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Does ChatGPT refer with Names? Design Intention and Derivative Reference in Large Language Models

Samuel Wheeler III

Many writers discussing Artificial Intelligence argue that what a Large Language Model produces are not sentences with truth-values but rather “stochastic parrotings” that can be interpreted as true or false, but in the way that Daniel Webster interpreted the Old Man in the Mountain as a sculpture by God with a message for humanity. Steffen Koch has argued that names used by LLMs refer in virtue of Kripkean communication-chains, connecting their answers to the intended referents of names by people who made the posts in the training data. I argue that although an LLM’s uses of names are not connected to human communication chains, its outputs can nonetheless have meaning and truth-value by virtue of design-intentions of the programmers. In Millikan’s terms, an LLM has a proper function intended by its designers. It is designed to yield true sentences relevant to particular queries.

What the photographer does: Luc Delahaye in Conversation with Michael Fried

by Michael Fried & Luc Delahaye

Does ChatGPT refer with Names? Design Intention and Derivative Reference in Large Language Models

by Samuel C. Wheeler

Black History from the Civil Rights Movement to BLM

by Touré F. Reed & Pradnya Garud

Action/intention/interpretation/ambition—Timothy Bewes and Jensen Suther

by Walter Benn Michaels

Not What a Lion Ought to Be

by Pawel Kaczmarski

Mystic Realism

by Vincent Hiscock

What if? A response to Walter Benn Michaels

by Timothy Bewes

Reply to Suther and Bewes

by Walter Benn Michaels

The Dead End of Intentionalism

by Jensen Suther

Was This Trip Really Necessary?

by Pawel Kaczmarski

What if? A response to Walter Benn Michaels

Timothy Bewes

What if Michaels, in some small part of himself and irrespective of what he maintains on the page, believes that this forty-year scholarly project might equally have been pursued not in the direction of an ever-expanding notion of intention but in the direction of an ever-diminishing one, a direction whose end would be its elimination altogether?

Reply to Suther and Bewes

Walter Benn Michaels

Bewes’ commitment to the (Deleuzian) “cinematic apparatus”—replacing “the unity posited by a human action together with its motivations, causes, and intentions” with “a nondetermined, acentered and decentered perception”—involves the opposite of immanent purposiveness. The point of the wave poem was that you saw the marks on the beach as a poem because you saw in them the act of writing. But the point of Deleuzian immanence is “the rupture in the very relation between the image and action,” that is, between what you see and any action. The achievement of the cinema apparatus is not that it accomplishes the feat of embodying the intention in the work but that it accomplishes the feat of keeping the intention out of the work.

What the photographer does: Luc Delahaye in Conversation with Michael Fried

Michael Fried

Photographing ordinary subjects with no particular drama was a response to what sometimes appeared to me as a limit: the fact that the photographs I made in the context of news events drew their strength from that of the situations themselves. I thought this was too simple, that ultimately a powerful subject weakens the image. What creates the irreducibility of the photograph is the mechanical trace of the experience, which gives it a value of enunciation. A photograph is the product of a gaze, a moment, and things; it’s the actualisation of presence. But the technical determination of the photographic tool on the one hand and the subordination to the contingencies of the real on the other reduce the perimeter of “making” and give the unconscious a major role. In a way, all that remains for the photographer is the unconscious.

What Comes After Liberalism?

nonsite

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent reflects some of the best principles, the most attractive values, of a liberalism—liberal capitalism—that we on the left have been criticizing for a century. And central to our critique has been the idea that the effort to reconcile labor and capital at the heart of this liberalism has been doomed to failure. What do we do now that we’re proven to be right?

When the Investor Class Goes Marching In: Twenty Years of Real Estate Development, Privatization and Resiliency in New Orleans

Cedric Johnson

What the storm and the sheer devastation wrought in its wake made possible was the consolidation of this ideological transformation virtually overnight—as city boosters, public officials, wealthy developers, private contractors, multinational hotel chains, anti-poverty researchers, entertainment conglomerates, and charter school advocates coalesced to promote a vision of wholesale privatization.

The Dead End of Intentionalism

Jensen Suther

The ordinary-language assumption that such metaphysical questions are resolved as soon as I raise my hand in a classroom or hug a friend when he tells me she has finally left him is given the lie by its own tacit metaphysics: a picture of reality as comprising two independent orders, one mechanical and complete in itself, the other normative and merely supervenient upon it. This is not a neutral description of our world, but a substantive—and historically specific—way of carving it up. By ordinary language’s own lights, moreover, the modern historical situation in which we experience ourselves as estranged from our own bodies, subject to economic mechanisms we do not control, generates a justified skepticism about the intentionality of our own bodily acts.

Action/intention/interpretation/ambition—Timothy Bewes and Jensen Suther

Walter Benn Michaels

The worry that underlies the sense that both writers and readers can be irresponsible—the writer by failing to have the right relation to her intention, the reader by failing to attend to the writer’s attention—is incoherent. Everyone who produces a speech act produces a text that means what she means by it; everyone who reads one is understanding (or misunderstanding) what she meant by it. This is the force of the non-optional—the reason why intentionalism cannot be a choice—the reason, really, why there is no such thing as intentionalism.

Neoliberal Hurricane: Who Framed New Orleans? (2007)

Jamie Peck

Fundamentally, the agenda of the new urban right is about setting the ‘ground rules’ for appropriate behaviour in cities, largely modeled on middle-class norms; establishing the preconditions for economic growth, largely through the kinds of minimalist supply-side interventions metaphorically represented, in this case, by the cat-5 levee; and maintaining social order through ruthless application of the force of law, facilitated by zero-tolerance policing.

Beyond the Katrina Moment: Exposure and the Political Economy of Invisibility after the Levee Failures (2025)

Thomas Jessen Adams

While the storm may have exposed the so-called invisible poor and the destitute living condition of America’s most poverty stricken and disrepaired major city, it in fact furthered the connection between the political economy of invisibility and economic dislocation.