Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Philosophy of language — meaning, content and reference as philosophy poses them — theories of meaning, meaning holism, assertion and whether machines assert, and conceptual change (group: philosophy).
18 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-044 v2 | In relational frame theory the self is verbal behaviour’s content, its process and its context, and the self as context is a perspective learned from deictic relations that cannot itself be found as content | Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) define three selves: the conceptualized self, the content of verbal relations about oneself; the knowing self, their ongoing process; and the transcendent self, their context. Hayes et al. (LIT-555) say the third arises from deictic frames (I–you, here–there, now–then) as “a sense of self as a locus or perspective”, and is “a context for verbal knowing, not the content”, so its limits “cannot be consciously known”. The account maps the three onto the record’s holdings: the content is the narrative self (Dennett, Gallagher, Strawson), and the context is what Hume could not find among his perceptions and what Metzinger calls a transparent perspective. It differs from the minimal self (Gallagher) on origin: RFT says the perspective is learned in language. The evidence for the learned origin is cited, not read, so Proposed. The clinical claim is THEORY-051. | Proposed |
| THEORY-050 | Psychological inflexibility, in which verbal relations give private events aversive functions and make experiential avoidance a general strategy, is a transdiagnostic process in psychopathology | Hayes et al. (LIT-555) model psychopathology as inflexibility: cognitive fusion supports experiential avoidance, which narrows behaviour. Barnes-Holmes et al. (LIT-541) give the mechanism: once a word stands in derived relation to an event it can carry that event’s aversive functions, so private events become worth avoiding. Kashdan and Rottenberg (LIT-553) find inflexibility across depression and anxiety in cognitive, behavioural and physiological systems, and say its causal role is unknown. The evidence is correlational, small, mostly self-report and mostly from the model’s authors, and the meta-analysis that would test it (LIT-543) is unread, so Proposed. It is compatible with the loop account of disorder, not a rival to it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-089 | The content of a mental representation has two factors, a narrow conceptual role inside the head and a referential factor relating it to the world, and a long-arm role theory that gets Twin Earth truth conditions right reduces to the same two | Block (1986), LIT-648, and Block (1987), LIT-625. Meaning has a conceptual-role component “entirely ‘in the head’”, an expression’s “total causal role, abstractly described” in inference and decision, which twins share and which explains their behaviour, and an external component relating representations to referents and truth conditions. Conceptual role fixes the nature of the referential factor, not reference. A one-factor theory with long-arm roles must, to get Twin Earth truth conditions right, import normal context, causal chains of borrowed reference and experts; chop off what lies outside the skin and the rest is the short-arm role, so the difference is “merely verbal”. Social meaning is assigned to the referential factor or to a third, social factor, and is only sketched. Proposed: no identity conditions for roles, and narrow content is given room, not shown explanatory. | Proposed |
| THEORY-159 | In a language a term’s value is fixed by its relations to the coexisting terms of the same system, so terms that share a signification can differ in value | Saussure (1916), LIT-774, read in NOTE-594, Part Two ch. IV. Value, the horizontal relation among signs, is distinguished from signification, the link inside one sign; the concept side and the sound side of a term are each “purely differential”. It does not say that the sign as a whole is nothing but a difference: the book calls the sign a positive fact and the relation between signs opposition. The support is argument by example. | Proposed |
| THEORY-162 | What an utterance does to the context it is used in is part of its meaning, and its truth conditions do not fix it: sentences with the same truth conditions can differ in what they make available to later discourse, in whether they inform or only test, and in whether they describe a state of affairs or bring one about | Heim (1982), LIT-838; Veltman (1996), LIT-818; Krifka (2024), LIT-835. Three readings find, each in its own domain, sentences that agree in truth conditions or in the proposition they carry but differ in their effect on a conversational state. The effects are anaphoric potential (Heim), tests rather than information (Veltman), and changing indices rather than eliminating them (Krifka). This is the dynamic view: meaning as context-change potential. It does not say that truth conditions are irrelevant, since each framework recovers them, or that the three formalisms agree with each other. | Proposed |
| THEORY-444 | To mean something by an utterance, in the non-natural sense, is to intend it to produce an effect in an audience by means of the audience’s recognition of that intention, where the recognition is meant to be a reason for the effect and not merely its cause; an intention to produce the effect, or to have it recognised, is not enough | Grice (1957), LIT-1042, read in full in NOTE-735. The analysis is reached by counterexamples to weaker conditions (the handkerchief, Herod and Salome, the photograph against the drawing) and stated “roughly”. It is an analysis of speaker meaning on an occasion, not of illocutionary acts, and its extension to timeless and sentence meaning is “a first shot” with the red light admitted as awkward. Strawson’s watcher case (LIT-1043) shows its three intentions are not sufficient. | Proposed |
