CONCEPT
Evaluative Literacy
The capacity to assess AI output critically—to distinguish reliable claims from plausible fabrications, recognize the boundaries of a system's competence, and apply probabilistic judgment where fluency cannot be trusted as a signal of accuracy—the specific cognitive skill that
Condorcet's educational philosophy demands from any epoch's citizens but that the language interface makes urgent.
When the printing press arrived, the monks argued that it would produce shallow readers who lacked the deep understanding that came from laboriously copying manuscripts. They were partly right: access to printed books did produce a great deal of superficial reading. But it also produced Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and the scientific revolution. The expansion of access lowered the average depth of engagement while raising the total volume, and the gains at the top of the distribution vastly exceeded the losses at the median.
Condorcet generalized this pattern across nine epochs of history and gave it a precise formulation: every technological expansion of access to knowledge demands the cultivation of a new form of literacy in the people who use it—not literacy in the old sense, but the capacity to evaluate what the technology delivers rather than merely receive it. He distinguished
instruction