Do texts generated by language models refer? Mandelkern and Linzen (2024) argue that externalist principles point to an affirmative conclusion. What grounds reference, according to their externalist, 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.

This content is only available as a PDF.

Author notes

Action editor: Michael White

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits you to copy and redistribute in any medium or format, for non-commercial use only, provided that the original work is not remixed, transformed, or built upon, and that appropriate credit to the original source is given. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode.

Article PDF first page preview

Article PDF first page preview