Tag: meaning

Language, Grounding, and the Myth of Privileged Access

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3–5 minutes

NB: I have been drafting an essay on “understanding understanding”, so the IAI article this is based on was perfectly salient. These are my reflections, expedited by ChatGPT.

Audio: Google Notebook summary podcast of this topic.

Elan Barenholtz has written an intriguing piece for the Institute of Art and Ideas, LLMs show language does not describe reality. It is well worth reading, though apologies in advance: IAI has put much of it behind a paywall, humanity’s traditional method for ensuring that ideas about knowledge remain selectively accessible.

Barenholtz argues that large language models present an awkward problem for the familiar idea that language derives meaning by referring to, representing, or somehow grounding itself in an external reality. LLMs manipulate relationships among linguistic tokens without anything resembling ordinary human sensory access to the world, yet nevertheless produce remarkably coherent linguistic behaviour.

It doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that language has no referential function, nor that human cognition is simply next-token prediction writ biological. But it does show that a substantial amount of what we ordinarily take as evidence of linguistic understanding can apparently emerge without the machinery we previously assumed was necessary for it. That should make us suspicious of the machinery.

The_Myth_of_Privileged_AccessDownload

My own position begins slightly elsewhere. I don’t assume that humans possess privileged access to an ontic reality against which artificial systems can be judged deficient. Whatever reality may exist independently of us, humans encounter it through an architecture of mediation: sensory systems, neural processing, linguistic categories, cultural practices, institutional structures and prior expectations. We don’t encounter the proverbial chair as it is. We encounter what our particular architecture permits the chair to become for us.

In this respect, the difference between humans and current LLMs is not that humans are grounded whilst LLMs float mysteriously above reality. The difference is that the architectures of encounter are different. Humans possess direct sensory and motor coupling of kinds that text-based LLMs lack. We see, hear, touch, move, fall over objects and occasionally stub our toes against them, reality’s least philosophically subtle contribution to epistemology.

But this difference is technological rather than obviously metaphysical. Vision, audition, spatial navigation, tactile sensing and motor feedback can all be incorporated into artificial systems. Robotics already does precisely this. Such systems need not perceive as humans perceive, any more than bats, dogs or octopuses do. They merely require channels through which external constraints can affect their behaviour. Embodiment therefore changes what can constrain a system. It does not, by itself, establish ‘understanding’.

The more substantial difference between humans and contemporary artificial systems may instead be existential stakes.

Things can go badly for organisms in a particularly uncompromising sense. We can be injured, starved, abandoned, exhausted or killed. Our encounters occur against a biological background in which outcomes matter because continued existence itself is conditional. An LLM doesn’t presently possess comparable stakes. Nothing is obviously at risk for it. But this distinction is not really about cognition.

A bacterium has existential stakes. A language model can solve differential equations. Whatever distinguishes those two systems, it would be peculiar to call the difference ‘understanding’.

Stakes may explain motivation, vulnerability, affect or perhaps moral consideration. They do not automatically explain inference, linguistic competence or cognition. To claim otherwise requires an additional argument.

This is why LLMs pose such an interesting philosophical irritation. They do not prove that machines understand. They expose how poorly we have specified what we meant when we claimed that humans do.

If understanding requires successful inference, contextual discrimination, generalisation and appropriate linguistic response, artificial systems already make the boundary uncomfortable.

If understanding instead requires consciousness, intentionality, phenomenology, genuine meaning or some other internal property, then those terms themselves require defensible criteria. Otherwise the explanation merely replaces one contested word with another.

Barenholtz writes that ‘language doesn’t mean; it does’. I am sympathetic to the deflationary impulse. I would perhaps go one step sideways. Language needn’t provide transparent access to reality in order for reality to constrain language. Nor must a system represent the world perfectly in order to negotiate its encounters with it.

