Language Models and Externalism
A Reply to Mandelkern and Linzen
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12156283 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gary Ostertag (0000-0002-7173-2984, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai & The Graduate Center, CUNY. [email protected], corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 651-659 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Computational Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0891-2017 • E-ISSN: 1530-9312 |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1162/coli_a_00551 |
| OpenAlex | W4406686516 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
Do texts generated by language models (LMs) refer? Mandelkern and Linzen (2024) argue that externalist principles point to an affirmative conclusion. What grounds reference, according to their externalism, is a term’s “natural history”. For example, ‘water’ refers to H2O among English speakers, and not to the phenomenally indistinguishable chemical XYZ, because H2O, and not XYZ, is implicated in the natural history of ‘water’. Appealing to the literature on contrastive explanation, I show that a term’s natural history does not generally ground its referential properties. Thus, Mandelkern and Linzen’s quick route to the referentiality of LM-generated texts fails
Cognitive science · Externalism · Linguistics · Natural language processing · Computer Science · Philosophy · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |