Carnap’s Robot Redux: LLMs, Intensional Semantics, and the Implementation Problem in Conceptual Engineering (extended abstract)

In his 1955 essay "Meaning and synonymy in natural languages", Rudolf Carnap presents a thought experiment wherein an investigator provides a hypothetical robot with a definition of a concept together with a description of an individual, and then asks the robot if the individual is in the extension of the concept. In this work, we show how to realize Carnap's Robot through knowledge probing of an large language model (LLM), and argue that this provides a useful cognitive tool for conceptual engineers to compare the extension of a proposed concept definition to the extensional knowledge represented as facts in a given knowledge base, providing a possible solution to the implementation problem in conceptual engineering.