Our Mission: Elevating Discourse in the Digital Age

In today's fast-paced digital world, meaningful conversations are more crucial than ever. Without actively striving for truth and better tools to counter misinformation, humanity risks fracturing into increasingly smaller echo chambers of pseudoscience, fake news, and disinformation. Whether in personal discussions or in social media, academic debates, or professional collaborations, the ability to analyze and construct strong arguments is an essential skill in the communication age.

However, fostering logical and respectful discourse isn’t easy - especially if you’re not a trained logician or critical-thinking expert. That’s where Aristotle comes in. Designed to streamline argument analysis, Aristotle provides a shared foundation for discussions while addressing some of the chaos introduced by social media. Our mission is to help build a better world - not just mentally, but also in the digital spaces where ideas are exchanged.

Looking ahead, we envision Aristotle as more than just a tool for argument analysis. Future iterations will serve not only as a bot for Discord, but also as an integrated critical-thinker for everyone packaged as a browser extension as well as an App, both capable of analysing any text, image, or sound bite anywhere, helping us navigate the cognitive biases and misinformation traps that challenge human understanding. We think its an important project, especially given the recent developements at Meta, and X, for example, where fact checking processes have been removed. Personally, we don't believe big communication platforms could have done a good job at being an impartial mediator either way, given their own private interests and interests towards investors. So, this creates a nice opportunity for a truly impartial third party to be introduced to do the work instead. Together, we can make meaningful discourse the cornerstone of a more informed and connected society.

The Inspiration Behind Aristotle

We are two programmers and a physicist that love Science and coding. Gonçalo works for a non-profit as an AI research engineer. Timen works for a company that builds software used in automatically identifying images of potential crimes. And Lisa is a Msc student at ETH, Zurich Switzerland. Gonçalo and Timen studied AI together at the University of Groningen while Lisa studied Physics, and the three of us have always been passionate about debating and argument. Which is what led us to explore several Discord servers as well as in-person forums aimed at just that. But, after more than 7 years of participating and organizing discussions and debates (sometimes with world-renowned researchers and writers!), we have documented a lengthy list of problems. People tend to speak past each other. People seldomly agree on a basis before they start building up a conversation which is bound to fall on its shaky legs. People are not good at catching fallacies and biases - be it in their own arguments or in others. People tend to attack eachother instead of trying to work together towards truth. And most important of all, people want to improve and become better at conversing and arguing but don't know how! This is why we believe tools like Aristotle can be extremely effective at creating bridges between people on and off the internet. Aristotle introduces a third party that can serve as a mediator, guide and support the people having a discussion.