Research

My PhilPeople page is here.

My dissertation was a collection of three independent but thematically connected papers on language models. The first assesses a currently popular account of the nature of the linguistic competence ostensibly manifested by LMs. According to this account LMs are “stochastic parrots”, whose linguistic outputs, though they look outwardly meaningful, are actually only  cleverly stitched together bits and pieces of language which have no meaning at all except accidentally. This claim depends on what I call the Communicative Intention argument. In this first paper I demonstrate that the argument is largely driven by strong Gricean assumptions about the nature of linguistic competence that I argue are 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. The second paper addresses the larger debate in the context of which the Communicative Intention argument is made: the debate about meaning in LMs. I argue here that there are two senses of “meaning” in the debate, which I term semantic meaning and content meaning. A failure to distinguish between these two varieties of meaning has led to many of the characteristic confusions in the debate. The final paper deals with metalinguistic capacities in LMs. This paper introduces a novel way of accounting for any ostensible differences in the competences manifested by humans and LMs. The account has to do with what I call metalinguistic agency — roughly, the claim is that the agential structure of the linguistic competences in LMs and humans differ; any ostensible differences between them can be accounted for in terms of this difference in agential structure.

In addition to these foundational conceptual issues, I am also interested in the ethical, scientific, and existential ramifications of artificial intelligence systems, especially  LMs and automated art machines (like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion).

I also have an interest in traditional questions in the philosophy of mind, like representation, intentionality, mental causation, etc., and am curious about how they might be informed by results in the cognitive sciences. I have an interest in the general philosophy of science as well. I am especially interested in questions about explanation in the life and mind sciences.

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See CV for publications and presentations.