Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Integrationism
autogenerative theory
prospective openness
semiotic continuity
language archive
How Do I Know What to Say Next? Barenholtz's Autogenerative Theory as an Enrichment of Harrisean Integrationism
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses key limitations in Harrisian integrational linguistics, particularly its insufficient account of the anticipatory openness of signs, the continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic activity, and the structural nature of archives formed through historically situated integrational acts. To overcome these shortcomings, the project innovatively incorporates Baron-Holz’s autopoietic theory of language, proposing a novel framework that synthesizes integrational and autopoietic perspectives. This integrated approach not only offers a robust structural explanation for the aforementioned issues but also elucidates the statistical foundations underpinning large language models and their inherent constraints. Crucially, it preserves the integrationalist ontological primacy of contextualized language use, thereby establishing a philosophical grounding and design principles for natural language processing.
📝 Abstract
Roy Harris's Integrationist linguistics offers a compelling critique of the referentialist tradition embedded deep at the heart of computational approaches to language, arguing that language is not a code that maps onto a pre-given world but a situated, bipartite activity oriented toward prospective joint action. Yet Integrationism leaves certain explanatory gaps: it does not fully account for the structural mechanism by which signs sustain prospective openness, it undertheorises the continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic activity, and it offers no detailed account of the structural properties of the accumulated archive of past integrations. This paper argues that Elan Barenholtz's autogenerative theory of language, developed in response to the behaviour of Large Language Models (LLMs), can fill precisely these gaps, enriching Integrationism without undermining any of its core commitments. Specifically, the autogenerative account provides: a structural mechanism for the prospective openness that Harris identifies as central to bipartite communication; a computational correlate for Harris's thesis of semiotic continuity between language and other sign-making activity; and a theory of the archive: what the accumulated residue of past integrations looks like and how new participants draw upon it. The synthesis preserves Harris's ontological primacy of the situated integrative act while adding explanatory content that Integrationism itself does not supply. For practitioners and researchers in natural language processing and large language model design, the argument offers a principled account of what the statistical structure that LLMs so effectively exploit actually is, and of what it cannot, by its nature, provide.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
autogenerative theory
Integrationism
prospective openness
semiotic continuity
language models
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