Rethinking Illocutionary Force in the Age of AI

Neri Marsili (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)

I would like to draw your attention to the following online philosophy seminar series, hosting by the Center for International Philosophy at Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai this semester.

On June 6th, 4pm China Standard Time, Neri Marsili (UNED, Madrid), will be presenting a talk titled "Rethinking Illocutionary Force in the Age of AI."

Attendance is free.

Please register for the event by sending an email to [email protected] for the Zoom link and password.

Abstract: Can LLMs perform genuine illocutionary acts, like assertions? Academics disagree. A key driver of this dispute, I will argue, is an underlying disagreement about what illocutionary force requires. Rather than insisting on a particular conception, I will review different theories, showing how each can be extended from human communication to machine communication. Artificial utterances, I will argue, satisfy different conceptions of force to different degrees. This pluralist approach better acknowledges our conflicting intuitions about machine communication: it explains precisely why we feel that there is some sense in which LLMs perform speech acts, and some sense in which they don't.

Bio: Neri Marsili is a researcher at UNED, in Madrid, where he leads the interdisciplinary project "IDANOC". He is a member of METIS, LOGOS, BIAP, and of the original Cogito research group. 

His primary research concerns (in)sincere communication and communicative norms. More generally, he is interested in philosophy of language (especially pragmatics and speech act theory), social epistemology (testimony, online communication), aesthetics (philosophy of literature), ethics (norms), and experimental philosophy.

He is currently putting together a book manuscript on sincerity and insincerity.