Ask the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Search for passages relevant to a question about philosophy. The dial lets you include additional passages connected to the main results. These connections pass a statistical test, but you may find some more useful than others. The additional passages are mixed into the results; you can identify them afterward in the evidence panel.
Select an example to search, then edit the question if you want to try a variation.
The first example uses dial 3. In the recorded query, it returned a connection between reparations and biological inheritance that I found useful, along with two that I did not. The additional passages are sampled, so your results may differ. Read that retrieval.
The reranker reads a few hundred candidates against your question, about fifteen seconds. The first pass appears as soon as it is ready.
Read the passages, then open the evidence panel if you want to see which connections were added and why.
How it works
A dense search and a lexical search collect candidate passages. A reranker scores them against your question, and the top 28 form the main results, called the floor. It has a twelve-second budget; the response is labeled partial if it runs out of time. Additional passages come from pairs of entries that share a sparse-autoencoder feature. The test requires co-occurrence of at least 28 times chance, evidence stronger than comparable pairs, support in multiple passages, no shared quotation explaining the link, and a distance of at least three steps in the encyclopedia's cross-reference graph. The system samples from eligible connections, with at most one passage per feature. The write-up explains these conditions and includes an example with both useful and unsuccessful suggestions.