philosophy-of-language.
48 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-090 v2 | LLMs are stochastic measuring devices | The chapter argues by analogy that deep neural networks are “stochastic measuring devices”. Training alters the parameters in response to data, so that the resulting configuration carries information about the data (“training is measurement”). The trained weights are a model, and generation is simulation. DNNs are stochastic because random initialisation and non-convex loss mean runs need not converge to the same weights, failing Baird’s “regularity” condition. The problems of interpreting model states and generated text are therefore the familiar problems of instruments, models and simulations. The problem of interpretable AI is an instance of the coordination problem in the philosophy of measurement. | Read |
| NOTE-102 v2 | Bottou & Schölkopf — Borges and AI | A short essay, not an argument with evidence. It claims that a “perfect language model”, defined as sampling each next word from a random occurrence of the current text in the infinite collection of all plausible texts, is a fiction machine governed by “narrative necessity”, to which “neither truth nor intention” matters. On that view hallucinations “are just confabulations”, chat-bot answers take the role the user’s framing implies, and fine-tuning and RLHF are attempts to prune the garden “against its nature”. It warns that power over what LLMs write becomes “power over what we think”. | Read |
| NOTE-157 v2 | Roberts — Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds | If a substantial class of mental states (interoceptive, affective, perceptual, and bodily-agentive states such as effort, trying and ownership) depends on an animate body, then today’s disembodied chatbots lack them, and their many self-ascriptions of such states are “systematically untrue”. Roberts argues that users can nonetheless engage chatbots through make-believe, as a new kind of fictional character that is interactive, co-constructed, self-involving and blended with the real world. He argues that this fictionalist stance escapes the epistemic norms that bind realist belief. | Read |
| NOTE-158 v2 | Grindrod et al. — Distributional semantics & holism | The authors argue that distributional models answer the instability objection to meaning holism if meaning is read “differentially”, as a word’s relations to its nearest neighbours, and not as its position in the space. They illustrate this with two corpus-expansion demonstrations. In a ±10-word count model on Stein’s The Making of Americans (about 522k tokens), adding Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (under 1,500 words) shifts every cosine value for “know” by at most about 0.0005 (e.g. 0.95231 → 0.95284 for “understand”) and leaves its top-10 neighbours in the same order, while “glass” gets a new neighbourhood. A Word2vec CBOW model on 143M words of Wikipedia shows the same pattern when about 21M words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) are added: “atomism” shifts, “can” barely moves. The residual instability, they argue, is a virtue. | Read |
| NOTE-179 | Brandom, inferentialism and meaning entitlement | Boghossian’s objection to substantive, entitlement-based theories of meaning (drawn from pejoratives like “Boche”) works against Dummett but not against Brandom. Brandom’s material inferences are non-monotonic and ceteris paribus, so one can grasp a concept while refusing to endorse the inferences it licenses. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-217 v2 | Natural Kinds (SEP) | Whether scientific kinds are natural breaks into four questions (are the classifications natural, are they into kinds, what the kinds are, and do they have essences). The entry maps the positions from conventionalism to essentialist strong realism, notes a recent turn toward pluralist and epistemology-first views and even eliminativism, and questions whether Kripke–Putnam semantics can deliver essences. | Superseded — by NOTE-769 |
| NOTE-245 | Mathematical Foundations for a Compositional Distributional Model of Meaning | The paper builds DisCoCat as a product category FVect × P of vector spaces and a free pregroup. A sentence’s meaning is f(w₁⊗…⊗wₙ), where f is the linear map got by putting vector spaces in place of the pregroup types in the reduction p₁…pₙ ≤ s. The ε maps become inner products and the η maps become Σᵢ eᵢ⊗eᵢ. So “John likes Mary” is Σ_ijk c_ijk⟨v|vᵢ⟩⟨w_k|w⟩ sⱼ ∈ S, and “not” is the 2×2 swap matrix placed on the sentence wire. There is no theorem and no experiment. The sentence space S is shown only as 1- or 2-dimensional truth values, over a toy model with one basis vector per individual, and the paper says how neither S nor the verb tensors are to be built from data. Its headline similarity numbers (3/4, 1/4, 3/8) are unnormalised inner products. Under its own Definition 5.1 they are 0.949, 0.316 and 0.6. | Read |
