This paper argues that large language models have a valuable scientific role to play in serving as scientific models of public languages. Linguistic study should not only be concerned with the cognitive processes behind linguistic competence, but also with language understood as an external, social entity. Once this is recognized, the value of large language models as scientific models becomes clear. This paper defends the position against a number of arguments to the effect that language models provide no linguistic insight. Building upon Weisberg's (2007) notion of a model construal, it is then argued that recent work in computational linguistics to better understand the inner workings of large language models can be used to develop a model construal for large language models as models of a language.

翻译：本文认为，大型语言模型在作为公共语言的科学模型方面具有重要的科学价值。语言学研究不仅应关注语言能力背后的认知过程，还应将语言理解为一种外部的社会实体。一旦认识到这一点，大型语言模型作为科学模型的价值就变得显而易见。本文针对"语言模型无法提供语言学见解"的一系列论点进行了辩驳。基于Weisberg（2007）提出的模型解释概念，本文进一步论证：计算语言学领域为理解大型语言模型内部机制所开展的最新研究，可用于构建大型语言模型作为语言模型的模型解释框架。