Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever, A Hyper-Externalist Manifesto for LLMs - PhilArchive
A Hyper-Externalist Manifesto for LLMs Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever In Herman Cappelen & Rachel Sterken, Communicating with AI: Philosophical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming) Copy BIBTEX Abstract The development of externalism—the thesis that mental and linguistic content is determined by factors outside the agent—was a landmark achievement in 20th-century philosophy. Yet, contemporary debates about Large Language Models (LLMs) are dominated by a resurgent, often unreflective, internalism that seeks to locate meaning "under the hood" in model weights and architecture. This paper challenges this internalist paradigm. First, it extends classic externalist frameworks (from Kripke, Putnam, Evans, etc.) to non-human systems like LLMs through a proposed method of "de-anthropocentric abstraction." Second, it introduces and defends hyperexternalism: the radical thesis that external factors determine not only the content of an LLM's outputs, but also its structura