| NOTE-246 v2 | Reasoning about Meaning in Natural Language with Compact Closed Categories and Frobenius Algebras | The paper sets the sentence space equal to the noun space (F(s)=F(n)=W). It then uses the basis-copying map σ: v_i ↦ v_i⊗v_i of the Frobenius algebra fixed by W’s basis to lift corpus-built verb matrices Σ_i sbj_i⊗obj_i into rank-3 tensors. So a transitive sentence becomes sbj⊙(verb·obj) (“copy-subject”) or obj⊙(verbᵀ·sbj) (“copy-object”), a vector in W. On the Grefenstette–Sadrzadeh verb-disambiguation set, copy-object gets Spearman ρ=0.172, against 0.168 (Kron), 0.163 (Multp), 0.143 (copy-subject), 0.050 (additive) and an inter-annotator bound of 0.620. On a 112-term definition-matching task the best F1 is 0.21 (nouns) and 0.27 (verbs). No significance test is reported. The disambiguation numbers are identical to the authors’ COLING 2012 paper, and the definition numbers are the same data re-reported. | Read |
| NOTE-338 | Where Am I? | A first-person story with an argument inside. With his brain in a vat in Houston radio-linked to his body under Tulsa, the narrator tests three answers to “where am I?”: where the body is, where the brain is, where the point of view is. He favours the third and finds it unclear. A computer duplicate of his brain can take over his body with no detectable difference, and when duplicate and brain drift out of step there are two persons in one body. Intuition pumps, no thesis defended to the end. | Read |
| NOTE-349 | Searle — Minds, brains, and programs | A man who follows English rules for manipulating Chinese symbols can answer Chinese questions like a native speaker without understanding Chinese, so no program is by itself sufficient for understanding. Six replies are answered; the systems reply by having the man internalise the room. Searle grants that machines could think, if they had the brain’s causal powers. The argument concerns intentionality, and its answer to the systems reply rests on treating the internalised system as a part of the man, which is the point in dispute. | Read |
| NOTE-350 | Intentional Systems | Defines an Intentional system as anything whose behaviour can be predicted by ascribing beliefs and desires and assuming rationality, and makes the status relative to the predictor’s strategy and indifferent to the system’s matter and consciousness. Argues that Intentional theory is vacuous as psychology because it presupposes rationality, that behaviourism smuggles it in, and that every content-ascribing theory owes a “loan of intelligence” that must be repaid by analysing away a little man. Ends on belief’s two norms, truth and accurate avowal. | Read |
| NOTE-353 | True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works | Belief is objective but visible only through a strategy: a true believer is any system “reliably and voluminously predictable” by treating it as a rational agent with the beliefs and desires it ought to have. Adopting the stance is free; its success is a fact, and Laplacean Martians who skipped it would miss real patterns. Thermostats and people differ in degree, by how tightly their states are tied to one interpretation. Evolution explains easily why the strategy works; how the machinery does it is open, and the language of thought is a bet, not a necessity. | Read |
| NOTE-363 | Clark — Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind | Clark defends LIT-097 against Adams and Aizawa’s intrinsic-content objection: the notion is unclear, silicon could carry it, and their own concession that not every cognitive state needs non-derived content lets a conventional encoding serve as a belief’s vehicle. Against the active-memory objection, he concedes the notebook is static and argues that how and when memory is updated is a difference below the level that matters. He closes on brains as open-ended controllers and persons as forensic, not biological, items. | Read |
| NOTE-368 | Adams & Aizawa — The bounds of cognition | Adams and Aizawa grant LIT-097’s parity sentence but deny that any actual case meets it. Cognition, they assume, needs non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal process. Otto’s inscriptions have only derived content, Otto’s retrieval uses vision and motor control that Inga’s does not, and coupling a process to its surroundings does not extend it. So cognition is brain-bound as a contingent fact, and human-plus-tool systems are too motley for a science. | Read |
| NOTE-369 | Chalmers — Foreword to Supersizing the Mind | Ten years after LIT-097, its co-author says the iPhone has made the thesis vivid, that the only principled objection is the perception-action boundary, and that the right reply is to let belief-ascription follow explanatory purpose, so that Otto’s belief is extended for some explanations and not others. Consciousness probably stays internal, because no twin case for it can be built. The thesis needs only a weak parity-style functionalism. | Read |