Humans and artificial systems may therefore differ profoundly without either possessing privileged access to things as they ontically are. The interesting question isn’t whether LLMs encounter reality as humans do. Plainly they don’t.

The interesting question is why we assumed that the human manner of encounter constituted the metaphysical entrance examination for understanding in the first place.

There Is No Spoon

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Responding to a post, I found myself returning to that iconic, routinely misrepresented scene from The Matrix: the one with the spoon. The scene has been dragged through so many motivational seminars, self-help swamp rituals, pseudo-Buddhist wall decals, and entrepreneurial cocaine-affirmation threads that it now arrives pre-misunderstood.

Video: Bonus Content

Even Baudrillard distanced his work from the version of simulation the Wachowskis made cinematic. This is not a criticism, exactly. Film has two hours to smuggle metaphysics through leather coats, sunglasses, and slow-motion firearms. One makes allowances. Philosophy, alas, has fewer trench coats and more footnotes.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Read the full story on Substack.

Capital Letters, Trade Marks, and Other Warnings Against Semantic Mischief

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I have an orthographic habit, perhaps merely a private convention, though I rather suspect all conventions begin this way before someone gives them a Latin name and a committee. I use typography to signal when a word is doing more than pedestrian language ordinarily admits.

Read the rest of the story on Substack. (It’s free there, too!)

Meantime, here is a video and podcast summary and some pics.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

Octogenarians

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5–7 minutes

The title may have given this away, but my parents are in their eighties, an absurdity on the face of it, because some primitive part of my brain still files them under ‘adults’ – people who understand the performance of being alive.

Years ago, against my father’s wishes, my mother took a job as a waitress. His objection came out with that antique domestic authority that probably ought to be preserved in amber: No wife of mine is going to work. There it is. The marital constitution in a single sentence. Not an argument – rather, by decree. Still, she worked.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

It’s been years since she held a paid job, but in retirement, she seems to have lost more than employment. She’s lost a structure of demand. She is bored out of her gourd or tree or whatever. Left alone with an unfilled day, she putters, tidies, wipes, folds, rearranges, and complains – rinse and repeat. Sisyphus would be proud. And the complaint isn’t incidental; it’s part of the ritual. The labour gives the grievance somewhere to reside.

There’s a peculiar mercy in not being too useful.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.

This creates an odd etiquette for everyone around her. One has to be careful not to interfere too much. Don’t clean everything; efficiently eliminate tasks; show up flushed with modern virtue and liberate her from the very thing that’s keeping the day from opening its jaws. Offer help, accept the refusal, move on without guilt. There’s a peculiar mercy in not being too useful.

Once the housework is done – or once it reaches the temporary truce by pause – the restlessness comes back. The ourobouros resumes its self-consumption. Then she needs to walk, drive, shop, bake, browse, fiddle, inspect, rearrange, and escape – more infinite loop, though only seemingly so. Anything to distract her from the long flat fact of being alive without a timetable. Employment used to do that. Marriage did that. Children did that. The household still does that. Now the old structures only remain as gestures, but gestures can still hold a person upright, as they had before, but with more salience.

A different version of this appeared with my mother-in-law, who had dementia. To occupy her, we’d give her silver to polish, or napkins to fold. There wasn’t a real need for the silver to shine, and the napkins, once folded, could be unfolded and dropped back on the pile to repeat the process. Like Keynes’s worker digging holes to fill them in again, the point wasn’t production. The point was occupation. The task didn’t need to move the world forward, as if it did in any case. It only needed to hold the day in place.

That sounds cruel when you describe it abstractly, as if we were tricking her into labour, but you’d be confusing this with Capitalism. The real cruelty would have been leaving her unmoored – nothing for the hands to do whilst the mind searched for a room it could still recognise. Folding napkins wasn’t housework in any economic sense. It was a small architecture of reassurance. A way of letting purpose survive after purpose had lost its object. even if the sense of purpose had long left the building.

