Chatbots Output Meaningful (but Problematic) Language
Are utterances by AI chatbots meaningful? Concretely, if a user asks, say, Anthropic's agent Claude, "What is the capital of Spain?" and Claude answers, "Madrid is the capital of Spain," does that sentence have its ordinary meaning -- and does it express a true proposition? Most ordinary users, as well as AI engineers, take the answer to be trivially "yes." However, many cognitive scientists, linguists, and philosophers of language argue that dominant intentionalist accounts of language and meaning deliver the opposite conclusion. Theorists more sympathetic to ordinary users' intuitions have therefore advocated a radical "de-anthropomorphization" of language, revising our understanding of...
| Authors | Matthew Stone, Una Stojnić |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 June 2026 |
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