How do we understand machines that talk to us?

About the research initiative

Many scholars rely on Gricean inferentialism (Grice 1957, 1967) as a fundamental aspect of human communication. According to this perspective, understanding verbal utterances, whether spoken or written, involves making inferences to determine the speaker's intended meaning. 

This process requires integrating contextual information and background knowledge with the syntactic structure obtained from parsing sentences. However, this raises a perplexing question: How can we effectively engage in conversational exchanges with individuals who lack communicative intentions, such as LLMs?

Purpose

By combining both theoretical and experimental research, we aim to answer several key questions:

1. Is inferentialism about communication correct for our interactions with LLMs?
2. Is a unified account possible of the interpretation of human and LLM utterances or are they understood in fundamentally different ways?
3. How do children perceive their interactions with LLMs?