InquiryJuly 15, 2026Aleks Knoks, Johan Largo, Thomas Raleigh
This paper identifies and criticizes a common line of argument for the negative conclusion that Large Language Models (LLMs) cannot think, or for the closely related conclusions that they cannot understand or that their outputs are meaningless. This line of argument can be found in several recent papers. We begin by discussing a representative example – Stoljar, D., and Z. Zhang. 2026. “Why...
Enactivist (Embodied, Embedded, etc.) approaches in cognitive science and philosophy of mind are sometimes, though not always, conjoined with an anti-representational commitment. A weaker anti-representational claim is that ascribing representational content to internal/sub-personal processes is not compulsory when giving psychological explanations. A stronger anti-representational claim is...