A paper in PNAS mentions a new word: Epistemia (n.) — the illusion of knowledge that emerges when surface plausibility replaces verification.
I like the idea but I’m not fully sold on the neologism, because I think a post-truth society where the semantic coherence LLMs provide trumps the wisdom earned from domain expertise is, on the whole, a bad thing. I think the new word needs to also connote this value judgement.
Epistemitis?
Pseudognosis?
Pseudoepisteme?
Originally posted on Substack Notes, December 2025.