Tag: language

The Demise of Frege–Geach?

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4–5 minutes

Journal Entry

I published an essay on the Frege–Geach problem in February. I published an update yesterday. I still wasn’t satisfied, so I engaged with several LLMs. This was my approach.

The involved LLMs were:

  • Claude
  • Grok
  • ChatGPT
  • Gemini
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
(This summary misses the mark in some ways, but it brings up some interesting observations along the way.)

First, I fed them some documents in no particular order, my goal being to share my own knowledge and position on the purported problem.

I started with Gemini. This was my prompt:

I am interested in resolving the Frege–Geach problem, but it seems I can only dissolve it. This doesn’t appear to be adequate for some analytical philosophers. How might I get closer to resolving it? My main argument is that they are assuming that language is stronger than it is, and they don’t agree with my argument.

As the prompt notes and by design, many analytical philosophers are reluctant to grant the degree of insufficiency I take to be constitutive of natural language, especially where logical embedding is concerned. Evidently, that counts as my not wanting to play their game. From my perspective, they are committed to a different ontological grammar. What this means practically is that I need to present my solution proposal in their terms. This doesn’t mean their terms are right; problems are only relevant in their dialect, even though my argument is that all dialects are lossy – mine included.

Part of the challenge is that formal logic was invented precisely because ordinary language is imprecise, yet its standards are often retrofitted back onto natural language as though they revealed what language must have been doing all along.

Without sharing the entire play-by-play of the transcripts, I established my course of action. I’d dissolved the problem, but I hadn’t yet resolved it.

My initial intuition of several years ago was to argue that they were expecting too much from grammar. I’ll use a well-worn example. Follow these statements:

  1. IF ‘Murder is wrong.’
  2. THEN ‘If murder is wrong, then getting your brother to murder is wrong.’
  3. SO ‘Getting your brother to murder is wrong.’

According to them, the embedded ‘murder is wrong‘ doesn’t make sense. Here’s their logic:

According to Ayer, moral statements are simply emotive. When one utters, ‘murder is wrong‘, they are really saying ‘Boo, murder‘ – ‘I don’t like murder‘.

If ‘murder‘ is defined as ‘killing disallowed by the state‘, then murder is wrong might be translated into ‘killing disallowed by the state is wrong’ or ‘what the state declares is wrong is wrong’, but we also know that the state makes many pronouncements, many of which carry no moral weight and others which are counter to expected moral positions – law does not equal moral, and vice versa. Let’s move on and revisit our statements:

  1. IF ‘Boo to Murder is wrong.’
  2. THEN ‘If boo to murder is wrong, then boo to getting your brother to murder is wrong.’
  3. SO ‘Getting your brother to murder is wrong.’

My intuition was that the embedded clause does not perform the same linguistic act as the standalone assertion, even if the lexical material is repeated. We’re committing a category error. More crucially, the category it belongs to doesn’t exist, so it’s unspecified. It needs to be invented.

Although I struggled to find apt nomenclature, I settled on performance-sensitive expressions.

A parallel challenge is that the solution can’t be a simple carve-out for moral language. Whilst I feel that moral language does use its own grammar and semantics, I don’t expect analytical philosophers to accept this assertion, so the solution should be more generalisable. I’d need to demonstrate where else this conditional logic fails in the same manner.

ChatGPT had this to say in response to a draft:

The comparative-cost section is good, but one sentence should be added to pre-empt the “your account also uses theory-laden notions” objection.
A critic may reply: your own terms, like “coherence zone” and “synchronisation protocol,” are also theoretical machinery. True enough. The difference is that your machinery is independently motivated and not introduced solely to patch Frege-Geach. You imply this already, but it would help to say so directly.

It offers clearer language:

Embedded moral predicates are not semantically identical to their unembedded counterparts, but neither are they inert; they are performance-sensitive expressions whose full evaluative load is attenuated under embedding while a thinner inferential profile remains available for reasoning.

In any case, I am still polishing the essay, dotting Is and crossing Ts. I think I’ve got the main argument and some examples. One of my weaknesses may be that I rely heavily on my own theories, but these are published and debatable on their own merits.

A real challenge of some problems and paradoxes is that they are self-inflicted. Faith that language is truth apt and lossless leads down many blind alleys.

