Beyond stochastic parrots: Lacanian reflections on LLMs as superior masters of the symbolic
Synthese June 11, 2026 Lorenzo Magnani
Abstract This article makes the case that, in the Lacanian sense, Large Language Models (LLMs) should be viewed as superior masters of the Symbolic. Thanks to their vast training data and disembodied architecture, LLMs achieve hyper-efficient mastery of the chain of signifiers, outperforming most humans in linguistic, discursive, and inferential tasks. However, precisely because they operate...