What do calculators tell us about meaning?

October 7, 2024

Abstract: When I use a calculator to tell me that 245 × 46 = 11,270, I learn something that I didn’t know before, even though calculators don’t have any beliefs or knowledge. Even small children know how to count things, and it is through our own capacity to enumerate and count things that we learn basic arithmetic. Calculators do not count things in any sense like we do, yet we can use them to learn arithmetic facts.

Calculators are one a simple example of the growing phenomenon of meaning at the boundary between humans and machines. In this talk I’ll draw out some lessons from recent work using computers to augment human reasoning to help us clarify what we are doing when we’re making claims about the world and trying to reason about them.

• This talk was a presentation at the University of St Andrews PhilSoc (the undergraduate Philosophy Student Society).