Whom Do I Serve? Spelling Counts

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2–3 minutes

“Whom do you serve?” is the unasked question in the Grail story. Parsifal’s failure is usually treated as spiritual unreadiness, moral immaturity, or some such medieval hush. I’ve never had much sympathy for that reading. My own experience has made it difficult to leave certain questions politely untouched.

In my late teens and early twenties, I worked in Los Angeles as a musician, recording engineer, and producer. That meant spending a good deal of time around wealthy celebrities, not at parties but at work. The useful lesson was not glamour. It was status. More precisely, it was learning how often status functions as atmosphere: something to be indulged while present and ignored once it passes.

Berry Gordy once walked into a mixing session at his own studio and imposed a round of suggestions on a track headed for film. Nobody contradicted him. We didn’t need to. We knew that when he left, we would reset the console and write off the lost hour as weather. That is what aura often is: not wisdom, not competence, merely a temporary distortion field around a person whom others have learned not to challenge in the moment.

Gordy was an exception. Most days, there were no sacred cows in the room. Egos were bruised, feelings hurt, and compromises made. Work got done. If anything, the greater impostors were the label middle managers, appeased when present, ignored when absent, and forever acting as though they were paying for decisions that would ultimately be recouped from the artist anyway.

By the time I left music and went legit, I had already learnt the useful part: never mistake decorum for truth. I was never fully indoctrinated into pedestal-thinking, and I have never since managed to treat institutional aura as anything but local theatre. That is why the Grail story catches me at an odd angle. I do not identify with the knight who withholds the question. I identify with the person who asks it anyway, or with the child in Andersen who has not yet learned that collective performance outranks plain observation.

That, perhaps, is the real training most institutions require: not belief, but acculturation into silence. Some of us never quite acquire it.

100% Human Content

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3–4 minutes

Perhaps not 100% because I’ve just spent hours chatting with several LLMs, complaining about the spate of purported AI detectors that tell me ‘this content shows a high similarity to AI-generated content’ or somewhat.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

If I weren’t already familiar with the AI tells, I am now, as Claude reluctantly shared this:


Lexical tics. The ones you’ve already flagged are real: “delve,” “robust,” “nuanced,” “multifaceted,” “landscape” (used metaphorically for any domain whatsoever), “tapestry,” “leverage” (as verb), “facilitate,” “underscores.” There’s also a tier of slightly subtler ones — “notably,” “crucially,” “it’s worth noting that,” “this is particularly important because” — which function as false-emphasis markers, lending rhetorical weight where the content doesn’t actually earn it.

Structural patterns. This is where it gets more diagnostic than any single word choice. LLM prose tends toward a very particular architecture: a thesis-restating opening sentence, three to five parallel elaboration points (often with suspiciously balanced treatment), and a synthesising conclusion that circles back to the opening. The ratio of setup-to-substance is high. Everything gets contextualised before it gets said. There’s a compulsive both-sides-ism, a hedging reflex — “while X is certainly true, it’s also important to consider Y” — that reads less like genuine intellectual caution and more like a conflict-avoidance subroutine.

Tonal tells. LLM text tends to be relentlessly encouraging. There’s an affective flatness masquerading as warmth — everything is “great question,” everything “raises important considerations.” The prose never gets genuinely irritable, confused, bored, or reckless. It maintains a kind of supervisory friendliness, the register of a middle manager who’s been on a coaching course. Relatedly, there’s almost never a genuinely surprising analogy or a metaphor that risks falling flat — the figurative language is always safe, always legible, always serviceable.

Punctuation and rhythm. The em-dash point is real but often overstated. More telling is sentence-length uniformity — LLM prose tends to hover in a narrow band of 15–25 words per sentence, rarely producing either the genuinely terse or the genuinely complex-subordinated. Paragraph length is also strikingly regular. The prose breathes at metronomic intervals.

The absence of mess. Perhaps the deepest tell. Human writing — even polished human writing — contains asymmetries: a paragraph that runs long because the writer got interested, a point that gets dropped without resolution, a transition that’s slightly rough, a joke that doesn’t quite land but stays in anyway. LLM prose is clean in a way that signals not craft but indifference — nothing is there because the writer cared about it, so nothing is disproportionate.

Add to this grammar-checkers attempting to drive writing back to middle school formats – not to mention competing grammar checkers hypercorrecting each other. The struggle is real.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

Of course, a solution might be just to review the content and undo these inclusions. Almost interestingly, I use Autocrit (but not often because it is too orthodox), but it does serve somewhat as an anti-AI agent, assessing rhythm and pace, plus the usual copyediting functions.

