Comment by skrebbel
4 days ago
> The idea that our ability to create and sustain conceptual systems depends on the give and take of reasons within a social setting.
I read this sentence 5 times and I still cannot parse it.
4 days ago
> The idea that our ability to create and sustain conceptual systems depends on the give and take of reasons within a social setting.
I read this sentence 5 times and I still cannot parse it.
I think it means if we all have to justify ourselves to each other, we collectively come up with an sustainable ecosystem of ideas that we can understand. So if we stop justifying ourselves to each other, the ecosystem doesn't get built or sustained, and we stop understanding things. Not the person you responded to, but that's my reading.
If a short sentence like that could accurately summarize Robert Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping, he would have wasted a good chunk of his career.
I mean this with zero snark: if you’re interested, you’d be best off asking an LLM or doing a search. But the overall idea is that Brandom described how concepts and meaning are created socially by a kind of game in which people keep track of the claims that other people commit to.
If you accept Brandom’s framework, then it can be argued that LLMs can’t meaningfully participate in this process. This could be considered an explanation of why people have a negative reaction to LLM involvement in activities that are meaningful to humans - even though most people won’t be familiar with the theory, they would instinctively recognize that something important is lacking, such as commitment over time.