Prompting as Scientific Inquiry

Ari Holtzman; Chenhao Tan

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arXiv · 2507.00163

Prompting as Scientific Inquiry

Ari Holtzman·Chenhao Tan

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Abstract

Prompting is the primary method by which we study and control large language models. It is also one of the most powerful: nearly every major capability attributed to LLMs-few-shot learning, chain-of-thought, constitutional AI-was first unlocked through prompting. Yet prompting is rarely treated as science and is frequently frowned upon as alchemy. We argue that this is a category error. If we treat LLMs as a new kind of complex and opaque organism that is trained rather than programmed, then prompting is not a workaround: it is behavioral science. Mechanistic interpretability peers into the neural substrate, prompting probes the model in its native interface: language. We contend that prompting is not inferior, but rather a key component in the science of LLMs.

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Ari Holtzman, Chenhao Tan. 2025-06-30. Prompting as Scientific Inquiry. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00163

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