Neri Marsili on “Rethinking Assertion in the Age of AI”

Can LLMs make genuine assertions? Academics disagree. A key driver of this dispute is an underlying disagreement about what asserting requires. Rather than defending a specific characterisation of assertion, I will review different proposals, showing how each can be extended from human communication to machine communication. Artificial utterances, I will argue, satisfy different conceptions of assertoric force to different degrees. This pluralist approach better acknowledges our conflicting intuitions about machine assertion: it explains precisely why we feel that there is some sense in which LLMs can assert, and some sense in which they don’t.

Neri Marsili (UNED)

To join the session on Zoom, please get in touch with Giulia Terzian at giuliaterzian@fcsh.unl.pt for the details.

This event is part of the ArgLab Research Colloquium organised by Maria Grazia Rossi, Giulia Terzian and Gloria Andrada at the Laboratory of Argumentation, Cognition and Language of the NOVA Institute of Philosophy. For any inquiries, please contact Maria Grazia, Giulia, or Gloria.