  In a recent paper, Mandelkern & Linzen (2024) - henceforth M&L - address the
question of whether language models' (LMs) words refer. Their argument draws
from the externalist tradition in philosophical semantics, which views
reference as the capacity of words to "achieve 'word-to-world' connections". In
the externalist framework, causally uninterrupted chains of usage, tracing
every occurrence of a name back to its bearer, guarantee that, for example,
'Peano' refers to the individual Peano (Kripke 1980). This account is
externalist both because words pick out referents 'out there' in the world, and
because what determines reference are coordinated linguistic actions by members
of a community, and not individual mental states. The "central question to
ask", for M&L, is whether LMs too belong to human linguistic communities, such
that words by LMs may also trace back causally to their bearers. Their answer
is a cautious "yes": inputs to LMs are linguistic "forms with particular
histories of referential use"; "those histories ground the referents of those
forms"; any occurrence of 'Peano' in LM outputs is as causally connected to the
individual Peano as any other occurrence of the same proper name in human
speech or text; therefore, occurrences of 'Peano' in LM outputs refer to Peano.
In this commentary, we first qualify M&L's claim as applying to a narrow class
of natural language expressions. Thus qualified, their claim is valid, and we
emphasise an additional motivation for that in Section 2. Next, we discuss the
actual scope of their claim, and we suggest that the way they formulate it may
lead to unwarranted generalisations about reference in LMs. Our critique is
likewise applicable to other externalist accounts of LMs (e.g., Lederman &
Mahowald 2024; Mollo & Milliere 2023). Lastly, we conclude with a comment on
the status of LMs as members of human linguistic communities.
