CONCEPT
Designative vs Constitutive Language
Taylor's distinction between language that points to pre-existing meanings and language that brings meanings into being through the act of expression — the distinction that separates what large language models do from what human articulation does.
In The Language Animal (2016), Taylor distinguishes two fundamentally different conceptions of language. The designative view, descending from Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac, treats language as a system of signs pointing to pre-existing meanings — a tool for transmitting information about a world whose features are settled independently of the vocabulary used to describe them. The constitutive view, descending from Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt, holds that language brings meanings into existence through the act of expression — that human practices produce the significance they express, creating moral and cultural realities that did not exist before the practice began. Large language models embody the designative view with extraordinary power. The constitutive function of language remains something only human beings perform, because it requires the biographical, moral, and embodied situation that the model does not possess.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction has enormous consequences for how one understands what happens when Claude produces