Still "Talking About Large Language Models": Some Clarifications

My paper Talking About Large Language Models has more than once been interpreted as advocating a reductionist stance towards large language models. But the paper was not intended that way, and I do not endorse such positions. This short note situates the paper in the context of a larger philosophical project that is concerned with the (mis)use of words rather than metaphysics, in the spirit of Wittgenstein's later writing. In (Shanahan, 2024b), I wrote "[a] bare-bones LLM does not really know anything because all it does, at a fundamental level, is sequence prediction". Looking at that sentence in isolation, a reader might be forgiven for assuming that I am taking some sort of reductionist stance according to which an LLM-based chatbot, such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, is just a next token predictor, where the word "just" here carries great metaphysical weight, and that LLM-based systems therefore do not and cannot have beliefs.