Whereas instrumental knowledge, properly understood, is ‘difference-making’ knowledge that supports causal intervention [5–9], the capacity to guess what comes next, no matter how robust, is no such ability. - Noë, Thompson
Despite these considerations, Yildirim
and Paul [1] entertain the hypothesis
that LLMs could build ‘worldly knowledge’
out of what they call ‘instrumental
knowledge’, analyzed as success in the
next token generation, in particular ‘task
domains’. This is a misleading characterization
of ‘instrumental knowledge’. The
term is typically used to refer precisely
not to statistical or associative learning,
but rather, by contrast, to knowledge
achieved by humans and other animals
on the basis of appreciating contingencies
between their actions and outcomes
(e.g., operant conditioning) [4]. Whereas
instrumental knowledge, properly understood,
is ‘difference-making’ knowledge
that supports causal intervention [5–9],
the capacity to guess what comes next,
no matter how robust, is no such ability.
No amount of prediction, from a set of
observations no matter how large, can
support the grasp of the notion of ‘making’,
‘generating’, or ‘doing’ that is the basis of
our world knowledge.
References
- Yildirim, I. and Paul, L.A. (2024) From task structures to
world models: what do LLMs know? Trends Cogn. Sci.
28, 404–415
- Noë, A. (2023) The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy
Make Us Who We Are, Princeton University Press
- Frank, A. et al. (2024) The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot
Ignore Human Experience, MIT Press
- Dickinson, A. (1994) Instrumental conditioning. In Animal
Learning and Cognition (Mackintosh, N.J., ed.), pp. 45–79,
Academic Press
- Goddu, M. and Gopnik, A. (2024) The development of
human causal learning and reasoning. Nat. Rev. Psychol.
3, 319–339
- Pearl, J. and Mackenzie, D. (2018) The Book of Why: The
New Science of Cause and Effect, Basic Books
- Pearl, J. (2009) Causality, Cambridge University Press
- Woodward, J. (2007) Interventionist theories of causation
in psychological perspective. In Causal Learning:
Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation (Gopnik, A.
and Schulz, L., eds), pp. 19–36, Oxford University Press
- Woodward, J. (2021) Causation with a Human Face:
Normative Theory and Descriptive Psychology, Oxford
University Press