Indrek Reiland (Vienna), 'What is it to Use a Word?'
Tue, 22 Oct
|London
Time & Location
22 Oct 2024, 17:00 – 18:30
London, Senate House, London WC1B, UK
Abstract
Abstract:
What is it, in producing a noise (mark, bodily movement), to use a word, sentence, or other expression? The most common suggestion is that this has something to do with the speaker’s articulatory intentions: the intention to repeat a previous use (Kaplan 1990) or simply the intention to use a word (Hawthorne & Lepore 2011). On some versions of the view, intention isn’t wholly constitutive, the product (noise etc.) also has to satisfy some conventional standards specifying the canonical articulation, within limits of toleration (Hawthorne & Lepore 2011).
In this talk I will offer two ways of working out this idea in detail and defend one of them over the other. On the offered view, to use a word is to intend, in making a noise, to put a rule in force that requires the noise to match the canonical articulation. I will end by showing how this view enables us to make sense of LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT as using words, even if they lack intentions and other mental states.