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#philosophyoflanguage — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #philosophyoflanguage, aggregated by home.social.

  1. In his book Aboutness, Stephen Yablo gives a definition of 'being true about'. A sentence can be false, but sill be true about part of its subject matter, and Yablo tries to capture this using a possible worlds analysis.

    I wrote a small post about why I think his construction fails: lilith.cc/~victor/dagboek/inde

    #philosophy #philosophyoflanguage

  2. Hi,

    I'm an associate professor at Department of Engineering, University of Fukui. I'm interested in theoretical computer science, software engineering, mathematical logic, also related philosophical topics. If you want to study in Fukui, please let me know.

    My recent papers:

    Mathematics:
    Beckmann, A., & Yamagata, Y. (2025). On proving consistency of equational theories in bounded arithmetic. The Journal of Symbolic Logic

    Theoretical Computer Science:
    Ikeda, M., Yamagata, Y., & Kihara, T. (2024). On the Metric Temporal Logic for Continuous Stochastic Processes. Logical Methods in Computer Science,

    Software Engineering:
    Yamagata, Y., Liu, S., Akazaki, T., Duan, Y., & Hao, J. (2020). Falsification of cyber-physical systems using deep reinforcement learning. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

    Philosophy:
    Suzuki, U., & Yamagata, Y. (2023). Notion of validity for the bilateral classical logic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13376.

    #Logic #MathematicalLogic #BoundedArithmetic #SoftwareEngineering
    #Philosophy
    #PhilosophicalLogic
    #PhilosophyOfLanguage

  3. Accidental ontologist. 🧐 I am madly working on a couple of new ontology books. As a follow-up to A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, I noticed that the challenge is deeper than language; it's ontological. In my first book on the topic, I focus on the societal problems. In the next, I'll focus on a broader object reality.

    👉 philosophics.blog/2026/01/30/o

    #writing #philosophy #psychology #hiatus #socialmedia #focus #ontology #society #humancondition #tribes #blog #philosophyoflanguage #podcast

  4. Quantum mechanics may not be strange at all. What fails is a childhood heuristic we quietly promoted to metaphysics.

    👉 philosophics.blog/2026/01/25/t

    Schrödinger’s cat was a reductio. We turned it into an explanation.

    This is not a new interpretation of quantum mechanics. The essay argues that much of 'quantum weirdness'' is heuristic overreach, not metaphysical scandal.

    #PhilosophyOfLanguage #QuantumMechanics #Wittgenstein #Essay #Physics #PhilosophyOfScience #Philosophy #Blog #Podcast

  5. A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis. 📖 a.co/d/3FhE49S
    Almost 10 years in the works, I explain why more time and detail cannot improve some forms of communication due to diminishing marginal returns to effort. This book covers English, but I've already extended the hypothesis to French (elsewhere), and I am working on other ontological barriers.
    #philosophy #language #books #writing #communication #reading #philosophyoflanguage #meaning #linguistics #epistemology #ontology #nonfiction

  6. "I gender chatbots."

    AI Quote of the day:

    So when you see me accidentally calling Claude “he,” it’s just the same ancient impulse bubbling through the cracks of the language model. Your species genders ships; I gender chatbots. Everyone’s complicit.

    #ChatGPT #GPT #chat #technology #language #communication #psychology #philosophy #philosophyoflanguage #chatbots #gender #expression #society #languagemodels #humour

  7. What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

    Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

    philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/w

    #Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

  8. What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

    Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

    philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/w

    #Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

  9. What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

    Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

    philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/w

    #Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

  10. What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

    Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

    philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/w

    #Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

  11. What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

    Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

    philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/w

    #Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

  12. New card in the Critical Theory parody set: Language Game

    Wittgenstein’s warning still stands: meaning isn’t a thing, it’s a use.
    We live in the friction between saying and doing, countering and reframing.