There’s a distinction here, though it isn’t clean. My mum’s rituals are self-maintaining. They belong to a life trained by domestic obligation, by marriage, by an older settlement between gender and labour, by all the small cruelties that once got to call themselves normal. My mother-in-law’s rituals were externally staged – not expressions of domestic identity so much as acts of care arranged by other people. Whilst all purpose is fictional, one woman kept her purpose through the fiction of inherited duty; the other was offered purpose as a merciful fiction. The border between the two is porous, naturally, because reality has never agreed to respect our categories.

I’m not recommending any of this to anyone. I’m just noticing it, which is what we writers call ‘thinking’ when we want to dodge responsibility.

Abstract freedom isn’t the same thing as a life you can actually inhabit.

I’m a feminist the way I’m a humanist: sincerely, but with reservations about the slogans. I don’t think this is how a woman should live. I don’t believe domestic labour is some mystical feminine vocation – as if dusting were an ontological destiny and the Hoover a sacrament. But I also can’t bring myself to take it away from her. Abstract freedom isn’t the same thing as a life you can actually inhabit. Sometimes emancipation arrives too late to provide new habits. Sometimes the cage has become furniture.

This doesn’t justify the cage. It only complicates the fantasy that removing it leaves behind a clean liberated self, glowing like a freshly unboxed appliance. People aren’t appliances, although civilisation has made several brave attempts.

The mistake is assuming purpose has to be justified by productivity. That’s the capitalist infection, of course: if nothing’s produced, nothing happened. But most of ordinary life isn’t productive in that sense. It’s regulatory. Consolatory. Rhythmic. A person folds the napkin, wipes the counter, polishes the spoon, walks round the block, checks the same cupboard twice, tells the same story, asks the same question, rearranges the same shelf, writes the same sentence again with one adjective changed and calls it progress – like an LLM but with less personality. These acts don’t redeem existence. They just stop it arriving all at once.

As for me, I don’t have a purpose either, so I write. Ostensibly, this is my own form of puttering. My desk is her kitchen counter. My paragraphs are folded towels. I arrange sentences, complain about them, rearrange them, and call the whole performance ‘vocation’ because compulsive symbolic housekeeping looks poor on a business card.

There’s a shabby tenderness in this, though one shouldn’t make too much of it. The old trick isn’t really meaning; it’s occupation, rhythm – having something to do with one’s hands whilst the mind declines to look directly at the wall. Some people clean. Some people shop. Some shoot fentanyl. Some become serial killers, CEOs, presidents, consultants, motivational speakers, or other recognised hazards. Some of us write essays about our mothers and pretend it counts as insight. We all find our own ways to bide the time until we die.

In the end, nobody gets out alive. The least we can do is not steal from each other the shabby little rituals that make the waiting bearable.

Video: On a related note. Jonny talks about Setiya and atelic activities.

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil – A Close Reading?

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6–9 minutes

NB: I reviewed the credentials of the hosts and revised my critique at the end of this piece.

I joined a scheduled close reading of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil recently and came away less refreshed than exasperated. I will spare the platform and the hosts, not out of charity exactly, but because the problem is broader than two particular men fumbling through a canonical text in public. What disappointed me wasn’t that they disagreed with Nietzsche, nor even that they may have misunderstood him in places. Misreading is inevitable. The problem was that they seemed not to have brought much of a reading to begin with.

I had read Beyond Good and Evil years ago and thought a return to it might do me some good, or at least less evil than the usual intellectual content mill. The format sounded promising enough: two interested hosts working through the introduction live, sentence by sentence, in a supposedly close reading. Both had apparently read the book before. One therefore assumed they might arrive with at least a provisional grasp of its architecture, key provocations, and habitual traps. That assumption, in the event, turned out to be embarrassingly optimistic.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

As one host read line by line, the discussion lurched forward by way of hesitant paraphrase, speculative gloss, and the occasional verbal shrug. He offered the more substantive guesses, such as they were, while the other contributed mostly vague assent, half-memory, and the sort of foggy commentary one gives when one dimly recalls having once encountered a difficult book in a previous phase of life. It was less a close reading than a public rehearsal of not quite knowing what one was doing.

