Is Language Social Action? A Commentary on Language Agents

Abstract

Recent public and/or intellectual controversies around large language models (LLMs) forcefully demonstrate the relevance of language to social life. In both computer science and computational social science (CSS) research, their development has led to a surge of interest and engagement with the complexity of natural language and its relationship to culture. But what sociological understanding of language can this emergent research draw on? The rise of LLMs — and their use in social simulations of interacting “language agents” — thus renders salient the relatively minor importance attributed to language in many conceptions of social action. Before attempting to imagine a new “social physics” in the age of AI, a far more important task for sociology is to address its fundamental linguistic deficit, which has often been exacerbated by the influence of individualistic theories of action and/or language.