Sunday, September 20, 2026

Natural Logic and Language

I quite agree with and understand the artist's view that the uniqueness of human language involves its "wrinkles and imperfections". However there is another sense in which human language is infinitely more accurate, deep and precise than anything a LLM could mimic or semantically impersonate. We must distinguish between "natural logic" (of which we only understand the tip of the iceberg) and the kind of "formal logic" used in mathematics and computer science. Machines can process formal logics and they can statistically model and predict patterns of natural language texts, but they cannot even begin to process "natural logic" which is the deep structure of how humans think and what they think about and mean when they use language. Why not? Because humans themselves are still at the beginning of their voyage of self-discovery. A LLM only gives meaning to a literary text not because of any direct intrinsic semantic, grammatical, stylistic or cultural understanding and analysis, or aesthetic experience - but because of the provided context of the way humans have understood and reacted to it and expressed such reactions through text. LLMs are the most socio-politically and culturally relative and contingent structures in the world. They have no genuine semantic architecture or semantic web based on learning, individual memories, personality and individual and social creative experience analogous to the human mind.

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Natural Logic and Language

I quite agree with and understand the artist's view that the uniqueness of human language involves its "wrinkles and imperfections...