Public Profile

The Center for Computational Epistemology is a research center at Carnegie Mellon University focused on the formal modeling of human belief, inference, and argumentation. Founded in 2011, the center occupies a joint position within CMU’s School of Computer Science and Department of Philosophy — an arrangement that, according to the center’s own literature, “represents either a perfect synthesis or an ongoing territorial dispute, depending on which floor you are on.”

The center’s research spans automated reasoning evaluation, Bayesian belief modeling, and what its founding charter describes as “the quantitative study of epistemic failure” — a field the center helped establish and that has, by most accounts, not suffered from a shortage of subject matter. The center maintains a public database of formally cataloged logical fallacies observed in published media, political discourse, and, since 2022, AI-generated content. The database currently contains more than 2.3 million entries and is updated daily.

The center’s work has been cited by technology companies, federal regulators, and several Senate committees, often in ways that its researchers did not anticipate.

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