CONCEPT
Form and Meaning
Emily Bender’s foundational distinction between the observable structure of language—marks, sounds, sequences of characters—and meaning, which is the relation between that structure and something outside it: the world, the intentions of a speaker, the situation being described.
Form is the observable substance of language: the marks on a page, the sounds in the air, the sequences of characters in a dataset. Meaning is what those forms are connected to—the world they describe, the intentions they carry, the understanding they create between people.
Emily M. Bender’s foundational claim, argued most carefully in her 2020 paper with Alexander Koller, is that these two things are genuinely different and that the difference does not dissolve no matter how much form you accumulate. A system trained on text and only text has been trained on form and only form: the staggering quantities of human expression that entered its training were stripped of the situations in which that language was originally used. The intentions, the knowledge, the listeners in mind—none of that accompanied the words into the dataset. What entered the machine was the residue, the patterns, the form. And from form the machine learns to produce more form.