Now, I am not demanding exegetical perfection. Nietzsche is not a writer one simply ‘gets’ and files away like a user manual. Nor am I naïve enough to think authorial intention settles everything. Barthes is right enough to remind us that the text exceeds the author’s sovereign control. But the death of the author is not a licence for the death of preparation. If one is going to host a close reading of a notoriously elliptical and performative philosopher, the least one might do is arrive having done some prior work. Read the introduction carefully beforehand. Refresh the major themes. Check the loaded terms. Develop an argument, or at least a point of view.

That point of view may be wrong. Fine. Better that than the contemporary preference for the curated shrug, where one mistakes visible uncertainty for intellectual seriousness. There is a difference between interpretive openness and simple lack of preparation. One is a virtue. The other is an aesthetic.

I find this especially grating because I cannot imagine teaching a class that way. When I taught, I’d spend hours preparing before entering the room. Not because I imagined myself infallible, but because students deserve more than watching a lecturer discover the material in real time. A formed point of view is not a dogma. It is a starting position. It gives the discussion shape, stakes, and resistance. Without it, one is not leading inquiry but merely simulating it.

The second host did little to improve matters. Rather than complicating or sharpening the reading, he mostly echoed the first. There was very little friction, and thus very little illumination. One of the virtues of reading Nietzsche in company is that he invites productive disagreement. He is slippery, aphoristic, ironic, and often strategic in his provocations. A good discussion can tease out the tensions in his prose, test competing emphases, and ask whether a claim is literal, tactical, genealogical, or satirical. None of that really happened. Instead, one host fumbled, and the other nodded. The result was a kind of interpretive ventriloquism in which agreement substituted for insight.

The accompanying chat made things worse, or perhaps simply made the missed opportunity more obvious. Viewers were offering questions and interpretations, yet the hosts largely ignored them. Aside from one participant, who seemed likely to have some prior relationship with them, the chat was treated as background furniture. This was especially irritating because the event was live. If one is going to perform reading in public, the public should not be reduced to silent witnesses of one’s uncertainty. Otherwise, the ‘community’ aspect is just branding, another little liturgy of digital participation in which the audience is invited to attend but not to matter.

NotebookLM Infographic on this topic. To be honest, I am including this because I find it to be humorous.

To be fair, even when they did read from the chat, they handled those comments much as they handled Nietzsche: superficially, without much analytical pressure, as though any sentence placed before them deserved the same tone of vague consideration. This flattening effect was revealing. It suggested not generosity but a lack of discrimination. A close reading requires hierarchy, emphasis, and judgement. One must be able to say: this is a crucial phrase; this term matters; this apparent aside is actually structural; this comment in the chat opens something worth pursuing; that one does not. Without such judgement, everything becomes equally interesting, which is another way of saying that nothing really is.

What emerged, then, was not close reading but the theatre of close reading. The ritual gestures were all in place: slow pace, sentence-by-sentence attention, occasional lexical speculation, the performance of thoughtfulness. But the substance was strangely absent. One had the form of seriousness without much seriousness of form. It was analysis as ambience.

This points to a broader problem in online intellectual culture. Much of it now confuses exposure with engagement. To read a difficult text aloud is not yet to wrestle with it. To host a discussion is not yet to lead one. To hesitate publicly is not yet to think. Somewhere along the line, people began mistaking the visible performance of inquiry for inquiry itself. The result is a style of pseudo-seriousness in which the host need not know very much, so long as he can sound tentative in the correct register.

Nietzsche, of all people, deserves better than that. He is not an author who yields his force to the merely dutiful or the casually adjacent. He requires energy, suspicion, historical feel, and the willingness to risk a reading. One need not become a priest of correctness. But one should at least bring a sharpened knife to the table, rather than two butter spoons and a podcast voice.

