Coupled Semantic System

A coupled semantic system is a dynamical system composed of two or more interacting subsystems — typically a linguistic expression system and one or more interpreting cognitive systems — whose semantic properties arise from their coupling rather than from either subsystem in isolation. The meaning of an utterance in such a system is not a property of the utterance itself but a property of the transaction between utterance and interpreter, modulated by the feedback loops that connect them.

The concept extends emergent semantics by making the relational nature of meaning explicit. In a coupled semantic system, the state space includes not only the expressions produced but also the interpretive states they trigger, and the dynamics describe how these states co-evolve through interaction. The system's behavior is governed by feedback topology: which expressions reach which interpreters, how those interpreters respond, and how their responses reshape future expressions.

This framework has direct application to large language models, which are often described as "understanding" or "meaning" things. The coupled semantic system perspective reframes this: an LLM does not possess semantic properties independently of its users. It is one component of a coupled semantic system, and the "meaning" of its outputs is a property of the full coupling — model, prompt, interpreter, and context — not of the model alone. The alignment problem, on this view, is a problem of semantic coupling: shaping the model so that the interpretive attractors it generates in human users are the ones we want.