New APPS

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 is to Kant.  I think this makes a lot of sense, and it helps (this was the trajectory last time) to understand why structuralist, post-structuralist and Wittgensteinian work seems to have real traction when applied to language models.

Here I want to step back a little and note part of what motivates the Kantian account, because I think it shows the political stakes of Kantianism. On a standard epistemological reading, Kant was awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Humean empiricism. Causality demands necessity and empiricism can’t get you there (see B123-4). I have no quarrel with the epistemological reading, but it’s worth noting that the language of the First Critique also is full of juridical terminology.  For example, we need to “institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws” (A xiii).  As David Lachterman showed, this kind of language is all over the First Critique and is critical to the project of disciplining reason.  In starting the Deduction, Kant distinguishes a question of right from a question of fact and applies the distinction to our use of the categories:

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 these are attempts to isolate and formalize the ability to use language as a distinctively human operation shared neither by animals nor by machines. For this reason, I think that his linguistics is more Kantian than Cartesian. Chomskyan linguistics is the search for the categories of a transcendental logic as it exists extensively, to find the rules that we impose on sound or paper …. The search for the rules of that knowledge in the empirical order is futile, Kant argued, and Chomsky’s argument against statistics ha its analog here, not in Descartes or in Humboldt” (46-7).

Chomsky’s aversion to empiricism (in this Kantian sense) is “at the cost of defining” language “not as actually spoken languages but as the formal production unit – in the brain or some computational formalism – that achieves the fit between knowing and saying, the internal and external aspects of the linguistic act” (51).  On the Chomskyan argument, it is not possible to bootstrap from semantics to syntax; the cost is explaining “how the deep structure of syntax actually imposes form on specific languages, like English or Lao” (51).

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 was thus very happy to finally read Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AIO and the End of Remainder Humanism, which came out earlier this year.  Weatherby’s thesis is, in brief, that the structuralists were right about language, and that we need to see this to have any hope of understanding language models and directing them to good use.  I’ll hopefully have more to say about various parts of the book later, but for now I want to offer a high level outline.

Weatherby begins by arguing that “nothing less than the problem of meaning, in a holistic sense, surfaces when language is algorithmically reproducible,” such that “this problem can be addressed only if linguistics is extended to include poetics … reversing the assumption that reference is the primary function of language, grasping it rather as an internally structured web of signs” (2).  This is because “the new AI is constituted in an conditioned by language, but not as a grammar or a set of rules.  Taking in vast swaths of real language in use, these algorithms rely on language in extenso: culture, as a machine” (5).

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 had considerable uptake in the literature on human development, where it is used to understand how socially marginalized people come to accept their marginal status. Here, I apply the framework to privacy resignation in two ways. On a substantive interpretation, adaptive preferences indicate a normative problem. In the case of privacy, it is with substantive autonomy and the importance of privacy to a number of core human capabilities. On a formal interpretation, adaptive preferences are irrational because they involve changing one’s assessment of something without it having itself changed. Here I argue that this sort of preference-“privacy is unavailable, therefore it is bad”-is a goal of the data industry, which wants to change social norms against privacy to serve its own purposes and to deflect critical thinking away from its practices.

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 a copy of his Discourse of Modernism off the shelf of a used bookstore.  I was working on a thesis about Heidegger’s metaphors for thought; Discourse seemed interesting and like the kind of thing I’d like. I read it and didn’t understand it all that well, though my underlining and marginal notes suggest I worked pretty hard at it. A few years later, I was researching my dissertation, which was half on Hobbes, relied heavily on minor 17c primary texts and made a claim about what “modern” political philosophy consisted in.  I had already been thoroughly influenced by David Lachterman’s Ethics of Geometry and had this idea that something in Discourse of Modernism might be helpful. So I picked it up again.  That time I did understand it, and remember evenings sitting by the gas fire in an underheated Oxford flat working my way through it.

At some point during this process, during which I also picked up The Meaning of Literature and Knowledge, Voyage and Discovery in Early Modern Europe, I cold emailed him, describing my project and asking if he’d be willing to be my outside reader.  A couple of days later, I got a brief but polite reply to the effect that he was already on too many projects.  A few days after that, I got another email – this time to say that he’d been looking over my proposal again, that it sounded very interesting, and he’d very much like to be one of my readers.  After I finished my dissertation, he generously cited it in one of his later books.  He also offered both positive feedback and some needed encouragement for my heterodox treatment of Hobbes’s mathematics, which was my first post-dissertation work on Hobbes.

