how much AI outsourcing is too much, and by what standard? This talk examines four prominent answers found in the literature—Purism, Glass-Box Transparency, Co-Authorship Accountability, and Pragmatic Instrumentalism—and highlights the limitations of each. It then motivates an alternative view, one that shifts focus from the production to the consumption of scientific research. On this view, what matters is less whether AI use impedes the individual researcher’s own understanding, and more whether it enables the scientific community to understand what is produced; the view avoids problems with the other four answer-types and preserves scientific understanding as a genuinely collective epistemic achievement.
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