Large language models are increasingly taken to be capable of semantic practices. Debate about what to make of this has largely been conducted as a dispute about understanding. I argue that these standard framings, whichever side one takes, leave out an essential component of discursive reasoning: responsibility. To assert something is to make oneself answerable for what is claimed, to stand ready to defend it, and to give up a previously-asserted claim that cannot be defended. What settles whet…
Read moreLarge language models are increasingly taken to be capable of semantic practices. Debate about what to make of this has largely been conducted as a dispute about understanding. I argue that these standard framings, whichever side one takes, leave out an essential component of discursive reasoning: responsibility. To assert something is to make oneself answerable for what is claimed, to stand ready to defend it, and to give up a previously-asserted claim that cannot be defended. What settles whether a system is a participant in discursive practice is therefore not merely whether it understands, nor merely how well it performs, but whether it can be held to what it has claimed. Drawing on Brandom’s inferentialism, I develop five criteria for responsible reasoning, each of which admits of degrees. What they track is not independence from a community, since no speaker’s discursive capacities are independent of the community that institutes the norms she is answerable to, but the degree to which an agent does its own deontic scorekeeping. The central thesis I defend is accordingly agent-neutral: an agent whose performances fail these criteria is not, to that extent, reasoning responsibly.
