Quine's meaning skepticism resurfaces in the LLM understanding debate
burny_tech · x · 2026-10-01
A repost of W.V.O. Quine on meaning skepticism: we learn language only by hearing it in observable situations — it's observable behavior all the way down. What we have to go on is the sentence itself, not the thought or the meaning. 'Why don't we stop with that?' The quote is clearly offered as a classic philosophical footing for debates over whether LLMs trained purely on text truly understand meaning.
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