Drawing Parallels to Quine: The Loopy Nature of Human and AI Language

geoffreyirving · x · 2026-08-23

Geoffrey Irving notes that human language shares the loopy characteristic of AI models. He cites Quine's critique of logical positivists, who wanted language to always map to objective experiments. Quine argued that this mess is acceptable: while we can't ground sentences one by one in a DAG fashion, the entire web of language grounds into experiment coherently.

Related event: Geoffrey Irving on Character Training: Language Philosophy Challenges and Diverging Moral Philosophy Bets in AI Alignment(7 posts)→

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