Language model understanding could still be reconciled with internalism about meaning if we conceptualize text itself as a form of sensory input. Like sense dat

Language model understanding could still be reconciled with internalism about meaning if we conceptualize text itself as a form of sensory input. Like sense data, text is ultimately caused by external reality. The language model "perceives" reality through text. Indeed, modern multimodal language models like Gemini treat text similar to pictures or audio. The conceptual difference between text and usual sensory input is that the causal story that produces the text is much more complex than the causal story that produces, say, photos. Photons bouncing off objects and hitting the retina or a CCD sensor, a very simple mechanism. For text the mechanism involves intelligent humans writing it down, so the relation to reality is much more indirect. So inferring an internal world model from text is much harder than from pictures. Then again, language models are trained on a lot of text, much more than a human could ever read.