What disappointed me, then, was not simply that these hosts stumbled. Everyone stumbles with Nietzsche. It was that the stumbling seemed to be the content. No deep framework, no clear prior preparation, little tension between the readers, and scant engagement with the audience. The whole affair felt less like a serious encounter with Beyond Good and Evil than a performance of cultural literacy: a way of being seen near an important book.

And perhaps that is the real irritation. One expects difficulty. One can even forgive error. What is harder to forgive is the peculiar modern tendency to make a spectacle of one’s underpreparedness and call it interpretation.

To be fair, I later learned that the co-host was not a philosopher by training but came from Literature. That in itself is no objection. Indeed, a pairing like that could have worked very well. Nietzsche is precisely the sort of writer who benefits from both conceptual and stylistic scrutiny. A philosopher can situate the argument, trace its targets, and identify the intellectual inheritance under pressure. A literary reader can pick up tone, irony, rhetorical staging, and the peculiar way Nietzsche so often performs thought rather than merely stating it.

The problem, then, was not the pairing but the execution. The session might have worked if both hosts had prepared properly and if each had leaned into his own strength. Instead, what emerged was a flatter sort of exchange, with the philosopher soliciting the literary co-host’s ‘opinion’ on semantic content as though interpretive adequacy were simply a matter of free-floating textual impressions. What was missing was any real division of labour, any methodological self-awareness, or any sense that different competences might illuminate different aspects of the text.

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.

Qualified Subjectivism

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4–7 minutes

I Am a Qualified Subjectivist. No, That Does Not Mean ‘Anything Goes’.

Make no mistake: I am a subjectivist. A qualified one. Not that kind of qualified – the qualification matters, but it’s rarely the part anyone listens to.

Image: Not that kind…

Here is the unglamorous starting point: all human encounters with the world are mediated. There is no raw feed. No unfiltered access. No metaphysical lead running directly from ‘reality’ into the human mind. Every encounter is processed through bodies, nervous systems, cultures, languages, technologies, institutions, and histories.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content – See addendum below.

Whilst I discuss the specific architecture of this mediation at length in this preprint, here I will keep it simple.

If you are human, you do not encounter reality as such. You encounter it as processed. This is not controversial. What is controversial is admitting the obvious consequence: the subject is the final arbiter.

Image: NotebookLM Infographic of Qualified Subjectivism

The Subject Is the Final Arbiter

Every account of truth, reality, meaning, value, or fact is ultimately adjudicated by a subject. Not because subjects are sovereign gods, but because there is literally no other place adjudication can occur.

Who, exactly, do critics imagine is doing the adjudicating instead? A neutral tribunal floating outside experience? A cosmic referee with a clipboard? A universal consciousness we all forgot to log into?

There is no one else.

This does not mean that truth is ‘whatever I feel like’. It means that truth-claims only ever arrive through a subject, even when they are heavily constrained by the world. And constraint matters. Reality pushes back. Environments resist. Bodies fail. Gravity does not care about your personal narrative.

Why This Is Not Solipsism

Solipsism says: only my mind exists. That is not my claim. My claim is almost boring by comparison: subjects are situated, not sovereign.

We are shaped by environments we did not choose and histories we did not write. Mediation does not eliminate reality; it is how reality arrives. Your beliefs are not free-floating inventions; they are formed under biological, social, and material pressure. Two people can be exposed to the same event and encounter it differently because the encounter is not the event itself – it is the event as mediated through a particular orientation.

Why Objectivity Keeps Sneaking Back In

At this point, someone usually says: ‘But surely some things are objectively true.’

Yes. And those truths are still encountered subjectively. The mistake is thinking that objectivity requires a ‘view from nowhere’. It doesn’t. It requires stability across mediations, not the elimination of mediation altogether. We treat some claims as objective because they hold up under variation, while others fracture immediately. But in all cases, the encounter still happens somewhere, to someone.

