Some time ago, Thomas Basbøll followed up his excellent post on how to write a paragraph with a much more daring endeavour on how to write a sentence. And while the post is a pleasure to read, I think it did not quite overcome the challenge the author stated at the start: “it is substantially more […]
TLDR; Reports that AI beat humans on certain benchmarks or very specialised tasks don’t mean that AI is actually better at those tasks than any individual human. They certainly don’t mean that AI is approaching the task with any of the same understanding of the world people do. People actually perform 100% on the tasks […]
Note: This is a slightly edited version of a post that first appeared on Medium. It elaborates and exemplifies examples I gave in the more recent posts on metaphor and explanation and understanding. One of the less fortunate consequences of the popularity of the conceptual metaphor paradigm (which is also the one I by and large work […]
This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure. (opening sentence of the preface […]
Background This is a lightly edited version of a comment posted on Martin Haspelmath’s blog post “Against traditional grammar – and for normal science in linguistics“. In it he offers a critique of the current linguistic scene as being unclear as to its goals and in need of better definitions. He proposes ‘normal science’ as […]
I’m not sure how ‘burning’ these issues are as such but if they’re not, I’d propose that they deserve to have some kindling or other accelerant thrown on them. 1. What is the interaction between automatic metaphor processing and deliberate metaphor application? Metaphors have always been an attractive subjects of study. But they have seen […]
TL;DR Why is this important? Many people believe that mental representations are the next goal for ML and a prerequisite for AGI. Does machine learning produce mental representations equivalent to human ones in kind (if not in quality or quantity)? Definitely not, and there is no clear pathway from current approaches to a place where […]
In some circles (rhetoric and analytics philosophy come to mind), much is made of the difference between metaphor and simile. (Rhetoricians pay attention to it because they like taxonomies of communicative devices and analytic philosophers spend time on it because of their commitment to a truth-theoretical account of meaning and naive assumptions about compositionality). It […]
Note: These are rough notes for a metaphor reading group, not a continuous narrative. Any comments, corrections or elaborations are welcome. Why should you read WFDT? Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind is still a significantly underappreciated and (despite its high citation count) not-enough-read book that has a lot to […]
People often talk about music as if it were language. Leonard Bernstein even recorded a series of lectures applying Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar to music. Chomsky himself answered a question on this in a not very satisfying manner. Some people can get very exercised over this. But it seems to me that a playing around with strengths […]