alt Hacker NewsThis piece circles, without naming it, around the concept of “deontic scorekeeping” central to the work of Robert Brandom on semantics. The idea that our ability to create and sustain conceptual systems depends on the give and take of reasons within a social setting. Brandom has been front of mind for me lately because elements of his theory both explain why LLMs should work in principle, and where they are bound to be radically deficient. An LLM encodes the normative regularities of our linguistic/conceptual games into its weights, but it cannot be a real participant in our games because it is incapable of staking durable commitments or changing its dispositions over time.
Worth reading: Robert Brandom, “Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment”
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> 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.
What a coincidence, I've also picked up inferentialism but never really got into it.
I'm interested in the reversal that Sellars proposes - it seems clear to me that "representation" is not prior to the space of reasons, despite how unintuitive it is.
> An LLM encodes the normative regularities of our linguistic/conceptual games into its weights, but it cannot be a real participant in our games because it is incapable of staking durable commitments or changing its dispositions over time.
I see no reason why this can't be the case in the future, even though I think inferentialist-based theories are generally strong. Can't you force LLM's (or whatever AI architecture will exist in a decade) to stake durable commitments itself, then? They're at least autonomous enough to run computers. I agree that that is a core part to true meaning & autonomy, but nobody just lets them yet. I don't think inferentialism is a consciousness-based argument, either, so that escape hatch isn't available. I also don't think this is a necessary condition to engage in the space of reasons (but maybe then I'm misunderstanding it, or retreating to a more Sellarsian understanding). Could you explain on this more?
Though again, I only have the book sitting on my desk, and I haven't cracked it open...
This sounds super interesting but 477 pages is a beast. Would you recommend anything about this subject thats a bit more approachable?
Ok what about memory systems though (basically LLM modifies its own RAG context) - that should allow commits and changing dispositions over time?
I think in future, each company will built its own universe of mathematics consisting of prized discoveries. Maybe one Mathematical Universe per Company in the multiverse of mathematics.
I don't think that's true. Why is it that I see more people using "shaped" and "load bearing"?
> An LLM ... cannot be a real participant
The participant is not an LLM, the participant is a company. The company learns. It adapts. It has a trillion dollars of skin in the game.