@inproceedings{gubelmann-2024-pragmatic,
title = "Pragmatic Norms Are All You Need {--} Why The Symbol Grounding Problem Does Not Apply to {LLM}s",
author = "Gubelmann, Reto",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.651/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.651",
pages = "11663--11678",
abstract = "Do LLMs fall prey to Harnad`s symbol grounding problem (SGP), as it has recently been claimed? We argue that this is not the case. Starting out with countering the arguments of Bender and Koller (2020), we trace the origins of the SGP to the computational theory of mind (CTM), and we show that it only arises with natural language when questionable theories of meaning are presupposed. We conclude by showing that it would apply to LLMs only if they were interpreted in the manner of how the CTM conceives the mind, i.e., by postulating that LLMs rely on a version of a language of thought, or by adopting said questionable theories of meaning; since neither option is rational, we conclude that the SGP does not apply to LLMs."
}
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<abstract>Do LLMs fall prey to Harnad‘s symbol grounding problem (SGP), as it has recently been claimed? We argue that this is not the case. Starting out with countering the arguments of Bender and Koller (2020), we trace the origins of the SGP to the computational theory of mind (CTM), and we show that it only arises with natural language when questionable theories of meaning are presupposed. We conclude by showing that it would apply to LLMs only if they were interpreted in the manner of how the CTM conceives the mind, i.e., by postulating that LLMs rely on a version of a language of thought, or by adopting said questionable theories of meaning; since neither option is rational, we conclude that the SGP does not apply to LLMs.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Pragmatic Norms Are All You Need – Why The Symbol Grounding Problem Does Not Apply to LLMs
%A Gubelmann, Reto
%Y Al-Onaizan, Yaser
%Y Bansal, Mohit
%Y Chen, Yun-Nung
%S Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2024
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Miami, Florida, USA
%F gubelmann-2024-pragmatic
%X Do LLMs fall prey to Harnad‘s symbol grounding problem (SGP), as it has recently been claimed? We argue that this is not the case. Starting out with countering the arguments of Bender and Koller (2020), we trace the origins of the SGP to the computational theory of mind (CTM), and we show that it only arises with natural language when questionable theories of meaning are presupposed. We conclude by showing that it would apply to LLMs only if they were interpreted in the manner of how the CTM conceives the mind, i.e., by postulating that LLMs rely on a version of a language of thought, or by adopting said questionable theories of meaning; since neither option is rational, we conclude that the SGP does not apply to LLMs.
%R 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.651
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.651/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.651
%P 11663-11678
Markdown (Informal)
[Pragmatic Norms Are All You Need – Why The Symbol Grounding Problem Does Not Apply to LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.651/) (Gubelmann, EMNLP 2024)
ACL