New opinion piece on the interface between research on concepts and categories in minds vs. in neural network LMs! I take the position that there is much to be learned from this interface (e.g., learning about concepts from language alone) and outline some directions for future.
We are excited to announce Kyle Mahowald will be a Keynote Speaker at IC2S2 2026!
Now published in open access! Your one-stop shop for the philosophy of language models. It's the spiritual descendant of our two-part preprint from 2024, fully updated. This should be particularly useful for anyone looking for an entry point into this rapidly growing field.
Kyle Mahowald
Excellent piece from Tom that gave us a lot to think about in our response!
"the neural toolkit provides a system one can probe and perturb in order to generate theories and test them counterfactually. These all seem to us like desirable features of good linguistic explanations."
Check it out and see if you find our analysis explanatorily satisfying!
New paper with @danieldrucker.bsky.social! We had language models play The Counterexample Game, a philosopher's pastime where one person proposes a conceptual analysis , another pokes holes in it, and the first one tries to repair it. What happens over long iterated chains? arxiv.org/abs/2605.03936
The success of large language models (LLMs) across many domains of AI research has generated intense debate. Some attribute their impressive performance on complex tasks to human-like linguistic and ...
International Conference on Computational Social Science
Raphaël Millière
"She'll go to France or Spain or Germany or France" sounds redundant—unless licensed with context like "She will go to an art program in France or Spain or a math program in Germany or France"
In new work w/ @qyao.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social: an LM-based 'Neural Semantics' account
🧵👇
🤖🧠 New commentary 🧠🤖
What role should large language models (LLMs) play in linguistics?
I reflect on this question in a commentary now on arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10061
To appear in BBS as a commentary on @futrell.bsky.social and @kmahowald.bsky.social's excellent piece on LLMs & Linguistics!
Conceptual analysis -- proposing definitions and refining them through counterexamples -- is central to philosophical methodology. We study whether language models can perform this task through iterat...
