I just asked Microsoft’s Copilot to write me a 1000-word essay about the normative implications of Quine’s naturalized epistemology, giving it a prompt of less than 20 words. It immediately complied and, within a few seconds, generated a coherent essay that could easily earn a decent grade in an undergraduate philosophy course. What I mean is that if a student had written the same essay under closed-book conditions, given three hours at the end of a course, it would clearly have demonstrated a familiarity with the texts studied (Copilot was able to correctly cite the two key texts that I would have) and an understanding of the issues involved. The exact grade would of course depend on the level of the course and the standards of the teacher, but the student would certainly have had to attend the class and at least skimmed the readings to pull it off.

I mention this, not to counter those who still insist that AI is not capable of doing their assignments, but to answer those that would have us abandon as meaningless any assignment that an AI can easily do. Keep in mind that my little test used a very low-level model (Copilot is available for free to all staff and students at CBS) and my prompt consisted of a one-sentence question along with the instruction to generate a 1000-word essay (it went over by about 100 words). A sophisticated student, faced with a 5000-word term paper at the end of a course they had not followed very closely, would be able to provide a better model with the course syllabus, learning objectives, and even the actual readings. Given a few hours, and assuming an above-average intelligence, they could no doubt cobble something together that would be quite impressive by pre-2022 standards. This ability to fake a semester’s worth of learning over a weekend is the problem we have to have face, I think.

In the future, I think universities will have to make students sit for written exams, on-site and off-line, more often. A degree that does not require at least half of a student’s total grades to come from such performances cannot be taken seriously. In fact, transcripts should make it very clear which grades were earned through homework (where AI support should be presumed) and which were earned through invigilated examination. That is, it should be clear whether the graduate of a given program is capable of writing coherently about their subject themselves. Their future employers can use that information as they please.

The simple test that I propose, then, is a 20-word question with no further context than the course that the student has taken. The student is given three hours and up to 1000 words to demonstrate what they have learned by answering the question to the best of their ability. Understanding the question (and its significance) is itself part of the competence being examined. Under these conditions, I am convinced that the instructor who designed and taught the course can easily determine whether the learning objectives have been met, just as a music teacher can evaluate a student’s ability simply by giving them some sheet music and an instrument to play it on, or a drafting teacher can evaluate drawing ability by giving a student a piece of paper and an object as model. The fact that an AI can also do these things does not make it less impressive when a student can muster their flesh and bones, their brain and their heart, to do it. An education, after all, consists of disciplining the body so as to liberate the mind. It’s important that we show our students what they are capable of.

Quine suggested that we think of our knowledge as an ever-changing “web of belief”. These beliefs have ontological implications, which is to say that they commit us to the existence of “things” of various kinds, such as furniture, corporations, and even numbers. Some of our beliefs we hold very lightly, others more firmly, and we keep our commitments accordingly. We are not always very explicit about either our beliefs or our ontological commitments — indeed, we may sometimes be entirely unaware of them — but they can often be gleaned from our words and actions even by complete strangers. Granted, there will always be some “indeterminacy” about exactly what we believe and what we think reality consists of. But our peers, at least, usually have a pretty good sense how we parse our experience into objects of belief. After all, they live in the same world that we do and, for the most part, parse it like we would.

An education is both a revision and a disciplining of our beliefs. We not only come to believe things we hadn’t before believed, and stop believing things we once thought were true, we also learn to hold our beliefs more, let’s say, intelligently. Educated people are, ideally, less afraid of being wrong about something they believe. They have experienced it often enough. Having come to believe something through deliberate effort, they know what sort of doubts may be raised. They sometimes face those doubts very explicitly through the criticism they receive from their peers. And they are not afraid of this criticism either. Just as they are familiar with the experience of being wrong themselves, they are familiar with the errors and misconceptions of others. They hold their beliefs in the face of doubt and criticism, at least until it becomes too much. Then they willingly discard the discredited notion.

I said that we may hold our beliefs firmly or lightly. But it is important to remember that while the strength of a belief may be continuous, its attitude is discrete. We believe something or not. We think that something is true or we do not. We may believe something only for a moment, and hold the belief so lightly that even the slightest doubt removes it altogether, but, while we believed, we believed that something was the case. A belief is a “propositional attitude”; it is a particular take on the reality in which we live.

One of the most important lessons of higher education consists in appreciating the contingency of our beliefs. We believe any one thing only because we believe many other things. And that means that revising one belief will often require us to revise others. Holding beliefs intelligently, then, means being careful about our revisions, always considering the implications. There is no shame in refusing to believe something that requires too radical a change in our existing web of belief, even if the evidence for the proposition is, and even in our own eyes, rather strong. In fact, sometimes we are put in the uncomfortable position of thinking something is true that we can’t quite bring ourselves to believe. The problem lies elsewhere in the web, and it will take us a little while to make all the necessary adjustments, to make room for the new among the old. Give it time. And give your peers time to do likewise when it happens to them.

No one has ever been right about everything. That much is probably obvious. What may be less obvious is that the main purpose of an education is not to make you right about as many things as possible. It is to teach you how to be wrong.