According to the externalist view of referential semantic competence in the philosophy of language, language users learn references not by directly interacting with referents (see also: Augustine’s “semantic” version of Meno’s paradox), but by gleaning referential meaning from “linguistic division of labor” or historical-causal chains of usage.
By appealing to externalism, @2024millierePhilosophical reframe the question of how large language models may come to have referential semantic competence as the question of whether LLMs can belong to a linguistic community: “If reference can be determined by a word’s history of use within a linguistic community, then LLMs may inherit referential abilities by being appropriately linked to the causal chain of meaningful word use reflected in their training data.”