Last time, I looked at Derrida’s Gift of Death to understand the logic of sacrifice there.  Briefly, the decision to do one thing involves sacrificing all of the other thing one could do.  So when I choose to feed this cat, I sacrifice all the other cats.  My ethics are impeccable, but the decision to…

There’s starting to be a good bit of productive “continental” work on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.  In particular, there’s emerging work that takes on LLMs from the point of view of language.  I’ve said a lot about the usefulness of Derrida for understanding LLMs, generally through the lens of Derrida’s discussion of Platonism. …

Leif Weatherby does not care for Derrida.  At least, in Language Machines (see here for a synopsis/initial take on this important book) he suggests that Derrida’s (mis)reading of Saussure is a significant part of “how the humanities lost language, allowing both cognitive science and NLP to update analytical and technological approaches that literary theory rarely…

Last time, I talked about Leif Weatherby’s fantastic Language Machines (for my initial synopsis and thoughts on the book, see here) and his identification of a Kantian problematic behind what he calls the syntax view of language, which is prominently associated with Chomsky.  Although Chomsky called his book Cartesian Linguistics, Weatherby thinks the better reference…

In Language Machines (see here), Leif Weatherby argues that what he calls the “syntax” view of language, which is most closely associated with Chomsky, is better viewed as a Kantian system than a Cartesian one: “Syntax, universal grammar, principles and parameters, and the more recent ‘minimalist program’ with its key idea of ‘merge’ – all…

Regular readers of this space will know that I think large language models are deeply fascinating, in addition to being a little scary (depending on their use).  I also think that we can get some traction on both of those things by way of post-structuralist language theory, or at least, by way of Derrida.  I…

The preprint is freshly posted on SSRN; the paper is forthcoming in a volume on Privacy Resignation (aka privacy cynicism). In it I argue that privacy resignation is usefully understood as an adaptive preference. Here is the abstract: Adaptive preferences are preferences that change because of the availability of what someone desires. The concept has…

I was saddened to learn this past weekend of the death on March 3 of Timothy J. Reiss, emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU.  Tim was the outside reader for my dissertation and was incredibly generous in supporting the project.  I had encountered his work first as an undergraduate, when I somewhat randomly pulled…