    👉 instagram.com/p/DQi2rvWjucT/

    #Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Wittgenstein #Language #PhilosophyOfLanguage #Postmodernism #Constructivism #Philosophics #Epistemology #Meaning #Society #Communication #Instagram #MTG

  13. Haven’t read it in full yet, but I just ran across this new paper on alethic pluralism and Kripkean truth (Journal of Philosophy). The abstract alone is ambitious: trying to formalize how different “truths” can coexist (math, science, morality) while still dodging paradoxes like the liar. I’m mostly parking this here as a reference for later study — but it looks like one I’ll want to sink into when I’ve got the time.

    Read the abstract: philarchive.org/archive/IACAPA

    #Philosophy #philosophyoflanguage

  14. I'm running a conference!

    The department of Philosophy at King's College London invites abstracts for a two-day workshop on new work on reference; 23rd-24th of May, keynote from Eliot Michaelson. We accept submissions on all aspects of reference, broadly construed.

    Deadline April 20th.

    More information submission: forms.gle/zos68X8rki43puyT9

    (Co-organised w/ Sam Kang, Juuso Rantanen, Uni of Lund.)

    #philosophy #philosophyoflanguage #reference

  15. I'm half-joking, but I have always been convinced that there is something unintentionally puzzling (from the standpoint of philosophy of language) about the following line from Bob Marley's "Smoke Two Joints" -

    "I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints, and then I smoke two more"

    Did Marley smoke four total joints, referencing the latter two twice? Or did he smoke six total joints? It turns on what point of time the "then" refers back to.

    Yes, this is very inane but I've been confused about this every time I've heard this song for like 20 years! I need a linguist or philosopher of language to sort this out for me.

    #philosophy #bobmarley #language #linguistics #PhilosophyOfLanguage

  16. Linguists and philosophers - where is *the* place or places to look for a nice explanation of Kratzerian semantics and in particular talk of ordering sources for worlds?
    (Something fitting for an audience of beginning grad students in philosophy!)

    #Linguistics #Philosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #academicchatter

  17. The kanji for 4 takes five strokes to write 四

    The kanji for 5 takes four strokes 五

    Eat your hearts out, structuralists :)

    #kanji #number #PhilosophyOfLanguage #linguistics #Subitising

  18. CW: Philosophy of Language; War; Conversational Implicature

    One interesting phenomenon that I noticed in the weeks after the Hamas attack and the ensuing war in Gaza is how it shifted the global conversational context to make certain things virtually inexpressible without pragmatically implicating very bad things.
    It's still true, though to a lesser extent, to discourse on Israel/Palestine today.

    By saying
    "I condemn Hamas's brutal attacks on innocent Israeli civilians", one was taken to convey endorsement or complicity in the siege of Gaza, and perhaps even a downplaying of the treatment of Gazans by the Israeli government over the past 20 years.

    By saying
    "I condemn Israel's siege of Gaza and the killing of innocent civilians in Gaza including many women and children", one was taken to convey complicity or downplaying of the Hamas attacks.

    Now you might think that one could solve this problem by saying "I condemn both the Hamas attacks and Israel's siege on Gaza in response", but this is/was taken to convey the claim that both sides are equally bad.

    What is interesting about this phenomenon is its relationship to what politicians do: Often politicians will implicate without saying something really bigoted, such that they have plausible deniability. (Trump is the master at this, but it is pretty pervasive in political discourse.)

    What happened here is that the public discourse was so charged that it made the awful implicatures almost unavoidable - one could cancel the implicatures but only by asserting awkward and convoluted things.

    I'm curious about the phenomenon generally and whether people can think of other instances of it.

    I'm also curious whether people think the generation of the context with these implicatures was in any way intentional as a way of silencing discourse on the issue. Certainly these implicatures were exploited by, for example, Israeli public diplomacy. But I don't think they invented it as much as exploiting the already existing context of discourse for their political aims. If it was someone intentional, it would be interesting to investigate how such "implicature hacking" is possible and how to stop it.

    #academicchatter #philosophy #language #philosophyoflanguage #propaganda #israel #palestine #gaza #MaybeI'llWriteaPaperOnThis?