Large Language Models as Phenomenotechniques for Linguistics

The Cybernetic Order-word: Tensors, Tensions and LLM Vector Spaces

Why what is really a matter of data analytics and statistical prediction is so readily assumed to be a display of real intelligence and even emergent cognition is explored by genealogically tracing the relationship between machines, organisms and language.

: Linguistics as Part of the Cognitive Sciences

Beyond Epistemia: Epistemic Schizologia and Large Language Models as Techno-Semiotic Machines

Quattrociocchi and colleagues warn that the fluent outputs of large language models may allow linguistic plausibility to substitute for epistemic evaluation, producing the condition they call *Epistemia*: the experience of possessing knowledge without undertaking the practices through which judgment would ordinarily be warranted. This article accepts that diagnosis but challenges its explanatory framework, which compares an embodied, socially situated human knower with an isolated generative model thereby locating epistemic legitimacy in capacities internal to autonomous agents. Drawing on Carlo Sini's philosophy of practices, writing, signs, and technics, we propose instead to understand a large language model (LLM) as a *techno-semiotic machine* that automates a phase of written semiosis by producing plausible linguistic configurations from the sedimented archive of human writing. From this perspective, *Epistemia* is one consequence of a broader phenomenon that we call *epistemic schizologia*: the socio-technical cleavage between signs as linguistically accomplished expressions and signs as moments within socially embedded circuits of interpretation, evidence, criticism, verification, and responsibility. This cleavage is reinforced by *eikotic closure*, through which a plausible continuation is presented with the finality of an epistemic result, and by algorithmic authority and epistemic self-misrecognition. The relevant unit is therefore not the model alone but the complete practice in which generated inscriptions are prompted, interpreted, verified, contested, used, and made consequential. This reframing preserves the distinction between linguistic production and responsible understanding while grounding a design programme centred on inspectable genealogy, contestability, distributed responsibility, epistemic agency, and the evaluation of hybrid human--AIpractices.

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Esperanto: a language made transparent

Language, Subject, Enunciation, Discourse: (Re)Reading Michel Pêcheux in Times of Generative Language Tools

ABSTRACT This article aims to reflect on the functioning of generative language tools, based on the theoretical-methodological framework of materialist discourse analysis, founded on the propositions of Michel Pêcheux. Taking as a starting point the (re)reading of Pêcheux’s work, focusing on the notions of language, subject, enunciation and discourse, it proposes questions about the way in which the processes of production of meanings, theoretically understood as phenomena carried out by/in subjects, are affected by the advancement of chatbots, in their capacity for textual production. In a second moment, based on the analysis of linguistic materiality produced by ChatGPT, it points to the way in which the machine, inscribed in the place of “artificial intelligence,” begins to “inherit” discursive positions arising from texts present in its training, so that the meanings produced in their formulations are anchored in a mapping of dispute processes over meanings that instantiate these positions.

There Is No Spoon: Existential Presupposition in Large Language Models

It is found that while all models show sensitivity to existential presupposition across syntactic embeddings, determiner types and contextual cues, their behaviour differs markedly in strength and systematicity, with NLI-fine-tuned autoregressive models exhibiting the most coherent and stable projection patterns.