A shorter-term intermediate question is: what even is the input set (i.e. domain) and output set (i.e. range) of the semantics box? Its inputs are natural language, but what about the outputs?
Because you are making the assumption that the important semantic content is inter-operable, and you’re assuming this interoperable content is mediated entirely through language (Carol doesn’t get to EG demonstrate how to tie shoelaces visually), It seems like Alice should be able to tell people what she understood Carol to mean.
In other words, it seems like your framework implies that you can use language itself as the representation without losing anything. Yes, an utterance will have many equivalent paraphrasings; IE the magic box is not a 1-1 function. It can be very lossy. However, the magic box should not add information. So the semantic content Y can be represented by one of the utterances X which would land on it.
If the magic box does add information (EG, if Carol says ‘apple’, Alice always imagines a specific color of apple, and does so randomly so that information is really added in an infotheoretic sense) … well, I suppose that can happen, but we’ve violated the assumption that the magic box is a function, and also I think something has gone wrong in terms of Alice trying to understand Carol (Alice should understand that the apple could be any color).
I don’t think this is quite right? Most of the complexity of the box is supposed to be learned in an unsupervised way from non-language data (like e.g. visual data). If someone hasn’t already done all that unsupervised learning, then they don’t “know what’s in the box”, so they don’t know how to extract semantics from words.
I don’t disagree with this point. I don’t see how it undermines the idea that all of the semantic content of language can be represented via language. (I’m not sure what you understood me to be saying, such that this objection of yours felt relevant.)
I’m not claiming that our mental representations of semantic content “are” linguistic, or that they “come from” language. I’m just saying that we can use language to represent them.
Importantly, it is also possible that there are forms of mental content which are very difficult or even impossible to communicate with language alone, like perhaps thoughts about knot-tying. I am only claiming that the output of the magic box described here can necessarily be represented linguistically.
Because you are making the assumption that the important semantic content is inter-operable, and you’re assuming this interoperable content is mediated entirely through language (Carol doesn’t get to EG demonstrate how to tie shoelaces visually), It seems like Alice should be able to tell people what she understood Carol to mean.
In other words, it seems like your framework implies that you can use language itself as the representation without losing anything. Yes, an utterance will have many equivalent paraphrasings; IE the magic box is not a 1-1 function. It can be very lossy. However, the magic box should not add information. So the semantic content Y can be represented by one of the utterances X which would land on it.
If the magic box does add information (EG, if Carol says ‘apple’, Alice always imagines a specific color of apple, and does so randomly so that information is really added in an infotheoretic sense) … well, I suppose that can happen, but we’ve violated the assumption that the magic box is a function, and also I think something has gone wrong in terms of Alice trying to understand Carol (Alice should understand that the apple could be any color).
I don’t think this is quite right? Most of the complexity of the box is supposed to be learned in an unsupervised way from non-language data (like e.g. visual data). If someone hasn’t already done all that unsupervised learning, then they don’t “know what’s in the box”, so they don’t know how to extract semantics from words.
I don’t disagree with this point. I don’t see how it undermines the idea that all of the semantic content of language can be represented via language. (I’m not sure what you understood me to be saying, such that this objection of yours felt relevant.)
I’m not claiming that our mental representations of semantic content “are” linguistic, or that they “come from” language. I’m just saying that we can use language to represent them.
Importantly, it is also possible that there are forms of mental content which are very difficult or even impossible to communicate with language alone, like perhaps thoughts about knot-tying. I am only claiming that the output of the magic box described here can necessarily be represented linguistically.