Tag: philosophy
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Polysemy, pragmatics and puppetry: What AI can learn from ethnomethodology
I recently wrote a blog post in which I summarised some research on the topic of multiple meanings and AI against the backdrop of an old paper of mine on ‘ambiguities we live by’, published in 2001 in the Journal of Pragmatics. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that studies how language is used in…
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‘Fake’: From murky origins to murky future
On 2 February 2024 I wrote a post entitled “Truth, post-truth and post-fake”. I started the post like this: “I was sitting at my desk trying to think about something I could blog about. For some reason the word ‘truth’ popped into my head. After that I … messed about on the news database Nexis, rummaged…
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Polysemy, safety and epistemic risks in AI discourse
In last week’s post I traced some connections between an old paper on ambiguity and polysemy that a colleague and I published in 2001, when generative AI and LLMs were not yet on the horizon, and a 2026 paper linking ambiguity and polysemy to modern AI discourse to hype and manipulation, power and ethics. In…
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Polysemy, power and ethics in AI discourse
I recently saw a paper by Travis LaCroix, Fintan Mallory and Sasha Luccioni entitled ‘Strategic polysemy in AI discourse: A philosophical analysis of language, hype, and power’ which immediately attracted my attention as I had worked on ambiguity and polysemy, in the distant past. I am now working on metaphors used in and for AI but I…
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Metaphors AIs live by
I wanted to write something about the history of science this week but I’ll postpone that until next week. In this post, I just want to draw your attention to a phenomenon relating to AI and metaphors that is quite intriguing and that I don’t understand, especially since I only use AIs, that is Claude,…
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From metaphors on market day to metaphors we live by
I was talking the other day with some people about AI metaphors. During that discussion the thorny question came up ‘what are metaphors anyway?’, followed by ‘is there anything in language that’s not metaphorical?’. This brought to mind a very old quote. In 1730 the grammarian and philosopher César Chesneau Du Marsais said: “I am…
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Making Science Public 2025: End-of-year round-up of blog posts
This year has been quite a year! First, I had to move the blog to a new independent home after the University of Nottingham shut down their blogging platform (I wrote two posts about this, one reflecting on the past and one on the future). Second, there was a lot to blog about, from wildfires…
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From symbolist poets to science communication: Exploring an invisible thread in my academic life
Years and years ago, I had an Academia profile in which I mentioned that when I began studying French literature in the mid-1970s I fell in love with Baudelaire and Rimbaud. I no longer have access to Academia, but somebody must have seen that sentence and recently sent me an email asking how I got…
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Metaphor, alchemy and lessons from the 17th century
Philip Ball has just published a magnificent book on the history of alchemy: Alchemy: An Illustrated History of Elixirs, Experiments, and the Birth of Modern Science. This made me think about metaphor, of course, given how central metaphorical language was to alchemical practice. In a sense, metaphor is alchemy, metaphorically speaking, as it transmutes two…
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Erving Goffman: Memories, method and metaphors
If you do sociology or, indeed, any social science whatsoever, you’ll come across the work of Erving Goffman. I have done too but never engaged with it as much as I should have done. This was brought back to me when I talked with somebody who once shared a taxi-ride with Goffman and chatted with…