About Soulmetric
Soulmetric is a research platform built on a single observation: generation has outpaced verification. A domain expert with the right scaffold can produce the research output of a small university department in days. The bottleneck is no longer production — it's confirmation.
The platform exists to demonstrate that the verification problem is real, to build infrastructure that makes verification communal, and to deliver operator-scaffold research consulting to clients who need rigorous answers faster than traditional academia can provide.
Kevin Scharp
Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
- 1992 Built a compression algorithm for NASA's Mars Observer mission at Washington University's Earth and Planetary Remote Sensing Laboratory. Age eighteen.
- 1996 Undergraduate degree in mathematics.
- 2005 PhD in philosophy, University of Pittsburgh. Dissertation under Robert Brandom on truth, paradox, and conceptual engineering.
- 2006–2013 Developed the replacement theory of truth. Published Replacing Truth (Oxford University Press, 2013) — arguing truth is an inconsistent concept that should be replaced with engineered successors.
- 2014–2015 Helped establish conceptual engineering as a named research program in analytic philosophy. Key conferences organized by Cappelen brought together Haslanger, Eklund, Plunkett, Burgess, Richard, and Scharp.
- 2015–2019 Directed the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. Worked on the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technology project at the University of Twente.
- 2025 Began systematic testing of operator-scaffold coupling for research at scale. The results became Soulmetric.
- 2026 Soulmetric launches. ~256 papers. 22 books. 3 externally validated mathematical results. The verification problem, demonstrated and named.
The Method
Operator-scaffold coupling is a research method in which a domain expert directs a coordinated system of AI agents. The operator provides taste, judgment, and adversarial integrity. The scaffold provides coverage, enumeration, and reduction pressure. Neither can produce the output alone.
The coupling has specific requirements. The operator must have domain-level fluency — enough to recognize plausible nonsense at a glance. The operator must have adversarial integrity — the willingness to kill favorite outputs. The operator must have taste — the distinction between a result worth pursuing and a result worth abandoning.
Soulmetric is the first systematic demonstration that this method works at scale across domains.
Contact
General inquiries: kscharp@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0003-3900-4087