1. The New Temptation
By this point, a reasonable reader may feel a residual resistance. Granted, large language models do not mean in the human sense. Granted, they operate over distributions rather than intentions. But surely, one might insist, they take context into account. Surely they are context‑sensitive. Surely they respond differently depending on situation.
This insistence is understandable. It is also where the final and most persistent category error quietly re‑enters.
Yes: LLMs condition on context.
No: this does not amount to situated meaning.
The task of this post is to make that distinction unavoidable.
2. What “Context” Means in LLM Discourse
In technical discourse around LLMs, context has a precise and unromantic meaning. It refers to:
the current prompt string,
the accumulated token history of the interaction,
windowed access to prior text,
learned weightings shaped by earlier corpora.
Context, here, is not a situation. It is not a setting. It is not a perspective. It is a structured input space within which probability mass is redistributed.
Nothing is perceived. Nothing is attended to. Nothing is taken as relevant.
There is only conditioning.
3. Conditioning Is Not Situation
This distinction is decisive.
Conditioning narrows a distribution. Situation constitutes a world.
No increase in scale, no refinement of architecture, and no accumulation of prompt history converts one into the other. Conditioning does not approach situation asymptotically. It remains ontologically distinct at every grain.
A system may be exquisitely sensitive to patterns of co‑occurrence without ever encountering a situation. It may respond differently across contexts without being in any of them.
This is not a limitation of present systems. It is a categorical boundary.
4. The Slide: From Conditioning to Soft Determination
The error usually reappears in softened language:
“the context guides the response”
“the model adapts to the situation”
“the system understands what’s going on here”
Each phrase performs the same quiet move. Conditioning is redescribed as orientation. Statistical restriction is redescribed as responsiveness. Context is smuggled back in as situation.
Once this slide occurs, meaning seems to follow naturally. If the system is already situated, then meaning merely needs to be granted.
But the premise is false. The slide is rhetorical, not theoretical.
5. Why This Error Persists
The persistence of this confusion is not accidental.
Human meaning is always situated. Our acts of meaning are inseparable from lived context, from answerability, from the irreversibility of perspective. When linguistic output mirrors the surface structure of such acts — fluency, relevance, turn‑taking — we project situation where only structure exists.
LLMs are compelling precisely because they reproduce the trace of situatedness without its instantiation.
They generate the appearance of context‑sensitive action while remaining entirely within second‑order patterning.
This is the “almost” that misleads.
6. The Relational Cut Restated
The relational ontology enforces a clean cut:
Context‑as‑conditioning is structural.
Context‑as‑experienced is phenomenal.
Meaning occurs only in first‑order acts within the latter.
LLMs instantiate none of these acts. They neither occupy situations nor construe them. They do not answer. They do not stand in relation.
They condition.
7. What LLMs Actually Teach Us About Context
Properly understood, LLMs are not a threat to theories of meaning. They are a diagnostic instrument.
They show how much linguistic behaviour can be shaped by conditioning alone — and, by contrast, what conditioning can never supply. They clarify the limits of context when stripped of experience, perspective, and answerability.
Context matters. But never in the same way twice.
Context conditions. Acts answer. Meaning happens.
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