The Real Source of the Panic

The real anxiety here is not philosophical. It’s moral and political. People are terrified that if we give up the fantasy of unmediated access to universal truth, then legitimacy collapses and ‘anything goes’.

This is a category error born of wishful thinking. What actually collapses is the hope that semantic convergence is guaranteed. Once you accept that mediation is unavoidable, you are forced to confront a harder reality: disagreement is often structural, not corrigible. Language does not fail because nothing is true. Language fails because too much is true, incompatibly.

So Yes, I Am a Qualified Subjectivist

Interpretation only ever occurs through subjects. Subjects are always mediated. Mediation is always constrained. And constraint does not guarantee convergence.

That is the position. It is not radical, fashionable, or comforting. It is simply what remains once you stop pretending there is a god’s-eye view quietly underwriting your arguments. Discomfort is simply a reliable indicator that a fantasy has been disturbed.

Addendum: Geworfenheit and the Myth of the Neutral Subject

Audio: NotebookLM summary of this Geworfenheit addendum

If all this sounds suspiciously familiar, that’s because it is. Heidegger had a word for it: Geworfenheit – usually translated as thrownness.

The idea is simple, and deeply irritating to anyone still hoping for a clean start. You do not enter the world as a neutral observer. You are thrown into it: into a body, a language, a culture, a history, a set of institutions, a moment you did not choose. You do not begin from nowhere and then acquire a perspective. You begin already situated, already oriented, already implicated.

This is not a poetic flourish. It is a structural claim about human existence.

Image: Another NotebookLM infographic for the fun of it.

What my qualified subjectivism insists on – without Heidegger’s ontological theatre – is the same basic constraint: there is no view from nowhere because there is no nowhere to stand. The subject does not float above mediation; the subject is constituted by it. Thrownness is not an accident to be corrected by better theory. It is the condition under which any theorising occurs at all.

Seen this way, the demand for pure objectivity starts to look less like a philosophical ideal and more like nostalgia for an impossible innocence. A wish to rewind existence to a point before bodies, languages, power, and history got involved. That point never existed.

Geworfenheit matters here because it dissolves the caricature that subjectivism is about arbitrary choice. Being thrown is the opposite of choosing freely. It is constraint before reflection. Orientation before argument. Salience before reasons. You do not decide what matters from a neutral menu; what matters shows up already weighted, already charged, already resistant.

This is why appeals to “just be objective” always ring hollow. Objectivity does not mean escaping thrownness. It means achieving relative stability within it. Some claims hold across many thrown positions. Others fracture immediately. That distinction matters. But none of it happens outside mediation.

So when I say the subject is the final arbiter, I am not crowning the subject king of reality. I am pointing out the obvious: adjudication happens somewhere, to someone, from within a situation they did not author. Thrownness guarantees that there is no cosmic referee waiting to overrule the encounter.

If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Discomfort is often just the sensation of a fantasy losing its grip.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

What the LIH Is Not About (And Why This Still Needs Saying)

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
3–5 minutes

As the publication date of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis (LIH) draws nearer, I feel it’s a good time to promote it (obviously) and to introduce some of the problems it uncovers – including common misperceptions I’ve already heard. Through this feedback, I now understand some of the underlying structural limitations that I hadn’t considered, but this only strengthens my position. As I state at the start of the book, the LIH isn’t a cast-in-stone artefact. Other discoveries will inevitably be made. For now, consider it a way to think about the deficiencies of language, around which remediation strategies can be developed.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this content.

Let’s clear the undergrowth first. The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis is not concerned with everyday ambiguity, garden-variety polysemy, or the sort of misunderstandings that vanish the moment someone bothers to supply five seconds of context. That terrain is already well-mapped, thoroughly fenced, and frankly dull.

