WORK
The Language Animal (Work)
Taylor's 2016 book on the constitutive role of language in human thought — the most sustained philosophical case against the computational model of mind that underlies large language models, developed decades before such models became operational.
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (Harvard University Press, 2016) is Taylor's culmination of decades of work on the philosophy of language. Its central argument is that the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition has misunderstood language by treating it designatively — as a system of signs pointing to pre-existing meanings. Taylor reconstructs the alternative constitutive tradition descending from Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt, arguing that language does not merely describe reality but brings meanings into being through the act of expression. The book is not explicitly about AI, but its argument has become acutely relevant to the AI age because it identifies precisely what large language models do (the designative) and precisely what they cannot do (the constitutive).
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's philosophical framework develops the distinction between designative and constitutive language across five hundred pages of sustained argument. Taylor traces the designative tradition through