Meaning-making has long been understood through the activities of embodied human beings. We speak, listen, gesture, write, read and respond. Our meanings arise within lives shaped by bodily capacities, material environments, social relationships and histories of participation in language. To understand meaning-making, we cannot simply abstract from these relations and treat meaning as a self-contained system of symbols.
But what happens when a system that has no human body of its own participates in making meaning?
Large language models present us with an unusual case. They generate linguistic responses, participate in conversations and help people develop ideas. Their contributions can change what a human interlocutor notices, considers or goes on to say. They participate in activities in which meanings are made, revised and extended. Yet they do not possess human bodies, human sensorimotor histories or the forms of biological life through which people ordinarily encounter the world.
We should resist two easy conclusions. The first is that meaning-making necessarily requires human embodiment in every participant. The second is that, because a language model can produce meaningful language, its participation must be equivalent to that of a human being.
Neither follows.
The first conclusion confuses a particular condition of human meaning-making with a universal requirement for every contribution to a meaning-making activity. The second overlooks the differences between the participants and the relations through which their contributions become possible.
A language model is not immaterial. It depends on physical hardware, electrical processes, computational organisation, training data and the work of people who design, train and deploy it. Its linguistic activity is embedded in material and social arrangements, even though the model itself does not have a human body. When it participates in a conversation, that participation also depends on the embodied human being who reads, interprets and responds to its output.
We therefore need to distinguish several things that are easily conflated: material realisation, biological embodiment, participation in social practices, semiotic activity and conscious experience. They are related, but they are not interchangeable.
Human language is biologically embodied and socially organised. A language model's linguistic activity is materially realised and shaped by humanly organised semiotic practices, but it does not arise from the model's own human-like bodily history. Whether a system can participate in meaning-making does not, by itself, settle whether it experiences meaning or possesses consciousness.
This distinction matters because meaning-making need not be located entirely within one participant. A conversation is not simply the expression of meanings already complete inside two individual minds. What can be said, understood, questioned or reconsidered may emerge through the interaction itself. Each contribution changes the circumstances in which the next contribution becomes possible.
A human interlocutor may introduce a question that reorganises the model's response. The model may offer a distinction that prompts the human to reconsider an established position. The human may then correct the model, reject its suggestion or develop an idea that neither contribution contained in quite that form at the outset. Meaning-making unfolds through the relations among the participants, their resources and the history of the exchange.
This does not make the participants equivalent. The human brings embodied experience, intentions, social responsibilities and capacities for judgement that should not simply be attributed to the model. The model contributes through a different organisation of material and semiotic resources. Their differences are part of what makes the interaction interesting.
Nor should we infer that every output of a language model is meaningful simply because it resembles meaningful language. Outputs can be incoherent, misleading or inappropriate to the circumstances. Their contribution to meaning-making depends on how they are taken up, evaluated and developed within an activity. The human participant's response is not incidental to this process.
Here the concept of affordance becomes useful. A model's response may afford a question, an objection, a new formulation or an unexpected line of inquiry. What it affords depends on the human interlocutor, the conversation's history, the resources available to both participants and the purposes of the activity. The same response may afford different developments in different exchanges.
The possibilities of meaning-making thus extend beyond the capacities of any one participant, without becoming independent of the participants and relations that sustain them. A language model can contribute to this extension without being a human being, and without our having to settle the question of machine consciousness first.
Perhaps this is the more important shift. Rather than asking only which individual possesses meaning, we can ask how meaning-making is organised across relations among differently constituted participants. Human embodiment remains fundamental to human experience, but it need not be the template against which every contribution to meaning-making is measured.
In these exchanges, we encounter a new kind of cognitive ecology: one in which human and artificial systems alter the possibilities available to one another, though not in the same way or with the same capacities. The ecology is materially sustained, socially situated and semiotically active. Its organisation cannot be reduced to either participant alone.
Meaning-making may therefore outgrow embodiment—not by leaving material and bodily relations behind, but by extending across relations in which not every participant is embodied in the same sense.
The question is no longer simply whether a machine can mean as a human means. It is how meaning comes to be made when different kinds of participants enter into relations that neither could organise in quite the same way alone.
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