Josh Dever

Making AI Intelligible

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021 · 90 citations

Abstract Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? One aim of Making AI Intelligible is to show that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Cappelen and Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy of to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they also show ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved: our linguistic encounters with AIs revel that our theories of meani…

On the Uselessness of the Distinction between Ideal and Non-Ideal Theory (at least in the Philosophy of Language)

Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 46 citations

Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever consider whether we can distinguish between ideal and Non-Ideal Philosophy of Language in the way that a philosopher like Charles Mills does for political philosophy. They argue that there is no deep distinction between the sort of philosophy collected in this volume and the more mainstream material.

Preliminary Scouting Reports from the Outer Limits of Conceptual Engineering

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 16 citations

Abstract If we distinguish between the conceptual engineering task of determining what concepts can be built and the conceptual ethics task of determining what concepts ought to be used once built, we make clear the possibility of a conceptual maximalist position that avoids conceptual ethics by holding that the norms of theorizing require a big theory including all truths expressible using any concepts. But the conceptual maximalist then assumes the burden of saying what the range of possible c…

Making AI Intelligible: Philosophical Foundations

arXiv (Cornell University) · 2024-06-12 · 7 citations

Can humans and artificial intelligences share concepts and communicate? 'Making AI Intelligible' shows that philosophical work on the metaphysics of meaning can help answer these questions. Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever use the externalist tradition in philosophy to create models of how AIs and humans can understand each other. In doing so, they illustrate ways in which that philosophical tradition can be improved. The questions addressed in the book are not only theoretically interesting, but…

AI with Alien Content and Alien Metasemantics

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-05-22 · 3 citations

Abstract AlphaGo1 plays chess and Go in a creative and novel way. It is natural for us to attribute contents to it, such as that it doesn’t view being several pawns behind, if it has more board space, as bad. The framework introduced in Cappelen and Dever (2021) provides a way of thinking about the semantics and the metasemantics of AI content: does AlphaGo entertain contents like this, and if so, in virtue of what does a given state of the program mean that particular content? One salient quest…