The Dialogue with Digital Socrates: Loss of Intellectual Virtue

In the article the authors research possibilities of reproducing a philosophical dialogue in the form of human-AI interaction. There are differences at three basic levels: 1) at the argumentative level the philosophical dialogue represents a consecutive constructing of a consistent standpoint, and human-AI interaction is looking through possible points of view which are not combined themselves into a single structure; 2) at the teleological level the philosophical dialogue is its participants’ joint research activity aiming at looking for truth as the dialogue with a AI is a means of getting satisfaction in an informal conversation with a favorably disposed opponent; 3) at the axiological level during transition to human-AI interaction there is lost the intellectual virtue of philosophical search for truth. These differences are obviously expressed during topological interpretation of the cognitive phenomena in which a point of view corresponds to a separate location abstracting itself from the context, and a standpoint 3 to a cognitive map offering different routes of intellectual search. In this sense the human-AI interaction deprived of the standpoint presents itself in the form of the intellectualized walk along an endless labyrinth of opinions and points of views satisfying a narcissistic demand of intellectualized self-admiration, but not leading to reflexive rethinking or forming a standpoint as understanding the world and one’s place in it.