Beyond Hooking Onto the World: Referential Profiles and the Numerical Structure of LLM Grounding

Abstract

This paper revisits the grounding problem for large language models in light of recent vector-grounding accounts. I accept the shift from classical symbol grounding to vector grounding, but argue that the current debate remains incomplete in two respects. First, reference is often treated too thinly, as if it were a fixed link between an isolated expression and an object. I argue instead that reference is profile-based, context-sensitive, discourse-level, affectively shaped, and norm-governed. Even in the human case, reference is publicly stabilized through patterns of use, correction, distinction, inference, and continuation rather than through identical private representations. Second, vector grounding requires an account of numerical realization. LLMs do not acquire reference through human perception, memory, intention, embodiment, or understanding. Rather, through optimization, they parameterize linguistic traces of human world-directed practice. In a finite vector system, referential profiles must be distributed, may be superposed, and are recovered through context-sensitive computation. Weights, activations, attention-mediated hidden states, softmax-trained contrasts, and inner-product alignments are the mathematical sites at which inherited linguistic relations become stable and causally active. Mechanistic interpretability findings, including entity-like features, knowledge neurons, and emotion-related activation directions, provide indirect support for this view. They do not show that LLMs possess human reference. They support a more limited thesis: LLMs may possess derivative, language-mediated, profile-based, and numerically structured forms of reference.