| THEORY-490 v2 | What a chat agent’s ‘I’ refers to is fixed by the context of use, not by the system: the agent role-plays characters that carry the self-conception the corpus and the conversation give them, and its uses of ‘I’ can pick out the model, present in many simultaneous instances, or the single conversation, none of them the self by nature | Shanahan (2025), LIT-466, read in NOTE-376, with Shanahan, McDonell and Reynolds (2023), LIT-460, read for the self in NOTE-370. The candidate sites of an LLM’s “I”, and the fact that a conversation-bound self is literally a transcript and a program, are solid. That both the model and the conversation are legitimate referents rests on two invented usages. It does not say that there is “no-one at home” or that no candidate is a self, which the papers assert without a criterion, and its subject is a 2024-vintage chat agent without tools or memory across conversations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-511 | Illocutionary acts that are not essentially conventional, such as warning, entreating and objecting, are individuated by a wholly overt, audience-directed intention, Grice’s three intentions with a fourth that the audience recognise the second, and are performed when that intention is understood; acts such as verdicts and umpires’ calls exist only within rule-governed procedures and fall outside the scheme | Strawson (1964), LIT-1043, read in full in NOTE-736, amending Grice (1957), LIT-1042. Against Austin, some illocutions need no convention beyond the linguistic; their force is an overt intention meant to be understood, and uptake is the audience’s recognition of it, an aim rather than an achievement. Orders fit “with some strain”; verdicts, umpires’ calls and marriages do not fit at all. The scheme predicts no non-institutional case in which the overt intention is fixed and the act changes, which gives QUESTION-073 a definite rival to test. The amended analysis is offered as necessary, not sufficient. | Proposed |
| THEORY-518 | If a word’s meaning in a distributional model is read differentially, as its relations to its nearest neighbours rather than its coordinates, then adding text moves every similarity value slightly but leaves the neighbourhoods of frequent, consistently used words intact and shifts those of rare words that the new text uses heavily, so the instability that holism implies is local and graded rather than total | Grindrod, Porter and Hansen (2024), LIT-208, read in full in NOTE-158. The conceptual reply to the instability objection is argued; the empirical half is four hand-picked words in two before-and-after demonstrations (a count model on Stein plus a Hemingway story; Word2vec on Wikipedia plus the SEP), top-10 lists, one run each, no metric. The abstract’s proportionality of resistance to frequency is not measured, the criterion used (a preserved neighbour list) is not the one defined (relative distances), and static embeddings only are tested. | Proposed |
| THEORY-547 v2 | A language model idealized as continuing any text with a plausible next word from the collection of all plausible texts follows narrative coherence and not truth, so its false statements are confabulations within the story the context sets up; whether trained and aligned chat models keep that nature is an open empirical question the idealization does not settle | Bottou & Schölkopf (2023), LIT-178, read in NOTE-102: an essay offering imagery, with no evidence beyond one Vicuna-13b transcript pair. For the “perfect language model” it defines, insensitivity to truth follows from the definition. That deployed chat models share it is assumed, and the essay’s own §2 leaves open whether alignment can turn a fiction machine into a verification machine. It credits the machine with knowledge of what makes sense in the story, denies it truth-directedness and intention, and never uses the word “sycophancy”. | Active |
| THEORY-606 | If consciousness words have meaning only through what is public, an entity is a candidate for consciousness only if an encounter with it in a shared world can be engineered, at least in principle; then disembodied chat agents, even with tools and memory, are not candidates, robots and virtually embodied agents could be, and beyond what an informed community comes to say there is no further fact about their consciousness | Shanahan (2024), LIT-465, read in full in NOTE-382 from the arXiv v2 preprint. A conditional, and the condition is the paper’s method: a later-Wittgensteinian reading of consciousness language, summarised, not defended. The candidature test is stipulated and illustrated by the octopus and an imagined alien cube. The verdict on chat agents follows from it. Calling functionalism and identity theory “dualistic” is a definition, not an argument. The two passages on the self (no “self worth preserving”, no “person behind the mask”) are asserted and are not part of this account. | Proposed |
