@article{ostertag-2025-language,
    title = "Language Models and Externalism: A Reply to Mandelkern and {L}inzen",
    author = "Ostertag, Gary",
    journal = "Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "51",
    month = jun,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-07/2025.cl-2.8/",
    doi = "10.1162/coli_a_00551",
    pages = "651--659",
    abstract = "Do texts generated by language models (LMs) refer? Mandelkern and Linzen (2024) argue that externalist principles point to an affirmative conclusion. What grounds reference, according to their externalism, is a term{'}s ``natural history''. For example, `water' refers to H2O among English speakers, and not to the phenomenally indistinguishable chemical XYZ, because H2O, and not XYZ, is implicated in the natural history of `water'. Appealing to the literature on contrastive explanation, I show that a term{'}s natural history does not generally ground its referential properties. Thus, Mandelkern and Linzen{'}s quick route to the referentiality of LM-generated texts fails."
}