I prefer to draft in a stream-of-consciousness style. The AI organises my messes, so if I asked it to, it would remove or relocate my functional parenthetical about Autocrit. But I’m leaving it just to prove I’m human. Or did I add it to an AI-scripted piece? 🧐

Whilst I considered that I could either overdo AI or join the 54 per cent of Americans who write at a third-grade level. Grok suggested something even more sinister – Friggin Musk. It suggested that I double down on the AI likeness and make my content into an AI parody factory – overpopulate it with em-dashes, deving, and tapestry. Evidently, Carole King was AI before Suno.

In any case – and AI might suggest moving this to the top – the problem is that I now have an additional layer that interrupts my flow and process. It’s disconcerting, and I resent it. My psyche is disturbed to appease witchhunters. And it’s bollox.

The question is whether to succumb to the moral suasion or ignore the moral posturing.

This post contains no sugar, salt, fat, carbohydrates, protein, or fibre. No animals were harmed in the production of this blog. All proceeds will be donated to the Unicorn Recovery Foundation.

Whom Do You Serve? WIP

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I’ve been working on an essay and perhaps more, but rather than reduplicate my efforts, I share the podcast and two seminal links to the Substack contents.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Note that this remains decidedly a work in progress; experience it as it unfolds.

Working thesis and abstract

This essay examines three mechanisms of institutional silence: the inhibition of inquiry under sacral authority, the inhibition of avowal under social consensus, and the inhibition of uptake under structural non-reception. Through the paired metaphors of the Grail (via The Fisher King), the Emperor’s New Clothes, and Cassandra, I argue that modern power often survives not by establishing truth but by organising silence across the social life of diagnosis. The result is a normatively managed gap between what subjects can perceive, what they are permitted to ask, what they are permitted to say, and what institutions are structured to hear.

Outline and thoughts

Video: There Are No Objects… Or Subjects

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What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things?

Every sentence you speak installs a hidden assumption. ‘The rock falls.’ ‘The mind thinks.’ ‘The electron orbits.’ Each one presupposes a thing – a noun – that exists before anything happens to it. Your grammar tells you: first, there are objects, then they do stuff. But what if that’s backwards?

The Mediated Encounter Ontology – MEOW – proposes that it is. Reality isn’t made of things. It’s made of structured interactions. Encounter-events – relational, patterned, constrained – are what’s ontologically basic. Objects, subjects, minds, worlds: these are all downstream. They’re what you get when structured interaction stabilises within a given scale of encounter.

Watch the video…

I Am a Language Model.

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1–2 minutes

I was writing a video script, and a warning popped up. I first noticed this warning a couple days ago, but I didn’t think anything of it.

‘Strong resemblance to AI text.’

I am creating some videos to promote my latest book. I realise that it is academically dense, so I want to break down some of the subject matter.

As usual, my writing is on language and its insufficiencies.

But why was I being warned that my writing resembled AI? What does that even mean?

I reread the sentence:

What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things?

I was looking for a hook to open the short clip. I altered it slightly:

What if the biggest trick language played on you is convincing you that the world is made of things, of objects?

This appeased the AI detector. I had to dilute the message by adding ‘of objects‘. As I write this, it reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale and the naming of the women as property of their masters – OfFred, and so on. Of objects.

The AI police are annoying to say the least. Profiling: Minority Project. A 1984 thought crime.

I’m hopping down off the soapbox, down off my high horse, but I’m miffed by bollocks.

How does AI summarise it? Find out here:

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

EDIT: Does it get worse?

When I checked into LinkedIn to share this post, I was distracted by another thread chatting about Emotivism. I’ll spare you the entire thread, but now Grammarly wants me to write in German. Was ist los?

Architecture of Encounter: Attention, Affordance, Salience, and Valence

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What do attention, affordance, salience, and valence have to do with meaning, and what is the architecture of encounter?

I’m still trying to figure out how to simplify these concepts. How am I doing?

  • 0:00 Introduction and Encounter
  • 0:52 Attention
  • 1:53 What is Affordance?
  • 3:13 What is Salience?
  • 4:12 Example: Salience Connexion and Context (My ex-wife)
  • 4:44 What is Valence?
  • 5:38 What is Meaning?
  • 6:23 Example: Southern Hospitality (Salience and Meaning)

Short and sweet.

