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.
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.