Workshop: the LLM as an interpreter of semantics
Goal
Work out whether a language model can be modelled as an interpreter of semantics the way an abstract machine models a computer: a device that takes representations whose semantics nobody has formally assigned and behaves as if they had one. The sketch holds the current material: the semantic-work definition, the option space, the forces, and the stress tests. What it lacks is the function. A functional definition would state the domain (a representation, its context, a question), the codomain (a reading: commitments, open alternatives, relevant consequences with their premises, proposals marked as proposals; for an instruction, a selection among operations), the correctness relation (the reading equals the representation's objective content under the context, in Popper's sense), and the resource bound that makes the function partial. The correctness clause is the load-bearing stipulation and the open problem.
Posed by the operator on 2026-09-14 in the theory-builder workshop and separated on 2026-09-17 with the operator's direction that it is too experimental for anything existing to depend on it. No library definition, instruction, or reference artifact rests on this device, and none may until this workshop closes with an adopted definition. The theory builder records a failure without attributing it; the fence note says attribution needs its own evidence and names no standard.
What closes the workshop
- A functional definition with the four parts above, or a recorded decision that none is available and the sketch is dropped.
- The stress tests in the sketch worked through against that definition, with expected results recorded so a candidate can fail them.
- Either promotion as a design proposal, once the definition is finished and something would consume it, or deletion with the reason in the closing commit.
Evaluation boundary
The sketch as moved here and the notes it cites. The theory-refinement-interface workshop owns the operations a refinement machinery implements; this workshop does not define the interpreter through those operations, since the question here is the device, not the machinery that uses it.
Write scope while open: this directory only.
Complete file listing (generated at build time)