New Architecture of Encounter Video Content: Glossary Terms

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I’ve commenced a new series in support of my new book. First, I’m building a glossary.

Video: Bry – Architecture of Encounter

On the docket in this segment are affordance, salience, and valence as they relate to the book. I selected these terms from the glossary in the appendix.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to produce videos on other terms and additional videos explaining key concepts. This one is straightforward and academic. Others will be less formal, hoping to accommodate different learning styles.

Does anyone subscribe to Kindle Unlimited? I may take time to create Kindle and eBook versions.

My fiction books had some formatting issues with Kindle, but these titles are more standard – no fancy layouts or fonts, and not too many images.

Truth, Subjectivity, and Constraint

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3–5 minutes

I like this bloke. Here, he clarifies Rorty’s perspective on Truth. I am quite in sync with Rorty’s position, perhaps 90-odd per cent.

Allow me to explain.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I have written about truth several times over the years, 1, 2, 3, and more. In earlier posts, I put the point rather bluntly: truth is largely rhetorical. I still think that captured something important, but it now feels incomplete. With the development of my Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) and the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH), the picture needs tightening.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

The first step is to stop pretending that ‘truth’ names a single thing.

Philosopher Bernard Williams helpfully distinguished between thin and thick senses of truth in Truth and Truthfulness. The distinction is simple but instructive.

In its thin sense, truth is almost trivial. Saying ‘it is true that p’ typically adds nothing beyond asserting p. The word ‘true’ functions as a logical convenience: it allows endorsement, disquotation, and generalisation. Philosophically speaking, this version of truth carries very little metaphysical weight. Most arguments about truth, however, are not about this thin sense.

In practice, truth usually appears in a thicker social sense. Here, truth is embedded in practices of inquiry and communication. Communities develop norms around sincerity, accuracy, testimony, and credibility. These norms help stabilise claims so that people can coordinate action and share information.

At this level, truth becomes something like a social achievement. A statement counts as ‘true’ when it can be defended, circulated, reinforced, and relied upon within a shared framework of interpretation. Evidence matters, but so do rhetoric, persuasion, institutional authority, and the distribution of power. This is the sense in which truth is rhetorical, but rhetoric is not sovereign.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. I prompted NotebookLM to illustrate a 4-layered model that shows how removed language is from encounter, attention, conception, and representation of what we normally consider to be reality. This view is supported by both MEOW and LIH.

Human beings can imagine almost anything about the world, yet the world has a stubborn habit of refusing certain descriptions. Gravity does not yield to persuasion. A bridge designed according to fashionable rhetoric rather than sound engineering will collapse regardless of how compelling its advocates may have been.

This constraint does not disappear in socially constructed domains. Institutions, identities, norms, and laws are historically contingent and rhetorically stabilised, but they remain embedded within material, biological, and ecological conditions. A social fiction can persist for decades or centuries, but eventually it encounters pressures that force revision.

Subjectivity, therefore, doesn’t imply that ‘anything goes’. It simply means that all human knowledge is mediated.

We encounter the world through perception, language, culture, and conceptual frameworks. Every description is produced from a particular standpoint, using particular tools, within particular historical circumstances. Language compresses experience and inevitably loses information along the way. No statement captures reality without distortion. This is the basic insight behind the Language Insufficiency Hypothesis.

At the same time, our descriptions remain answerable to the constraints of the world we inhabit. Some descriptions survive repeated encounters better than others.

In domains where empirical constraint is strong – engineering, physics, medicine – bad descriptions fail quickly. In domains where constraint is indirect – ethics, politics, identity, aesthetics – multiple interpretations may remain viable for long periods. In such cases, rhetoric, institutional authority, and power often function as tie-breakers, stabilising one interpretation over others so that societies can coordinate their activities. These settlements are rarely permanent.

What appears to be truth in one era may dissolve in another. Concepts drift. Institutions evolve. Technologies reshape the landscape of possibility. Claims that once seemed self-evident may later appear parochial or incoherent.

In this sense, many truths in human affairs are best understood as temporally successful settlements under constraint.

Even the most stable arrangements remain vulnerable to change because the conditions that sustain them are constantly shifting. Agents change. Environments change. Expectations change. The very success of a social order often generates the tensions that undermine it. Change, in other words, is the only persistence.

