Research Project

He will spend time at the Archiv in summer 2026 working on his monograph, Meaning Without Language: A Phenomenological Account of Sense, Understanding, and the Challenge of AI. The book challenges philosophy’s long-held assumption that meaning is essentially linguistic, taking generative artificial intelligence as the wake-up call. If meaning belongs essentially to language, AI may already be able to mean and understand. We rightly respond to this challenge by appealing to the meaningfulness of our experience, but views in the philosophy of language since the linguistic turn suggest that, except via language, experience does not carry meaning. The book seeks to correct this blind spot by distinguishing between meaning as such and meaning in language. Drawing on ideas from phenomenology—especially the later Husserl—the book argues that the primary bearers of meaning are acts of intentionality; meaning is ultimately a matter of aboutness, and the directedness of the subject’s embodied experience of the world is the most basic form of referring. Adapting ideas from the later Wittgenstein, Meaning Without Language argues that the success conditions for intentional acts are not only perceptual but also public, normative, and socially constituted; Wittgenstein correctly saw the embeddedness of meaning in forms of life, but intentional acts, not language use, is the bedrock. By expanding the scope of the theory of meaning, the book shows why current AI systems (especially Large Language Models) do not yet possess meaning and understanding despite their linguistic capacities.