Language models imply world models

In a recent article about John Haugeland's rejection of micro-worlds I claimed: as a “Large Language Model”, Claude necessarily includes a model of the world in general Nobody has objected to this remark, but I would like to expand on it. The claim may or may not be true — it is an empirical question. But as a theory it has been widely entertained since the very earliest days of digital computers. Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, the first person to seriously investigate machine translation, came to this conclusion in the 1950s. Here's an extract of Haugeland's discussion of his work: In 1951 Yehoshua Bar-Hillel became the first person to earn a living from work on machine translation. Nine years later he was the first to point out the fatal flaw in the whole enterprise, and therefore to abandon it. Bar-Hillel proposed a simple test sentence: The box was in the pen. And, for discussion, he considered only the ambiguity: (1) pen = a writing instrument; versus (2) pen = a child's play enclosure.…