| NOTE-370 | Shanahan, McDonell & Reynolds — Role play with large language models (read for the self) | Read for the self. The simulator has no beliefs, goals or agency, “not even simulated versions”; simulacra only role-play characters that have them, so when an agent says “I” there is “no-one at home”. The paper names, and does not answer, the question of which self a dialogue agent would act to preserve: hardware, process or instance. The denial of a self follows from the framing; no argument rules out a conscious actor behind the roles. | Read |
| NOTE-373 | Survival and Identity | What matters in survival is the R-relation (mental continuity and connectedness among person-stages), and it is also identity, because persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of stages and so the relation of being stages of one person is the R-relation. Fission and fusion become persons sharing stages, counted by tensed identity; the long-lived Methuselah is a continuum of overlapping persons; degrees come from supervaluation over cut-offs. Against Perry’s lifetimes, two persons, not three, take part in a fission. | Read |
| NOTE-376 | Shanahan — Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being | An avowedly “poetic” attempt to fit consciousness and selfhood to a disembodied 2024 chat agent. Its time would be discrete and discontinuous. Its “I” can be the model or a conversation-bound self that flickers into being each turn; we may slip between them. Such selves can be copied, edited and merged, and spread over branching simulacra. No candidate site survives scrutiny, which is read as Buddhist emptiness and applied back to human selves. Examples are invented usages, not data. | Read |
| NOTE-380 | Adams & Aizawa — Defending the Bounds of Cognition | A reply to a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge”. It names the coupling-constitution fallacy, coupled is not part of, and restates the 2001 marks of the cognitive. Against Clark’s Euler-circle case it separates how a diagram gets its meaning from how a mental image of it does. Against a “brain-tool science” it argues that tools are an open-ended motley. The fallacy is shown by one analogy, and the processing differences are asserted, not measured. | Read |
| NOTE-382 | Shanahan — Simulacra as Conscious Exotica | A Wittgensteinian treatment: consciousness talk is anchored in what is public, so an exotic entity is a candidate only if we could engineer an encounter with it in a shared world. Disembodied chat agents are not candidates; virtually embodied ones could be. On the self: no “self worth preserving” without body, history and autobiographical memory, and no “person behind the mask” for a role player, whose identity is a shifting distribution of roles. Argued by method and scenario; nothing is measured. | Read |
| NOTE-388 | Social ontology: Some basic principles | Searle restates the 1995 theory in twenty pages. Social facts are facts involving collective intentionality. Institutional facts are the subclass in which collective acceptance imposes a status function, “X counts as Y in C”, carrying deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action. Language is constitutive, since such facts exist only as represented. He revises the book in two places: status indicators matter in their own right, and some Y terms are free-standing, with no X, as with corporations and money without currency. “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, a formula from later in the book, is now ranked as the more general form. Collective intentionality is assumed, not argued for. | Read |
| NOTE-393 | Epstein — Social Ontology (SEP) | A survey organised by its author’s own distinction: what grounds a social fact versus what anchors the category it falls under. It reports that ontological individualism is widely assumed and now contested; that grounding has displaced supervenience; that convention, collective acceptance, patterns, practices and language are rival theories of anchoring; and that whether anchoring is a distinct relation is disputed. It covers groups, group agency, institutions, race and gender, artifacts, money, law and language. Survey claims are reported, not argued; one citation (Epstein 2016) is missing from the bibliography, and Schwitzgebel 2015 is listed with critics of group phenomenal states. | Read |
| NOTE-394 | Haslanger — Gender and Race: (What) Are They? | An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account. Gender and race are defined as hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone regularly observed or imagined to have bodily features presumed to indicate a female’s reproductive role, marked by that within the dominant ideology for subordinate positions, and subordinated in part because of it. Racialized groups are defined in parallel from features presumed to show ancestral links to a region. Gender in general and ethnicity are the non-hierarchical genus. The commonality and normativity objections are met by appeal to the project’s values. Stipulative, with no evidence. | Read |
