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…

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve no doubt heard that Typepad is shutting down on Sept. 30. I’ve moved NewAPPS to WordPress, which is what you’re reading here. In the coming days and weeks I hope to get nearly all of the content from the original site ported over, get the url’s working correctly, and…

By Gordon Hull For quite a while, I’ve been exploring how to relate Derridean concerns about language and the politics behind theories of language (and text), and how to think about those in the context of large language models (part one, two, three, four, five, six).  Last time, I talked about subjectivity and the question…

The announcement is here: https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2025/08/typepad-is-shutting-down.html NewApps has its own URL, but it's hosted on Typepad.  I assume this means that Typepad blog content will disappear from everything other than the Internet Archive (I can also download a file, so I can explore migration options), which hopefully will capture a lot of it. I have limited…

By Gordon Hull Over what’s become a lengthy series of posts ((one, two, three, four, five), I’ve been exploring a Derridean response to language models. Initially prompted by a pair of articles by Lydia Liu on the Wittgensteinian influence on the development of language models, and some comments Liu makes about Derrida, I’ve been looking…

I want to take a break from Derrida and language models this week to explore an emerging policy issue.  As is impossible to miss, “AI” is everywhere.  Not everything that claims to be “AI” really is, but it’s getting hard to avoid things that call themselves “AI” as the AI companies look to make the…