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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9323738" data-attributes="member: 42582">I mean, this is a problem for human beings as well. Circa three hundred years ago, there were people confidently asserting that combustion is a phlogiston-dependent phenomenon. And, without pushing too hard against board rules, I'm sure you're aware of many contemporary examples of large numbers of human confidently and sincerely affirming falsehoods.The reason that people can tell the difference between truth and falsehood - when they can - is not because of their mastery of semantics as well as syntax, but because of their mastery of evidence. It's quite a while (close to 30 years) since I worked on these issues; but I think a couple of points can be made.First, what Quine called occasion sentences must be pretty important. These can be identified by syntax, I think, at least to a significant extent. But AI doesn't have epistemic access to the occasions of their utterance.Second, when it comes to what Quine called eternal sentences, human being closely correlate their credence to these with their credence to the speaker. My understanding of the way these AI models "learn" is that speaker identity does not figure into it, and that they are not grouping sentences in speaker-relative bundles. So eg they might note that sentences about the moon are often correlated with sentences about NASA, but (as I understand it) they don't weight sentences about the moon in terms of their production by NASA compared to Wallace (who travels with Gromit to the moon because their larder is empty of cheese).I'm definitely not an expert in AI, and as I said I'm out of date in epistemological literature. But on the face of it, these problems of warrant seem more significant than the issue of semantics vs syntax.Right. Which is not a problem in linguistics (syntax vs semantics). It's a problem in epistemology (evidence/warrant).</blockquote>

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