| NOTE-395 | Hindriks & Guala — Institutions, rules, and equilibria | Institutions are correlated equilibria of coordination games with several equilibria, represented by the players as rules. Searle’s constitutive rules are derived from a regulative rule by coining a term that splits it into a base rule and a status rule; the term is conservative and eliminable, so constitutive rules add a name and cognitive economy, not a new kind of fact. The derivation is shown for one toy institution and asserted in general. The reply adds that normativity needs no constitutive rules, because a right is a bundle of other people’s regulative obligations. | Read |
| NOTE-430 | Relational Frame Theory: Some Implications for Understanding and Treating Human Psychopathology | RFT stated for clinicians. Human relating is bidirectional and arbitrarily applicable, a generalized operant under contextual control, with mutual and combinatorial entailment and transformation of function. Relating relations explains metaphor, rules are networks whose coordination with events regulates behaviour, and the self is content, process and context. These are offered as the reason direct-contingency behaviour therapy is “inadequate”, and ACT’s acceptance, defusion and values are given RFT readings explicitly labelled heuristic. | Read |
| NOTE-490 | Block — The Mind as the Software of the Brain | An introductory chapter that says what the computer model of the mind claims and defends it. Intelligence is explained by functional decomposition into primitive processors; meaning-respecting processing by an isomorphism between syntactic and semantic functions that must hold counterfactually; intentionality by a language of thought whose symbols get meaning from functional role. The Turing test, Stich’s syntactic theory and Searle’s Chinese room are criticised. Block grants the model for intelligence and intentionality and doubts it for phenomenal consciousness. | Read |
| NOTE-492 | Block — Functional Role and Truth Conditions | A use (functional role) theory of meaning must say why ‘aluminum conducts electricity’ has different truth conditions on Earth and Twin Earth. Internal inferential roles cannot, and appeals to referential uses beg the question. A public-use theory can only do it with long-arm roles that import the devices of a theory of reference, and the result is equivalent to a two-factor theory whose internal part is narrow meaning. Burge’s arthritis cases further require role in a language, structured by deference, alongside individual roles. | Read |
| NOTE-503 | Block — Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology | Block advertises two-factor conceptual role semantics as the only approach that could meet eight desiderata for a semantics serving cognitive science. Narrow meaning is an expression’s short-armed conceptual role, its abstracted causal role in reasoning and deliberation; a separate factor relates it to referents. Conceptual role explains behaviour shared across Twin Earth, learning without definitions, relativity of meaning to representational system, and the inheritance of public meaning from the language of thought. Harman’s long-arm roles reduce to the same two factors, and Gricean and indicator semantics either are not naturalistic or fail. | Read |
| NOTE-594 | Cours de linguistique générale | Linguistics takes as its object langue, the social system of signs, not parole or langage. The sign unites a concept (signified) and an acoustic image (signifier) arbitrarily; the signifier is linear. Arbitrariness makes the sign immune to deliberate change and exposed to blind change. Synchrony and diachrony are irreducible. A term’s value is set only by its oppositions to coexisting terms: “dans la langue il n’y a que des différences sans termes positifs”, though the sign as a whole is positive. Terms relate syntagmatically and associatively, and relative motivation limits arbitrariness. | Read |
| NOTE-602 | Performative updates | Makes the performative/constative distinction a difference between two operations on a context set: informative update eliminates indices, performative update changes them minimally so that a proposition holds. Declarations are purely performative; an assertion is a performative truth guarantee by the speaker plus a negotiable informative update; the same declarative sentence can be either. Argued from linguistic evidence, not tested. | Read |
| NOTE-608 | The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases | Argues that indefinites (and definites) are variables without quantificational force, bound by the nearest operator, which yields donkey-sentence readings; then recasts semantics as file change: each sentence updates a structured common ground of numbered cards, truth of a file supplies existential force, and the definite/indefinite contrast reduces to one felicity condition (new card versus familiar card), from which binding, presupposition projection and, with accommodation, narrow-scope definites follow. | Read |
