The machine has no reference for its terms, "salt" does not refer.
To a machine "salt" is just a distributional pattern within a large body of text, it isnt salt.
Ie., what computer scientists call "semantics" is again metaphorical BS, as much as calling an if-statement a "decision maker".
Denotation is the most fundamental part of what a natural language is (ie., it is about the world, and caused by the world in a fundamental way). Machines processing terms without their denotations are not using language, they are shuffling it aorund.
To a machine "salt" is just a distributional pattern within a large body of text, it isnt salt.
Ie., what computer scientists call "semantics" is again metaphorical BS, as much as calling an if-statement a "decision maker".
Denotation is the most fundamental part of what a natural language is (ie., it is about the world, and caused by the world in a fundamental way). Machines processing terms without their denotations are not using language, they are shuffling it aorund.