Plenty of RL systems learn to play video games just fine without fine-tuned rewards, but I see this line of thought isn't actually what you're getting at.

I would assume serious ML people would not be overly ambitious and overstep their claims beyond empirical realms. You were saying ML "uncovers latent representational structure not present in the data", but I would guess the claim, if that is what you're going against, is merely that the latent structures exist, and no Truth is really "uncovered" by ML per se, in the Heideggerian sense.

I agree ML hasn't really produced an Understanding of the world. The carving along the joints is in other words a symbolic abstraction of the world that is a radical simplification, for which only Reason is capable of, and ML hasn't shown to be capable of Reason. As an aside, I also would not assume the ambiguity you refer to can be fully eliminated even by human intelligence, just see how languages are fully of ambiguity, or even quantum mechanics.

But again, when philosophical critiques are launched against ML, the usual story is ML advocates would retreat to the success of ML in the empirical realms. I'm reminded of the Norvig vs Chomsky debate by this.