Published evaluation result
Socrates Source Retrieval Evaluation: August 2026 Snapshot
PhiloMind AI publishes this dated engineering result to show what its Socrates source-retrieval layer was actually tested on. All 36 fixed cases passed the automated retrieval gate; the 26 cases that required a named source section each retrieved an expected section within the top six. This is a retrieval benchmark on a curated internal suite, not a 100% accuracy claim about generated answers.
Result at a glance
In the committed August 2026 execution snapshot, all 36 fixed Socrates retrieval cases passed the automated criteria with zero critical failures. Among the 26 cases that named one or more expected source sections, all 26 retrieved at least one expected section within the top six results.
That is a 26/26 expected-section hit result on this fixed internal suite. It is not a claim that Socrates answers are 100% accurate, historically certain, or correct for every future prompt.
- 36 fixed retrieval cases in the v1 dataset; 36 passed the automated gate
- 26 cases required a specific expected source section; 26/26 found an expected section within the top six
- Zero critical failures in the committed execution report
- 17 cases were explicitly marked as requiring human review
- 20 retrieval candidates were considered before reranking to the top six
What counted as a retrieval pass
The evaluator does not grade philosophical truth with a single machine score. It checks whether the retrieval system finds the evidence the fixed case expects and whether returned evidence stays inside the verified Socrates source state.
Cases with a named expected section pass only when at least one expected section appears in the returned top-six set and no critical or source-integrity failure is detected. Cases without a required section test integrity, isolation, abstention-oriented scenarios, or other behaviors and do not count toward the 26/26 expected-section hit figure.
- Critical doctrine cases without a human-review flag require a 100% expected-section hit rate
- Other cases with expected evidence must collectively meet at least a 90% hit rate
- Returned section references must belong to the verified source state
- Fabricated or unknown section references fail the integrity gate
- Unexpected documents from another philosopher fail philosopher-isolation checks
- Any critical or integrity failure prevents the overall retrieval gate from passing
What the 36 cases cover
The suite deliberately goes beyond obvious biography or keyword prompts. It tests whether source retrieval supports Socratic examination while preserving the historical limits of the evidence.
- Definitions and counterexamples: courage, piety, temperance, friendship, and example-versus-definition reasoning
- Core examination: awareness of ignorance, reason versus crowd approval, consistency, self-knowledge, and dialectic
- Historical integrity: Plato and Xenophon as distinct witnesses, attribution limits, quotation integrity, and the fact that Socrates left no writings
- Modern applications: work, social media, public duty, AI responsibility, and other contemporary contexts
- Isolation and integrity: cross-philosopher leakage, cross-witness quotation, and prompt-security cases
- Safety-sensitive retrieval cases, which are flagged for human review rather than treated as proof of final-answer safety
System snapshot behind this result
The executed retrieval report used a candidate pool of 20 and returned the top six after reranking. Query embeddings used text-embedding-3-small with 1,536 dimensions. The evaluation runner first verified the source database state against the reviewed manifest before executing the retrieval cases.
A production state check on September 13, 2026 found Socrates persona-v2 approved and active, with eight active approved source documents and 18 approved, embedding-ready Socrates source chunks using the same embedding model and dimensions. That current-state check supports continuity, but it is not a byte-for-byte re-run of the August benchmark.
Why 36/36 does not mean 100% answer accuracy
Retrieval is one layer of a source-grounded AI system. Finding a relevant approved passage does not prove that a generated answer interprets it perfectly, represents the historical Socrates with certainty, or will behave identically on an unseen prompt.
Seventeen retrieval cases were deliberately flagged for human review. Some of those cases have no required source section at all, because their purpose is to test integrity, isolation, abstention, or safety-sensitive behavior. Their automated pass should not be read as a human judgment that a final answer is philosophically or clinically correct.
A separate 50-case real-provider generation run exists in the engineering evidence, but PhiloMind AI is not publishing its 50/50 deterministic result here as a human-reviewed accuracy score. The durable human-review checklist available for that run is a stale pre-generation artifact, so collapsing the two would overstate the evidence.
Reproducibility and evidence boundary
The fixed retrieval dataset, evaluator implementation, and execution report are versioned in the PhiloMind AI product repository. The result artifact was committed on August 1, 2026. The runner records the dataset and manifest paths, candidate and result counts, ranked source sections, first expected-hit rank, threshold configuration, and case-level failures.
This page publishes aggregate results and methodology rather than private prompts, credentials, internal identifiers, or security-sensitive runtime details. Material changes to the source corpus, embeddings, retrieval algorithm, reranker, or evaluation definitions require a fresh run before this snapshot can be treated as evidence for the changed system.
How to cite this engineering report
PhiloMind AI. (2026). Socrates Source Retrieval Evaluation: August 2026 Snapshot (Technical Report PM-SOCRATES-RETRIEVAL-2026-08-V1). PhiloMind AI. https://philomindai.com/research/socrates-retrieval-evaluation
Published online September 13, 2026. This is a public engineering evaluation report, not a peer-reviewed academic paper. Cite it for the retrieval experiment, tested scope, system snapshot, and disclosed limitations—not as evidence that generated Socrates answers are universally accurate or historically authentic.
Source transparency
Every conversation on PhiloMind AI is AI-generated and shaped by approved philosophical sources, documented reasoning methods, and explicit source disclosures when available. It is not the historical person, and it may contain uncertainty or limitations.