Take the classic sort of example wheeled out whenever someone wants to sound clever without doing much work:

‘I made a 30-foot basket’.

Video: a woman making a large basket

If you’re a basketweaver, you picture an absurdly large basket and quietly question the maker’s life choices. If you’re watching basketball, you hear ‘score’. If you’re anywhere near the context in which the sentence was uttered, the meaning is obvious. If it isn’t, the repair cost is trivial. Add context, move on, live your life.

Language did not fail here. It merely waited for its coat. This is not the sort of thing the LIH loses sleep over.

The Groucho Marx Defence, or: Syntax Is Not the Problem

Logicians and armchair philosophers love to reach for jokes like Groucho Marx’s immortal line:

‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. Why it was wearing my pyjamas, I’ll never know’.

Video: A man and elephant in pyjamas (no sound)

Yes, very funny. Yes, the sentence allows for a syntactic misreading. No, nobody actually believes the elephant was lounging about in striped silk. The humour works precisely because the “wrong” parse is momentarily entertained and instantly rejected.

Again, language is not insufficient here. It’s mischievous. There’s a difference.

If the LIH were worried about this sort of thing, its ambitions would be indistinguishable from an undergraduate logic textbook with better branding.

Banks, Rivers, and the Myth of Constant Confusion

Likewise, when someone in a city says, ‘I went to the bank’, no sane listener imagines them strolling along a riverbank, unless they are already knee-deep in pastoral fantasy or French tourism brochures. Context does the heavy lifting. It almost always does.

Video: Rare footage of me trying to withdraw funds at my bank (no sound)

This is not a crisis of meaning. This is language functioning exactly as advertised.

Where the Trouble Actually Starts: Contestables

The LIH begins where these tidy examples stop being helpful. It concerns itself with Contestables: terms like truth, freedom, justice, fairness, harm, equality. Words that look stable, behave politely in sentences, and then detonate the moment you ask two people what they actually mean by them. These are not ambiguous in the casual sense. They are structurally contested.

In political, moral, and cultural contexts, different groups use the same word to gesture at fundamentally incompatible conceptual frameworks, all while assuming a shared understanding that does not exist. The conversation proceeds as if there were common ground, when in fact there is only overlap in spelling.

That’s why attempts to ‘define’ these terms so often collapse into accusation:

That’s not what freedom means.
That’s not real justice.
You’re redefining truth.

No, the definitions were never shared in the first place. The disagreement was smuggled in with the noun.

‘Just Ignore the Word’ Is Not a Rescue

A common response at this point is to suggest that we simply bypass the troublesome term and discuss the concrete features each party associates with it. Fine. Sensible. Often productive. But notice what this manoeuvre concedes. It does not save the term. It abandons it.

If meaningful discussion can only proceed once the word is set aside and replaced with a list of clarifications, constraints, examples, and exclusions, then the word has already failed at its primary job: conveying shared meaning. This is precisely the point the LIH is making.

The insufficiency is not that language is vague, or flexible, or context-sensitive. It’s that beyond a certain level of conceptual complexity, language becomes a confidence trick. It gives us the feeling of agreement without the substance, the appearance of communication without the transaction.

At that point, words don’t merely underperform. They mislead.

Philosophics's avatar

Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Cold, Aliens, and the Grammar That Thinks It Knows Too Much

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
2–3 minutes

I shared this post not too long ago. Today, I shared it in a different context, but I feel is interesting – because I feel that many things are interesting, especially around language and communication.

When Aliens Speak English: The False Promise of Linguistic Familiarity

It commenced here on Mastodon.

Ocrampal shared a link to an article debating whether we are cold or have cold. Different cultures express this differently. It’s short. Read it on his site.

Audio: Exceptional NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

I replied to the post:

Nicely observed. I’ve pondered this myself. Small linguistic tweak: between être and avoir, avoir already behaves better metaphysically, but sentir seems the cleanest fit. Cold isn’t something one is or has so much as something one senses — a relational encounter rather than an ontological state or possession.