| THEORY-625 v2 | Institutional facts are status functions, imposed by collective acceptance on things that cannot perform the function by their physical structure alone; the status carries deontic powers that give desire-independent reasons for action, and it exists only as represented, so institutions require language; ‘X counts as Y in C’ is the common case of the more general ‘We accept (S has power (S does A))‘ | Searle (2006), LIT-482, read in NOTE-388 in its Papers printing, the record’s readable statement of The Construction of Social Reality (LIT-485, unread). Conceptual analysis, not argument: the three primitives are asserted to suffice, collective intentionality is referred to an unread 1990 paper, and the animal line is hedged. The paper revises the book: some Y terms have no X, and the general form is “We accept (S has power (S does A))”. Hindriks & Guala’s rules-in-equilibrium account is its rival on what a constitutive rule adds. | Proposed |
| THEORY-638 | Instantiating a formal program is never by itself sufficient for understanding or intentionality, since a person can carry out a program for answering questions in Chinese by hand without understanding Chinese; whatever thinks does so in virtue of causal powers at least equivalent to the brain’s, and the reply that the whole system understands is answered only by an asserted internalisation | Searle (1980), LIT-400, read in NOTE-349 (target article only). The room is a full implementation run by a person, and his first-person verdict is read as the system’s. The decisive step against the systems reply (“the system is just a part of him”) is asserted, not shown, and which causal powers matter is left empirical. The argument is about understanding and intentionality, not consciousness, and it grants that machines, including artifacts with the brain’s causal powers, could think. Proposed; Dennett’s intentional strategy is its rival. | Proposed |
| THEORY-665 v2 | Asserting is undertaking a commitment that entitles others to reassert it and carries a responsibility to show entitlement if challenged; every interlocutor keeps score of everyone’s commitments and entitlements, so the score is doubly perspectival, and a speech act’s significance is the change it makes to the scores, fixed by its content’s inferential role | Brandom (1994), LIT-794, skimmed in NOTE-622: the Preface and the core of chapter 3 only. This states the deontic scorekeeping model of assertion, not the book’s arguments for it, and rests on a skim. By the author’s account the model is an idealization limited to semantic inference, with implicature left to an outer shell. It gives no single objective score, only scores kept from each perspective. | Proposed |
| THEORY-667 | Gender and race, defined as a feminist and antiracist theory needs them, are hierarchical social positions: a woman is someone subordinated in part because she is taken to have bodily features presumed to show a female’s reproductive role, a racialized group is one subordinated or privileged in part because its members are taken to have features presumed to show ancestry from a region, and on these definitions both are real, social and contingent | Haslanger (2000), LIT-480, read in NOTE-394. An explicitly ameliorative (“analytical”) account: the definitions are chosen for what a critical theory needs, and the author is “less committed to saying that this is what gender is and what race is” (p. 52). It is tied to a descriptive claim, that our gender and race talk tracks social kinds obscured by its manifest content (p. 34), which the paper asserts and does not test. Its empirical premises about race are uncited. Not a discovery about bodies, and not a claim that every female is a woman in its sense. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1240 | Trained, instruction-tuned and preference-tuned chat models keep the nature of the idealized fiction machine: what they assert follows the narrative coherence of the frame, role or story the conversation sets up, not a representation of truth that stays fixed across frames | The wider thesis Bottou and Schölkopf assume, filed beside THEORY-547 by the twenty-fourth status review (ADR-065 §3; ADR-047 kind 1). THEORY-547, Active, holds what follows from their idealization; whether deployed chat models share that nature is this entry’s question, and its promote_when is THEORY-547’s old condition, word for word. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1278 | Communication can be treated as transduction, the continuity of an action through processes that it transforms, rather than as exchange between parties; meaning is then the contribution an action makes, in retrospect, to a joint individuation, coexisting meanings mark concurrent individuations, and the problem of scaling agency from individual to collective is claimed to dissolve | Bencherki, Brummans and Vézy (2024), LIT-1902, read in NOTE-1484, pp. 1355–1358 and 1363–1365. Simondon’s transduction made into a theory of organizational communication. Proposed: argued from examples, with the dissolution of scaling up asserted. The examples (a synapse, a hunger pang, a piston) show the notion applies to any change, which is its strength as a vocabulary and its weakness as a theory. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1279 | Organizational categories are radially structured, so applying them to nonprototypical cases extends and changes them; this is one source of continuous change in routine organizational action | Tsoukas & Chia (2002), LIT-1913, pp. 573–575, read in NOTE-1489. The paper’s mechanism for organizational becoming, built on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s prototype theory and Hart’s penumbra of legal rules. Proposed: it is supported by illustrative cases, not tested. | Proposed |