Against Homogeneous Consensus: Why Scientific Discovery Requires Heterogeneous Adversarial LLM Agents

In this position paper, we argue that current LLM agents, optimized strictly for consensus and coherence, act as epistemic echo chambers that reinforce dominant scientific paradigms. We posit that true discovery requires Epistemic Friction—structured disagreement between heterogeneous explanatory models. To articulate this vision, we introduce the Triadic Disagreement Framework, a conceptual agent architecture where a consensus-aligned Proposer and a falsification-aligned Challenger engage in sustained adversarial interaction. Through an illustrative simulation on Alzheimer's disease etiology, we illustrate how this architectural heterogeneity can surface suppressed explanatory pathways (e.g., the Infection Hypothesis) that standard consensus-driven agents ignore. Our work calls for a shift from helpful assistants to adversarial co-scientists capable of preserving irreducible epistemic conflicts.