Creative Minds Like Ours? Large Language Models and the "How" of Human Linguistic Creativity
Vincent Carchidi
October 2024
 

Descartes famously constructed a language test to determine the existence of other minds. The test made critical observations about how humans use language that purportedly distinguishes them from animals and machines. These observations were carried into the generative (and later biolinguistic) enterprise under what Chomsky in his Cartesian Linguistics, terms the “creative aspect of language use” (CALU). CALU refers to the stimulus-free, unbounded, yet appropriate use of language—a tripartite depiction whose function in biolinguistics is to highlight a species-specific form of intellectual freedom. This paper argues that CALU provides a set of facts that have significant downstream effects on explanatory theory-construction. These include the internalist orientation of linguistics, the invocation of a competence-performance distinction, and the postulation of a generative language faculty that makes possible—but does not explain—CALU. It contrasts the biolinguistic approach to CALU with the recent wave of enthusiasm for the use of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) as tools, models, or theories of human language, arguing that such uses neglect these fundamental insights to their detriment. It argues that, in the absence of replication, identification, or accounting of CALU, LLMs do not match the explanatory depth of the biolinguistic framework, thereby limiting their theoretical usefulness.
Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/007719
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Biolinguistics
keywords: cartesian linguistics; computational modeling; creative aspect of language use; generative linguistics; large language models
previous versions: v4 [October 2024]
v3 [February 2024]
v2 [February 2024]
v1 [November 2023]
Downloaded:1024 times

 

[ edit this article | back to article list ]