{
  "id": 6621,
  "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27626v1",
  "title": "Umwelt Engineering: Designing the Cognitive Worlds of Linguistic Agents",
  "summary": "I propose Umwelt engineering -- the deliberate design of the linguistic cognitive environment -- as a third layer in the agent design stack, upstream of both prompt and context engineering. Two experiments test the thesis that altering the medium of reasoning alters cognition itself. In Experiment 1, three language models reason under two vocabulary constraints -- No-Have (eliminating possessive \"to have\") and E-Prime (eliminating \"to be\") -- across seven tasks (N=4,470 trials). No-Have improves",
  "authors": "Rodney Jehu-Appiah",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "agents-autonomy,environment",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-03-29T10:49:50.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-14T16:32:37.310Z",
  "source_slug": "arxiv-ethics",
  "source_name": "arXiv",
  "source_homepage": "https://arxiv.org",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/6621",
  "original_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.27626v1",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}