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Before reading “Art, craft, game-theoretic cognition and machine learning”

Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022 A few essentials about the language game: language is cooperation; cooperation, far from being occasional among us, is the underlying condition of humanity as water is to a fish. Cooperation is so basic to our nature that we scarcely notice it. We share a code and share it among us constantly. We are the conversing species. The seven points below are an expansion of H. Paul Grice’s insights into conversational logic.  It is obvious that language evolved and survived for the purpose of conversation — sharing information. As powerful as symbolism is for an individual alone — to have a symbol “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “will” or “may” or “could” or “not” let alone “could not have” or “couldn’t not have” allows us to think about imaginaries beyond the real, possibilities, counterfactuals and even impossibilities, that non symbolic minds cannot think about — as powerful as that individual possession is, it is vastly more power
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Art, craft, game-theoretic cognition and machine learning

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, July 12, 2022 Here in Istanbul, you cannot but admire the Turkish carpet and the mosques of Sinan, the carpet a wonder of intricacy, the more complex and detailed the more wondrous, and Sinan’s grand mosques a wonder of simplicity, purity and restraint even when scaled to the most expansive heights. If you are an idle wonderer with time to think about questions almost too obvious to ask, you might puzzle over why are there no simple carpets when the simplicity of the mosques is so overwhelmingly effective. Why can’t carpet makers avail themselves of modest simplicity in their craft, when purity and humility can reach so deeply into the human heart and mind? The goals of craft are not the goals of art, no doubt. But what’s the difference? Or better, why such a difference? A good libertarian, and a good Darwinian — and they might as well be the same — would ask first where the market incentives lie. The answer will go a long way to expla
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Bossy jerk

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, February 9, 2016 Sheryl Sandberg, Corporate Operations Officer of Facebook, has created a Ban Bossy campaign to encourage girls to be leaders. Many celebrities have expressed support for the campaign and even advertisers have taken up the cause as a means to market to women.   Sandberg makes several distinct claims about the use and meaning of “bossy.” Some have merit, others are misleading. All of them are fruitful for understanding cultural roles, inequalities, and how they play into perception, attitude and emotional response. I want to take them separately and look at some data.   “bossy” is used more to describe females than for males this disparity shows an inequality in our cultural stereotypes cultural stereotypes influence our perception of behavior and our emotional response to behavior the cultural role of boss is masculine so males can’t effectively be disparaged by “bossy” the cultural feminine roles include nurturing role
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liar paradoxes, a problem with reductio proof and speech acts

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 20, 2013 It’s easy to mistake paradoxical sentences for liar paradoxes. “If this sentence is true, then it is false,” is a liar paradox. If the sentence is true, then the antecedent is true. If the antecedent is true, then the consequent must be false, the implication as a whole is false, so the sentence must be false. So if the sentence is true, then it is a contradiction and a falsehood. So the antecedent must not be true. If the sentence is false, antecedent is false, and the implication as a whole is true. “If this sentence is false, then it is true,” however, is not a liar paradox. If it is false, then the antecedent is true and the implication fails, and the whole is false. If the sentence is true, then the antecedent is false, the implication holds, and the sentence is true. That’s not a paradox, it’s just a sentence the truth of which cannot be determined. It’s like the sentence, “This sentence is true.” Is it true or fals
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intended paradox

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, June 16, 2013 “I’m very witty!” someone wrote in a comment box in response to the criticism “You have no wit.” “I’m very witty” might seem at first a witless and therefore unpersuasive response, unless it is sarcastic, in which case it is actually witty. If it’s sarcastic, the meaning intended to convey is that author isn’t witty, and therefore it implies that the comment itself also is not witty. The joke is, the author knows it’s not witty; yet that’s what makes it witty. So if it’s witty, it’s a lie; if it’s a lie, it’s not witty: a liar paradox. But if the comment is merely false, then there’s no paradox — just a reply by someone who thinks he’s witty but is too dull to know he’s not witty, and hasn’t enough wit to say so wittily. So if it’s a lie, then it is a meta-witty paradox; if an honest falsehood, it’s just stupid. What’s interesting is that the intention or speaker’s attitude or character of mind induces the paradox, not th
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use

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, May 30, 2012 In the latest New Yorker Steven Pinker quotes his defense of the dictionary, “it is not just a matter of opinion that there is no such word misunderestimate , that the citizens of modern Greece are Greeks and not Grecians , and that divisive policies Balkanize rather than vulcanize societies.” Given that language is always in flux, on what principled ground can these be judged? Misunderestimate is redundant, but what of it? Language is full of redundancy, and if some underestimations are benign then maybe misunderestimating is not exactly redundant. If Grecians becomes current, then Greeks will be an anachronism; same with vulcanize . Stranger things have happened to English. So what’s the purpose of a dictionary? Shouldn’t it be a source of scholarly information — about who uses Balkanize , vulcanize , Grecians and misunderestimating and why, and how their use came to be?  When did scholarly information include p
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Aymara, trivalence, competing satisfaction and modality

  Originally published on Language and Philosophy, January 6, 2012 In his monograph on the trivalent logic of Aymara, Ivan Guzman de Rojas sets out to show that a trivalent logic can reach conclusions unavailable to bivalent logic. I want to tease out the import and accuracy of this extraordinary claim, and try to understand its significance for modal logic. Consider two circumstances: p) there’s smoke; q) there’s fire. And consider these two premises: X) if there’s smoke, there’s fire; ¬p) there’s no smoke. From these two premises in a bivalent logic using the standard definition of implication, you can conclude that (X) is true, but no conclusion can be reached as to whether (q) holds or not. Using a Rojas matrix: p  T   |  T  |  F  |  F q  T  |  F  |  T  |  F X  T  |  F  |  T  |  T ¬p F  |  F  |  T  |  T The third and fourth columns reflect that the two cases in which the premises are both true, the circumstance described in (p), that there is smoke, clearly is false, but th
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