By Gordon Hull The diversity of language has been a philosophical problem for a while.  Hobbes was willing to bite the bullet and declare that language was arbitrary, but he was an outlier.  One common tactic in the seventeenth-century was to try to resolve the complexity of linguistic origins with a reference to Biblical Hebrew. …

The MA Program at UNC Charlotte has a number of funded lines (in-state tuition plus $14k a year) for our two-year MA program in philosophy.  We're an eclectic, practically-oriented department that emphasizes working across disciplines and philosophical traditions.  If that sounds like you, or a student you know – get in touch!  We also have…

Just published in the Journal of Social Computing, as part of a special issue on the question of the sentience of AI systems.  The paper is here (open access); here's the abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has renewed debate about whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be conscious or sentient. This paper identifies…

By Gordon Hull In a couple of previous posts (first, second), I looked at what I called the implicit normativity in Large Language Models (LLMs) and how that interacted with Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF).  Here I want to start to say something more general, and it seems to me like Derrida is a…

By Gordon Hull I first listened to the Pogues late in high school.  I had started moving beyond the music I could hear on the radio – basically top 40 and classic rock – and I discovered the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash at about the same time I discovered Midnight Oil’s Diesel and…

By Gordon Hull Over the course of a few posts (first, second, third), I’ve been exploring the question of what Foucault means when he refers disparagingly to “Chardino-Marxism” in a mid-1960s interview, comparing it unfavorably to what Althusser and his circle are doing.  Although the “Chardino” part refers to Teilhard de Chardin, it’s fairly clear…

Recall that ChatGPT a couple of months ago did a total face plant on the topic of Kierkegaard's knight of faith from the knight of infinite resignation.  Well, with the fullness of time and an upgrade, it's a lot better now: (screen grabs below the fold)

You know how sometimes your students don't do the reading?  And then how, when you give them a writing prompt based on it, they try to guess their way to a good answer from the everyday meaning of the words in the prompt?  And how, sometimes, the outcome is spectacularly, wonderfully wrong? Well, I don't…

The MA Program at UNC Charlotte has a number of funded lines for our two-year MA program in philosophy.  We're an eclectic, practically-oriented department that emphasizes working across disciplines and philosophical traditions.  If that sounds like you, or a student you know – get in touch!  You can email me (ghull@uncc.edu), though for a lot…

I wrote a piece a little more than a year ago about how intellectual property rights are getting in the way of global vaccine equity, condemning a lot of people to die in lower-income countries.  There have been various initiatives to address the situation.  A piece in Nature by Amy Maxmen today highlights somewhat encouraging…