The mistake of traditional realism is to imagine truth as a mirror of reality – an unmediated correspondence between statement and world. The mistake of crude relativism is to imagine that language and power can shape reality without limit. Both positions misunderstand the situation.

We do not possess a final language that captures reality exactly as it is. But neither are we free to describe the world however we please. Truth is not revelation, and it is not mere invention.

It is the provisional stabilisation of claims within mediated encounter, negotiated through language, rhetoric, and institutions, and continually tested against a world that never fully yields to our descriptions. We don’t discover Truth with a capital T. We negotiate survivable descriptions under pressure.

Encounter with Mary Sue

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3–4 minutes

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lucyhay_unpopular-opinion-that-shouldnt-be-unpopular-activity-7437399419584405505-SDvF

View Lucy V. Hay’s graphic link

Lucy V. Hay posted this on LinkedIn… and then stopped allowing comments, so I figured I’d recycle it here for comment.

Unpopular opinion (that shouldn’t be unpopular):

The term “Mary Sue” is inherently s3xist 🎯

The phrase comes from a 1973 parody story by Paula Smith called A Trekkie’s Tale. It mocked the self-insert characters appearing in Star Trek fanfiction.

Those writers? Mostly teenage girls 😡

That matters, because culturally we have a long history of treating teenage girls – and the things they create – with contempt. Their fandoms, their stories, their passions are routinely framed as embarrassing, shallow or ridiculous.

Sometimes that ridicule even comes from older women punching down.

And no, the fact Smith was a woman doesn’t magically make the term neutral. Internalised misogyny exists.

Here’s what happened next …

For the last 50+ years, the label “Mary Sue” has been used against practically every female protagonist who shows competence, power or narrative importance.

Meanwhile, male characters with identical arcs are celebrated.

An inexperienced boy who turns out to be the chosen one? Hero.

A woman who discovers she has unusual power or talent? “Mary Sue.”

Same narrative structure … Different reaction 😡

Also, it’s worth noticing something interesting: I hadn’t seen the term “Mary Sue” on my timeline for yeeeeeeaars. Now, every time I post something about female characters, there it is again. In 2026 🤮

Given the current climate around women’s rights and the growing attacks on women and girls globally, that resurgence doesn’t feel accidental. Language shapes culture. Storytelling shapes culture.

And here’s another truth many people don’t realise:

The professional writing industry does not use the term “Mary Sue.”

Not in publishing. Not in development notes. Not in writers’ rooms.

If you’re using it as critique, you’re not signalling professional insight. You’re signalling that you learned storytelling discourse from internet flame wars.

If we want better conversations about character, we need better vocabulary than a 1970s insult aimed at teenage girls writing fanfic.

If you want to explore how bias shapes the way we write and judge characters, that’s exactly what I unpack in my book Writing Diverse Characters For Fiction, TV Or Film (Creative Essentials) 👇 👇 👇

Writing Diverse Characters for Fiction, TV or Film

My response.

Nah, mate. Even the provided definition is incorrect. Yes, Mary Sue is a gendered term. (Duh.) But the male equivalent would be a male character who had so much plot armour as to have no vulnerabilities, and his capabilities would require no training or friction, not just a ‘female protagonist who shows competence, power or narrative importance’. Pretty much no one wants to watch a character in God mode – female, male, pet, alien, or robot. What would possibly be the character arc or development? Asking for a friend.

BTW, none of the women depicted in the cover images are generally portrayed as Mary Sues. She-Hulk in the comics is not a Mary Sue. The one that streamed for a season was. Huge difference.

Her response was flippant and contained no useful information. I can only imagine she’s trolling.

Obviously, I understand that language is an imperfect vehicle, but it doesn’t have to be this abused. And, obviously, she provided her definition, but it doesn’t comport with any definitions I’m aware of.

As far as the Mary Sue argument goes, ‘no one’ in that space berates all female roles, not even past heroes like Wonderwoman, Spiderwoman, Batwoman, or Ripley from Alien, Terminator’s Sarah Connor, and so on. No one (except Lucy) categorises them as Mary Sue.

This is convenient for an argument, but it’s really tilting at windmills. I understand she’s likely trying to drum up publicity for her book. Good on her. She’ll attract people sympathetic to her message. As for me, I don’t trust a disingenuous source.