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        <title>Language Models and Externalism: A Reply to Mandelkern and Linzen</title>
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        <namePart type="given">Gary</namePart>
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    <abstract>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.</abstract>
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    <identifier type="doi">10.1162/coli_a_00551</identifier>
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        <date>2025-06</date>
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%0 Journal Article
%T Language Models and Externalism: A Reply to Mandelkern and Linzen
%A Ostertag, Gary
%J Computational Linguistics
%D 2025
%8 June
%V 51
%I MIT Press
%C Cambridge, MA
%F ostertag-2025-language
%X 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.
%R 10.1162/coli_a_00551
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-2.8/
%U https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00551
%P 651-659

Markdown (Informal)

[Language Models and Externalism: A Reply to Mandelkern and Linzen](https://aclanthology.org/2025.cl-2.8/) (Ostertag, CL 2025)

• Language Models and Externalism: A Reply to Mandelkern and Linzen (Ostertag, CL 2025)

ACL

• Gary Ostertag. 2025. Language Models and Externalism: A Reply to Mandelkern and Linzen. Computational Linguistics, 51:651–659.