Do language models lack communicative intentions?
In some recent work, some psychologists, linguists, AI researchers, and philosophers (e.g., Shanahan, 2022; Bender & Koller, 2020; Montemayor, 2021; Bender et al., 2021) have argued that, despite producing convincing human-like linguistic output, large language models do not possess linguistic compe...
| Publicado en: | Synthese Vol. 205; no. 5; pp. 1 - 24 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Springer Nature
May2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=185719971&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 185719971 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00397857 4LI jtl: Synthese issn: 00397857 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2025 vid: 205 iid: 5 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 185719971 10.1007/s11229-025-05022-6 ppf: 1 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1MB tig: atl: Do language models lack communicative intentions? aug: au: Attah, Nuhu Osman affil: https://ror.org/019wvm592 School of Philosophy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia sug: keyword: Communication and Culture Linguistics Communicative intentions Language Large language models Philosophy of AI ab: In some recent work, some psychologists, linguists, AI researchers, and philosophers (e.g., Shanahan, 2022; Bender & Koller, 2020; Montemayor, 2021; Bender et al., 2021) have argued that, despite producing convincing human-like linguistic output, large language models do not possess linguistic competence on the ground that they lack communicative intention. Among the proponents of this position, the notion of communicative intention is entertained as the liveliest candidate for a distinguishing characteristic of human cognition vis-a-vis LLMs and as such as at least one of the features which accounts for the characteristic mentality of humans. I demonstrate that such a position is largely driven by strong Gricean assumptions about the nature of linguistic competence that I argue is now known to be empirically untenable. Moreover, I show that once we give up these assumptions and fairly assess the architecture of both LLM and human cognitive architectures, we will find no good reasons to suppose large language models lack communicative intentions. I thus reject communicative intentions as a viable ground on which to understand the difference between LLMs and humans and thus as a characteristic mark of human mentality. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: Synthese is a copyright of Springer, 2025. All Rights Reserved. item: Synthese holder: Springer Nature dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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