Tim’s erudition was astonishing – he published a long list of books, much longer than I’ve recounted here.  All of them were meticulously documented and carefully argued across wide ranging primary and secondary sources.  He was a “renaissance scholar” in that he worked on texts of the European Renaissance, but the scope of his reading and thought was truly global, including to contemporary work.  In the late renaissance and early modern period in Europe, he moved seamlessly between literature and philosophy (both in Europe and outside it), locating them both in their shared cultural moment and refusing to abide by our much later disciplinary boundaries.  When I teach Modern, I’m still informed by his treatment of Descartes and the ways he shows both that Descartes was deeply attuned to his own cultural moment, and that Descartes ultimately could be read as working toward a community of thinkers, rather than the isolated ego best known for a “retreat from the polis to the poêle,” as Tim cited Lachterman as having once quipped.

NYU has a memorial notice here, and you should really read the appreciations gathered at the bottom – they speak to his scholarly contributions, his personal generosity, and his immense influence in growing and transforming the NYU comp lit department.

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 then to resume posting on my ordinary semi-regular schedule.

For now, I’ve imported back to late 2013. Back then, NewAPPS was very much a group endeavor. Unfortunately, I’ve not (yet) figured out how to get original authors preserved in post titles. Everything will appear as me, even when it’s not.

Thanks to all of NewAPPPS’ readers over the years!

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 of whether a speaking subject necessarily subtends language production and how that might play out in the context of language models.  Here I want to return the conversation to Plato, since Derrida’s discussion of Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus is central to all of these thoughts.  One thing that emerges in Plato is that he is acutely aware of the political stakes involved, and the Phaedrus deploys various strategies with myths and stories to communicate those stakes.  Indeed, Plato does this basically all the time.

Most obviously, in the Republic, when he infamously banishes the poets, it is not all poets he banishes, but the Homeric ones.  The problem is that Homeric poetry teaches the wrong thing.  Socrates broaches the subject as follows:

“We must begin, then, it seems, by a censorship over our storymakers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject.  And the stories on the accepted list we will include nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls by these stories far rather than their bodies by their hands.  But most of the stories they now tell we must reject” (377c).

He then immediately cites the example of the Uranus Kronos story told by Hesiod, which he avers shouldn’t be told to young people even if true (I’ll return to this point, as I think it’s important).  Instead, for stories like that, “the best way would be to bury them in silence” (378a).  This is because “the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory, but whatever opinions are taken into the mind at that age are wont to prove indelible and unalterable” (378d).  As Penelope Murray comments of this passage, Plato “is not concerned with the factual veracity of history here, but with the ethical truth that should be expressed through myth” (252).  The problem is that the wrong myths have been told, and numerous examples of allowed and disallowed myths follow. For example, we must say that the Gods do not deceive, because words are a “copy of the affection in the soul” (382b) and “essential falsehood … is hated not only by gods but by men.”

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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 experience with the Internet Archive however.

I don't know what this means for producing content going forward.  I know NewApps is not the only philosophy blog with this sudden problem (Leiter Reports is on Typepad, according to the URL; I'm not sure about Daily Nous).

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 at the implications of Derrida’s critique of Platonism in the context of language models, and in particular the need to avoid making ontological pronouncement about them when we should be seeing them politically.  At the end of last time, I suggested that one possible Platonism concerns the unity of a speaking subject: when I say “the cat is on the mat,” what kind of subjectivity subtends my speech?

That is, the Platonism question secondarily points to the question of the unity of a speaking subject (or at least the desirability of positing that speech emanates from a unified subject), which the Platonic priority of voice over text then enables one to associate with the production of language.  Language models produce speech but there is no unified subject behind them, only statistical prediction.  This predictive model treats meaning as a matter primarily of association and distribution across a language system. Anybody who’s versed in 20c “continental” thought will not be surprised by this, since one of the main endeavors of that thought from Heidegger (or even Nietzsche or Marx) onward has been to dismantle projects that posit such a unified subject.  As Henry Somers-Hall has argued, there has been a particular effort in French thought to move past constructions that rely on a broadly Kantian understanding of thinking as judgment (x is y) which are themselves subtended by an understanding of thought as representative.  Indeed, there’s a rich history of the developments in cybernetics making their way into France.

There are several implications for language models.

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