Mahrad Almotahari

Many linguists and philosophers of language view the cognitive theory of generics with suspicion. This paper discusses five of the most recent objections targeting the theory. Considered separately, the objections seem to have very little in common. Taken together, however, they represent the cognitive theory in a difficult bind: the first three suggest that it's too rigid to accommodate nuanced speech (specifically, the use of quantifiers in early childhood and the use of generics in metalinguistic negotiation), while the last two seem to indicate that it's too flexible --- having been tailored to fit so many of our naive semantic judgments, it ceases to be explanatory. This paper argues the bind is illusory. All five objections rest on misunderstanding that independently motivated, adjacent psychological considerations help address. Demonstrating this point will reveal how resilient and resourceful the cognitive theory is as an account of language.

Cooperative speech is purposive. From the speaker's perspective, one crucial purpose is the transmission of knowledge. Cooperative speakers care about getting things right for their conversational partners. This attitude is a kind of respect. Cooperative speech is an ideal form of communication because participants have respect for each other. And having respect within a cooperative enterprise is sufficient for a particular kind of moral standing: we ought to respect those who have respect for us. Respect demands reciprocity. I maintain that large language models aren't owed the kind of respect that partly constitutes a cooperative conversation. This implies that they aren't cooperative interlocutors, otherwise we would be obliged to reciprocate the attitude. Leveraging this conclusion, I argue that present-day LLMs are incapable of assertion and that this raises an overlooked doubt about their semantic competence. One upshot of this argument is that knowledge of meaning isn't just a subject for the cognitive psychologist. It's also a subject for the moral psychologist.

This paper does three things. First, it presents a new interpretation of Avicenna’s influential argument, the Flying Man. One nice feature of this interpretation is that it vindicates the argument’s validity. Unlike the cogito-inspired case for dualism, the Flying Man isn’t undermined by neglect of referential opacity. Second, it compares Avicenna’s argument with Anscombe’s take on the possibility of conscious thought under sensory deprivation. Finally, the paper concludes with a brief critical assessment. Several possibilities are considered.