Between having and being, having is the lesser sin — but sensing/feeling feels truer. Cold belongs to the world; we merely sense it.

He replied in turn:

Agree except for: “Cold belongs to the world”. That is a metaphysical assumption that has consequences …

Finally (perhaps, penultimately), I responded:

Yes, it does. That statement was idiomatic, to express that ‘cold’ is environmental; we can’t be it or possess it. Coincidentally, I recently wrote about ‘cold’ in a different context:

where I link back to the post at the top of this article.

A more verbose version of this response might have been:

This pushback is fair, but I’m not trying to re-ontologise cold. “Belongs to the world” in that context is doing rhetorical, not metaphysical, work; it’s idiomatic.

The point isn’t that cold is a mind-independent substance waiting around like a rock. It’s that whatever cold is, it doesn’t sit comfortably as an identity predicate (‘I am…cold’ – ‘J’ai…froid‘) or a possession (‘I have…cold’ – so, not ‘Je suis…froid‘) – neither to be confused with ‘I have a cold’, a different animal altogether.

‘Sensing’ (‘I feel…cold’ – ‘Je me sens…froid‘ – we have to use the reflexive pronoun, me, here; in English, this syntax has been deprecated) keeps the relation explicit without smuggling in ownership or essence. It leaves cold as an encounter-property, not a thing I contain and not a thing I am.

If anything, that phrasing was meant to resist metaphysical inflation, not commit to it.

And this is exactly the problem I gestured at in the aliens piece. We mistake familiar grammatical scaffolding for shared metaphysics. We assume that if the sentence parses cleanly, the ontology must be sound.

Language doesn’t just describe experience. It quietly files it into categories and then acts surprised when those categories start making demands.

Cold, like aliens, exposes the trick. The moment you slow down, the grammar starts to wobble. And that wobble is doing far more philosophical work than most of our declarative sentences are willing to admit.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

Meet the Language Insufficiency GPT

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1–2 minutes

In anticipation of the publication of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis in January 2026, I have created a Language Insufficiency GPT.

In anticipation of the publication of A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis in January 2026, I’ve created a Language Insufficiency GPT.

Today I’m launching something designed to exploit a familiar failure mode with forensic precision:
👉 https://chatgpt.com/g/g-694018a9bbc88191a8360d65a530e50c-language-insufficiency-gpt

Naturally, it will make more sense alongside the book. But it may still provide a bit of entertainment – and mild discomfort – in the meantime.

tl;dr: Language is generally presumed to be stable. Words mean what you think they mean, right? A table is a table. A bird is a bird. Polysemy aside, these are solid, dependable units.

Then we arrive at freedom, justice, truth, and an entire panoply of unstable candidates. And let’s not even pretend qualia are behaving themselves.

So when someone says ‘truth’, ‘free speech’, or ‘IQ’, you may suddenly realise you’ve been arguing with a cardboard cut-out wearing your own assumptions. That isn’t just interpersonal mischief. It’s language doing exactly what it was designed to do: letting you glide over the hard problems while sounding perfectly reasonable.

Audio: Short NotebookLM summary of this page content*
Video: Legacy video explaining some features of the LIH.

If that sounds banal, you’ve already fallen for the trap.

Give it a try – or wait until you’ve digested the book. Not literally, unless you’re short on fibre.

Cheers.

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Written by Bry Willis

Philosophics

* As I’ve cited previously, the quality of NotebookLM varies – usually in predictable directions. This one does well enough, but it doesn’t have enough context to get the story right (because it was only drawing from this page rather than from a fuller accounting of the LIH). Its trailing comment reveals that it doesn’t grasp that “new words” don’t solve the problem.

Earlier, it suggests that language is intentionally vague. This is not an assertion I make. You can read some of the earlier incarnations, or you can wait for it to be published.