Cooperative Speech, Semantic Competence, and AI

TL;DR

The paper challenges the claim that current LLMs can engage in genuine assertion by tying assertion to Gricean cooperation and discursive respect. It introduces quasi-assertion as a tentative knowledge- transmission notion but argues that true assertion requires reciprocal moral and normative commitments that LLMs cannot fulfill. By connecting discourse to moral psychology and conceptual competence, the author contends that true semantic competence (as knowledge of what it is for a sentence to be true) remains out of reach for present-day LLMs. The work thus reframes semantic understanding as requiring more than statistical text production, highlighting a moral-psychological dimension to meaning and a direction for future AI research.

Abstract

Cooperative speech is purposive. From the speaker's perspective, one crucial purpose is the transmission of knowledge. Cooperative speakers care about getting things right for their conversational partners. This attitude is a kind of respect. Cooperative speech is an ideal form of communication because participants have respect for each other. And having respect within a cooperative enterprise is sufficient for a particular kind of moral standing: we ought to respect those who have respect for us. Respect demands reciprocity. I maintain that large language models aren't owed the kind of respect that partly constitutes a cooperative conversation. This implies that they aren't cooperative interlocutors, otherwise we would be obliged to reciprocate the attitude. Leveraging this conclusion, I argue that present-day LLMs are incapable of assertion and that this raises an overlooked doubt about their semantic competence. One upshot of this argument is that knowledge of meaning isn't just a subject for the cognitive psychologist. It's also a subject for the moral psychologist.