What is it to Use a Word?

Indrek Reiland (University of Viena)

29 November 2024, 12:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: What is it, in producing a noise (mark, bodily movement), to use a word, sentence, or other expression? The most common suggestion is that this has something to do with the speaker’s articulatory intentions: the intention to repeat a previous use (Kaplan 1990) or simply the intention to use a word (Hawthorne & Lepore 2011). On some versions of the view, intention isn’t wholly constitutive; the product (noise etc.) also has to satisfy some conventional standards specifying the canonical articulation, within limits of toleration (Hawthorne & Lepore 2011). In this talk I will offer two ways of working out this idea in detail and defend one of them over the other. On the offered view, to use a word is to intend, in making a noise, to put a rule in force that requires the noise to match the canonical articulation. I will end by showing how this view enables us to make sense of LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT as using words, even if they lack intentions and other mental states.