Title: Meaning in Chatbots: A Critical Approach

Abstract: Are utterances by AI chatbots meaningful? Concretely, if a user asks, say, Anthropic’s agent Claude, “What is the capital of Spain?” and Claude answers, “Madrid is the capital of Spain,” does that sentence have its ordinary meaning—and express a true proposition? Most ordinary users, as well as AI engineers, take the answer to be trivially “yes.” However, many cognitive scientists, linguists, and philosophers of language voice skepticism. This skepticism is well rooted in dominant intentionalist accounts of language and meaning.

In response, others have advocated a radical “deanthropomorphization” of language, revising our understanding of mental states, intentions, and semantic content to capture the intuition that the outputs of LLMs are meaningful. In this talk, I argue that the proper theory of human language already applies, as is, to current chatbots. While dominant and intuitively appealing, widespread intentionalism is false. Language does not—not even for humans—require communicative intentions. This, I argue, has important consequences for how we should theorize about—and critically engage with—both human linguistic output and synthetically generated text.