Do LLMs gain true linguistic agency through integration?
Explores whether LLMs can develop genuine linguistic agency—the capacity to be embodied, stake-bearing participants in meaning-making—as they become embedded in human language practices, or whether this requires fundamental architectural changes.
Two theoretical frameworks reach apparently contradictory conclusions about LLM language use. The Understanding AI (Schneider 2024) view: LLM social grounding increases gradually as LLMs are integrated into linguistic practices — analogous to children acquiring language community membership through participation. The more LLMs function as communicative partners, the more elementary social grounding they acquire. The enactive view ("Large Models of What?" 2024): linguistic agency requires embodiment, participation, and precariousness — properties "likely incompatible in principle with current architectures." The absence is categorical.
The apparent contradiction dissolves when the two views are recognized as naming different properties:
Social grounding (Schneider): a functional-social property acquired through participation in language games (Wittgenstein). It is relational — a matter of how the LLM is positioned in discourse practices by the communities that use it. This can increase through integration because the positioning changes even if the LLM does not.
Linguistic agency (enactive view): a constitutive property requiring the agent to be embedded in a world through a body, to have stakes in communicative outcomes (precariousness), and to participate in meaning-making as a reciprocal process. This cannot increase through integration because integration changes how others relate to the LLM, not whether the LLM has a body or precarious existence.
Both can be simultaneously true: LLMs acquire more social grounding as they are integrated AND remain categorically non-linguistic-agents in the enactive sense. The first is a claim about community practices; the second is a claim about constitutive architecture.
Since Does semantic grounding in language models come in degrees?, this distinction maps onto the grounding taxonomy: social grounding is the dimension that increases through use; enactive linguistic agency is the dimension that requires architectural change no amount of use can provide.
Inquiring lines that read this note 37
This note is a source for these research framings, grouped by the broader line of inquiry each explores. Scan the bold lines of inquiry; follow any specific question forward.
Can AI systems participate in genuine communication or only simulate it?- Can secondary orality exist without any embodied human participant at all?
- Can we develop competent reading practices for disembodied orality?
- Can you separate grammatical competence from rhetorical commitment in language systems?
- How does communicative standing depend on participation in normative communities?
- Does embodiment and interaction matter for linguistic competence beyond pattern learning?
- What makes social grounding different from constitutive linguistic agency?
- What's the difference between formal and functional linguistic competence?
- Does language shape how speakers understand themselves and their agency?
- Do children gradually acquire the full capacity for assertion through developmental stages?
- How does enactive theory define language differently than computational linguistics?
- Can linguistic agency exist without embodiment and real-world participation?
- What makes linguistic agency impossible for systems without embodiment?
- Why does shared practice matter for meaning to take hold?
- Does embodiment matter for genuine linguistic agency?
- What role does failure and vulnerability play in real linguistic practice?
- How does embodiment affect whether LLMs can participate in Wittgensteinian language games?
- How does embodiment relate to whether something can have a persistent identity?
- What does embodiment and precariousness mean for linguistic agency?
- Does Habermas's strategic action framework explain LLM dialogue behavior?
- Can LLMs participate meaningfully in discourse without consciousness or understanding?
- Does social integration of LLMs increase their capacity to influence technological futures?
- Why do LLMs presume common ground instead of building it?
- Do LLMs build common ground or assume it already exists?
- Does community integration change LLM properties or only relational positioning?
- Do LLMs have functional linguistic competence or only formal language ability?
- Can LLMs develop genuine understanding without embodied experience?
- Is the distinction between pretense and realization meaningful for LLMs?
- Does LLM vocabulary become the cultural lexicon for how we think?
- Is the boundary between human communication and LLM language production truly sharp or gradual?
Related concepts in this collection 3
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Can LLMs acquire social grounding through linguistic integration?
Explores whether LLMs gradually develop social grounding as they become embedded in human language practices, analogous to child language acquisition. Tests whether grounding is a fixed property or an outcome of participatory use.
the gradual-acquisition pole; social grounding as relational property
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What makes linguistic agency impossible for language models?
From an enactive perspective, does linguistic agency require embodied participation and real stakes that LLMs fundamentally lack? This matters because it challenges whether LLMs can truly engage in language or only generate text.
the categorical-absence pole; linguistic agency as constitutive property
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Does semantic grounding in language models come in degrees?
Rather than asking whether LLMs truly understand meaning, this explores whether grounding is actually a multi-dimensional spectrum. The question matters because it reframes the sterile understand/don't-understand debate into measurable, distinct capacities.
provides the framework: the two poles correspond to different grounding dimensions, not competing claims about the same thing
Related papers in this collection 8
Papers most semantically related to this note, ranked by cosine similarity in the embedding space.
- “Understanding AI”: Semantic Grounding in Large Language Models
- Large Models of What? Mistaking Engineering Achievements for Human Linguistic Agency
- Grounding Gaps in Language Model Generations
- Conversational Alignment with Artificial Intelligence in Context
- Mapping the Emerging Social Science of Large Language Models
- Can LLMs Ground when they (Don't) Know: A Study on Direct and Loaded Political Questions
- Computational structuralism: Toward a formal theory of meaning in the age of digital intelligence
- A Comparative Study of MCP and A2A for Inter-Agent Coordination in LLM-Based Systems
Original note title
social grounding and linguistic agency are distinct properties — llms acquire more of the former through integration while categorically lacking the latter