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The complexities of simple: What simple language proponents should know about...

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post Update Part of this post was incorporated into an article I wrote with Brian Kelly and Alistair McNaught that appeared in the December issue of Ariadne. As part of...

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Framing and constructions as a bridge between cognition and culture: Two...

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post I just found out that both abstracts I submitted to the Cognitive Futures of the Humanities Conference were accepted. I was really only expecting one to get through...

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How we use metaphors

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about...

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Sunsets, horizons and the language/mind/culture distinction

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post For some reason, many accomplished people, when they are done accomplishing what they’ve set out to accomplish, turn their minds to questions like: What is primary,...

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Storms in all Teacups: The Power and Inequality in the Battle for Science...

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post The great blog Genealogy of Religion posted this video with a somewhat approving commentary: The video started off with panache and promised some entertainment,...

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Binders full of women with mighty pens: What is metonymy

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post Metonymy in the wild Things were not going well for Mitt Romney in early autumn of last year. And then he responded to a query about gender equality with this...

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5 things everybody should know about language: Outline of linguistics’...

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post Drafty This was written in some haste and needs further refinement. Maybe one day that will come. For now, it will be left as it stands. Background This post outlines...

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Linguistics according to Fillmore

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post While people keep banging on about Chomsky as being the be all and end all of linguistics (I’m looking at you philosophers of language), there have been many...

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What does it mean when words ‘really’ mean something: Dismiss the Miss

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post A few days ago, I tweeted a link to an article in TES: What Miss really means < It’s always worthwhile re-examining ingrained inequalities http://t.co/GKhjc4VgUP...

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Anthropologists’ metaphorical shenanigans: Or how (not) to research metaphor

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post Over on the excellent ‘Genealogy of Religion’, Cris Campbell waved a friendly red rag in front of my eyes to make me incensed over exaggerated claims (some)...

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What language looks like: Dictionary and grammar are to language what...

Send to Kindle Listen to this Post Background Sometimes a rather obscure and complex analogy just clicks into place in one’s mind and allows a slightly altered way of thinking that just makes so much...

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10 ways in which music is like language and 8 (more important) ways in which...

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...

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How to read ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things’: Guide to essential reading on...

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:...

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Not ships in the night: Metaphor and simile as process

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...

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Does machine learning produce mental representations?

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...

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3 burning issues in the study of metaphor

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...

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What would make linguistics a better science? Science as a metaphor

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...

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Writing as translation and translation as commitment: Why is (academic)...

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...

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Fruit loops and metaphors: Metaphors are not about explaining the abstract...

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....

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Turing tests in Chinese rooms: What does it mean for AI to outperform humans

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...

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