Saying More Than They Know: A Framework for Quantifying Epistemic-Rhetorical Miscalibration in Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.19768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic miscalibration with rhetorical intensity not proportionate to epistemic grounding. This study tests this hypothesis and proposes a framework for quantifying this decoupling by designing a triadic epistemic-rhetorical marker (ERM) taxonomy. The taxonomy is operationalized through composite metrics of form-meaning divergence (FMD), genuine-to-performed epistemic ratio (GPR), and rhetorical device dist