| NOTE-614 | On Linguistic Aspects of Translation | Names the three kinds of translation (intralingual, interlingual, intersemiotic) and argues that interlingual translation renders whole messages, since code-units rarely have full equivalents; that every cognitive content can be conveyed in any language; and that languages differ in what their grammar obliges a speaker to say, so translation adds and drops information and a chain of translations can erode a message. Poetry, where grammar and sound carry meaning, allows only creative transposition. | Read |
| NOTE-617 | Defaults in Update Semantics | Sets out update semantics (meaning as change of information state), proves a dynamic system reduces to static propositions exactly when updates are total, idempotent, persistent, monotone and strengthening, and shows epistemic “might” and “presumably” are tests that fail persistence. Gives a decidable non-monotonic logic of default rules in which specificity and other priorities follow from coherence and applicability conditions, with predictions that differ from Reiter’s, Delgrande’s, Asher and Morreau’s and inheritance-net theories. | Read |
| NOTE-619 | Semantic Communication: A Survey of Its Theoretical Development | Surveys semantic information theory around three Shannon analogues: semantic entropy (no agreed definition; logical-probability, task, knowledge and context variants), semantic rate–distortion (meaning as a latent state S behind the observation X, with dual distortions), and semantic channel capacity (definitions under which it can exceed Shannon capacity). It adds the information bottleneck, age of information, joint source–channel coding and LLMs as tools, and lists open problems. It catalogues rather than reconciles. | Read |
| NOTE-622 | Making It Explicit | In the core of chapter 3, asserting undertakes a commitment, licenses others to reassert it and takes on a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged. Entitlement passes by justification (across contents) and by deferral (between people), and holds by default until challenged. Each interlocutor keeps score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so scorekeeping is doubly perspectival. A speech act’s significance is the change it makes to the scores, determined by its content’s inferential role. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-644 | Semantic Unification | Puts basic DRT into sheaf form: a DRS is a section of a presheaf of consistent literals, an anaphoric resolution is a cover by variable maps, and the discourse’s meaning is the gluing, unique if it exists (Proposition 1). All the interpretive work is in choosing the cover; the only obstruction to gluing shown is inconsistency, so the paper models context dependence and ambiguity, not contextuality in the Abramsky–Brandenburger sense. Its probabilistic section ranks covers by summed corpus counts, not by gluing distributions. | Read |
| NOTE-697 | Floridi — AI as agency without intelligence | An editorial, not an argument. LLMs work statistically on the form of texts and understand nothing, yet they act successfully and, through RL fine-tuning, “learn” to act better. Floridi concludes that they are “a new form of agency” that has been “liberated … from intelligence” (pp. 5–6). Learning to make “a different or better difference” is the only mark given that separates it from a sea wave. The no-understanding premise rests on anecdote, and no criteria for agency are stated. | Read |
| NOTE-734 | Grice — Logic and Conversation | pp. 45–47 only: conversational implicatures are to be tied to a Cooperative Principle (contribute what the accepted purpose of the talk exchange requires) and to maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation and Manner. Grice flags the second Quantity maxim as disputable, defers Relation, and calls the information-exchange framing too narrow. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-735 | Grice — Meaning | Speaker meaning is analysed as an intention to produce an effect in an audience by means of the audience’s recognition of that intention; the effect must be one recognition can give a reason for, not merely cause. Timeless meaning is to be explained from occasion meaning. It is an analysis of meaning, offered “roughly”, not of illocutionary acts. | Read |
| NOTE-736 | Strawson — Intention and Convention in Speech Acts | Austin’s thesis that illocutions are conventional fails for warnings, entreaties and objections. Their force is a wholly overt, audience-directed intention: Grice’s three intentions plus a fourth, with uptake as the audience’s grasp of it. The scheme strains on orders and fails on institutional acts. What all illocutions share is an overt intention meant to be understood. | Read |
