I agree that it's possible for someone to say words that in other context would have meaning, without their having that meaning when they say it.

Most of what you say merely asserts that when an LLM says something it can't truly mean it.

(Incidentally, that's not quite responsive to the original claim, which is that LLMs learn meanings, not that they mean things when they say them. I think there are situations that could be described by saying that they learn the meanings of things but none the less don't mean those things when they say them. I would need to think more before trying to pass judgement on whether that's actually happening with today's LLMs, but it seems well within the range of somewhat-plausible possibilities.)

The key argument you make for claiming that LLMs can't really mean things -- which I remark is not the argument you were making a couple of comments upthread -- is this bit:

> The problem with a "predict the next word" training goal is that any patterns which emerge will only be coincidentally related to the non-linguistic reality words refer to -- because the machine isn't trained on reference: it is not participating in reality and associating words with it. [] The kind of participation necessary for an agent to acquire the meaning of words has no universal answer, but [...] an LLM has none.

I think "coincidentally" is way too strong here. When you ask an LLM "When did J S Bach die?" and it says 1750, it isn't by coincidence that it gives a correct answer. (Considering how much they get right, despite their confabulations and whatnot, it would have to be one hell of a coincidence.) So that's a pattern in what they say that is not-coincidentally related to the non-linguistic reality.

It's only indirectly related, for sure. The LLM says that Bach died in 1750 because it has read things that say that Bach died in 1750. But, again, that's also why I say that Bach died in 1750.

And it seems to me that what matters, when determining whether and to what extent an utterance actually means something, is not the directness of the utterer's connection to the underlying reality, but something more like its robustness and richness. Robustness: To what extent, if the reality were different, would that tend to make the person say something different? Richness: Consider all the other bits of reality closely connected to the one in question; does our speaker's behaviour correlate with those too?

If someone perpetrates an elaborate deception that makes me believe in a certain person's existence and various facts about them, when in fact everything I think I know about them is mediated by the deception, and by pure coincidence there actually is a person with those properties, unknown to my deceiver, then ... well, maybe I do "mean" what I say about them, but I don't really know what I think I know. This is a failure of robustness; changes in the underlying reality have scarcely any tendency to change my behaviour.

If I learn a list of things to say about stars ("they operate by nuclear fusion", "they are mostly billions of years old", etc.) but I'm just parroting them, then robustness might not fail: maybe I learned these things by asking an astrophysicist to give me a big list of facts about stars, and if the facts were different they'd have given me a different list. But richness fails: if you ask me "would stars behave the same way if the weak nuclear force had very different parameters?" or "were there stars before there were trees on earth?" or "if we brought five more stars like the sun about as close to the sun as the earth is, what would happen to the earth and its inhabitants?", I wouldn't be able to answer unless I got lucky and one of the answers was in my list.

But if both those properties do apply, then -- while of course anyone who isn't me is welcome to disagree -- I am happy to say that they "mean" what they say, or at least that what they say has meaning, and conveys actual understanding, and so on. At any rate, what they say behaves like what someone with actual understanding says: it's responsive to the facts, and it permits not only recitation of a few specific facts but something more general.

Those properties of robustness and richness can be present even when learning takes place only textually. How far they're present in today's LLMs is debatable (though e.g. I think no reasonable person can deny that they are present to an extent that phrases like "stochastic parrot" would lead one not to expect) but if they aren't there it isn't just because the LLMs learn about things only via text.

Learning how to think with Meta Chain-of-Thought