| NOTE-769 | Bird & Tobin — Natural Kinds (SEP) | A survey that maps positions rather than arguing for one. Its firmest conclusions are negative: shared natural properties, support for induction and a role in laws are each necessary but not sufficient for a natural kind, and the Kripke–Putnam semantics yields only partial essences, or essences only on assumptions it does not argue. It reports a turn to pluralist, cluster and epistemology-first accounts, against which a purely epistemic criterion is said not to separate natural from conventional kinds. | Read |
| NOTE-994 | Borg, Harrison, Stazicker & Salomons — Is the folk concept of pain polyeidic? | Six objections to the experimental philosophers’ claim that the folk concept of pain is bodily, not mental: small and skewed samples, acute pain only, a loaded “in the mind” probe, means near neutral, a non-Cartesian mental reading of the same data, and an invalid step from “partly bodily” to “bodily”. Pilot vignettes in which damage never hurt drew mind-centred answers. The authors propose that the folk concept is “polyeidic”: several framing-sensitive dimensions, of which mental/bodily is one. | Read |
| NOTE-1007 | Reuter, Sienhold & Sytsma — Putting pain in its proper place | Three online studies on the “pain is in my fingertip, the fingertip is in my mouth” argument. People reject its conclusion for pain about as much as for tissue damage and inflammation, and accept it for a paper-clip; across fourteen items, acceptance tracks how misleading the conclusion is rated; and “technically speaking” wording raises acceptance. The authors explain the argument’s failure by implicature, not by an intensional “pain” or a non-spatial “in”, and conclude that the data favour a bodily conception of pain. | Read |
| NOTE-1017 | Balganesh — The Immanent Rationality of Copyright Law | A review essay on Drassinower’s What’s Wrong with Copying?. It reports a Kantian, rights-based account on which a work is a communicative act and infringement is compelled speech, praises its coherence, and defends rationalist theorizing against the charge that it is faith-based. It then objects that the method needs a criterion of what is fundamental, a defence of autonomy if it is to justify, an account of copyright’s private-law enforcement, and room for change over time and for instrumental reasoning at the level of the system. | Read |
| NOTE-1068 | Lycan — Representational Theories of Consciousness (SEP) | A survey by one of its protagonists. Strong representationalism holds that a sensory quality, such as the green of an after-image, is a represented property of a represented, possibly nonactual object, and that representation of a certain functionally specified kind suffices for it. “What it’s like” to experience the quality is kept apart as a further, higher-order property that needs awareness, and the theory addresses only the quality. The entry sets out the arguments for and the counterexamples against, and leaves wide against narrow content unsettled. | Read |
| NOTE-1384 | Cover — Violence and the word | Cover argues that legal interpretation “takes place in a field of pain and death”: a judge’s interpretation is a practical act whose meaning is bound to deeds that others, in roles, carry out on bodies. Because the judge cannot act alone, legal meaning depends on a social organization of violence — secondary rules that tell wardens which paper to obey, and plural courts so that no single mind’s interpretation becomes a deed — and the perpetrator and victim of that violence cannot share its meaning. | Read |
| NOTE-1445 | Berdini — Rationality as the Normative Dimension of Speech Acts | Berdini rejects Searle’s rule-based account of the deontology of speech acts. Meaning cannot fix which act is performed, so she adopts Bach and Harnish’s inferential model, in which the hearer infers the speaker’s expressed attitude from what is said, mutual beliefs and presumptions. She quotes Bach and Harnish that illocutionary acts at best create mutual beliefs about rights and obligations, which they call a moral question. She proposes, without argument, that the presumption of the interlocutor’s rationality is the basic normativity of communication. | Read |
| NOTE-1453 | Harnish — Commitments and Speech Acts | Harnish sets the Gricean expressed-attitude theory against normative theories of illocution. On Bach and Harnish, communicative acts are individuated by the attitude the speaker expresses, that is, reflexively intends the hearer to take the utterance as reason to ascribe. Institutional acts are a separate class. Searle’s account of how speech creates commitment is unexplained, and Alston’s rule-subjection analysis fails. Expressing the belief that P and taking responsibility for P may be equivalent, so the normative theory may be the same facts redescribed. Teasing and the audience’s standing are not discussed. | Read |