by David J. Lobina
Having written for 3 Quarks Daily since July 2021, with the first entry coming out around the time of my birthday (two anniversaries to celebrate in July since then for me!), it has recently dawned on me that I have tended to write long “series” of articles here at 3QD Tower – but also, that I have made quite a mess of it at times.
Depending on how you gather up the posts, two series out of seven have not been completed at all, despite assurances given and promises made, and not every series has been posted in chronological order, which doesn’t make for a very uniform reading experience (but who reads this stuff anyway?!).
Given that this is the last entry of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to bring some order to my Monday Column, tie up some loose ends, and in addition anticipate some of the topics and arguments I want to run in 2024 – a New Year’s resolution of sorts, though as I will mention below, I had already announced in the past that I would tackle some of the very issues I shall list in this post. In my defence, some of these topics can be quite controversial, so perhaps I can be forgiven for the broken promise.
Never mind that for now. More to the point of the Monday Column, in general what I have tried to do in my monthly posts has been to apply some of the ideas and results of cognitive science – especially from the fields of linguistics and philosophy (and from cognitive psychology sometimes too) – to current affairs, politics, and the arts. And a natural place for me to start off in 2021 was the study of nationalism, as the role a common language usually plays in creating or fostering national identities has been central to many a study in nationalism and I had already carried out some work on this topic before.
Many scholars in the study of nationalism have tended to treat the notion of “language” (and of “a language”) fairly inadequately, missing some important points along the way, and I saw this as the perfect opportunity for a linguist’s contribution to this particular topic. This resulted in Series Number 1, laid out below.
I don’t think the first few posts of the inaugural series received much attention (at least judging by the number of comments), but things changed a bit when I considered the case of so-called peripheral nationalist movements, such as Catalanism (Catalonia is a region in Spain), which seemed to generate some interest. I wrote two posts about the Catalan case, the first of which concentrated on the questions of who the Catalans are and what they seem to want (politically speaking).
The highlight for me was the second post on Catalanism, and the final in the overall series, where I chronicled “the independentist process” in Catalonia since 2009 or so, and in so doing I took the opportunity to do a bit of Colm Tóibín bashing, he who has quite a rose-tinted view of Catalan nationalism and in the tumultuous years of 2016-17 was writing quite absurd (and fairly ignorant) pieces on the matter (I kept the bashing to a footnote, number 11, because I actually felt embarrassed to discuss this material in the main text).
Series #1. On Language and Nationalism: intro, the psychology of nationalism, some philosophical repercussions, of small nations, what Catalans want, what has happened in Catalonia in the last ten or so years (footnote 11, in all its glory, is in the last link).
This series also discussed some of the psychological properties of mental systems such as language and social cognition, and I think this made me decide to move on to my main field of study in cognitive science for the following series: the relationship between language and thought. An immense topic in its own right, and which remains as unsettled as any other big issue in the study of cognition, it is also a question I have returned to often in my Monday Column, almost exhausting all I have ever thought about it.
In Series Number 2, I started by describing what the language-and-thought relationship is all about, argued that we don’t, and really don’t, think in a language (say, English), that talking to ourselves is not quite a case of thinking (and I did so by taking the employment of the interior monologue in literature to track a character’s thought processes as a case in point, a topic I would like to come back to in the future), and that one’s particular language has a somewhat limited effect on one’s overall cognition. I ended the series by providing a high-level outline of what has come to be called The Language of Thought (LoT), the latter a construct to which I would come back again and again in subsequent posts.
Series #2. On Language and Thought: the issue, you don’t think in a natural language, you really don’t, the interior monologue in psychology (and Joyce), linguistic relativity, and what The Language of Thought is like.
To my surprise when going over these posts, I did not follow up on Series Number 2 by starting a series on the LoT itself, the more natural development, but instead I published two posts about the anarchist thinker and activist Rudolf Rocker and his truly impressive but forgotten magnum opus, the 1937 book Nationalism and Culture. It would have made more sense to come to Rocker after Series Number 1, given that some of the material there was directly related to Rocker’s book (a long article of mine connecting Rocker’s book to the aforementioned linguist’s contribution to the study of nationalism is forthcoming – hopefully!).
I say that I published two posts, but in reality this series contains three, it’s just that I went on to other topics (and series) after the second post, and then at some point later, much later, in fact, I came back to this series and posted a final piece (which, if I have learned anything about myself while reviewing my writing for 3QD, is probably not my last word on Rudolf Rocker). I should add that the first post of Series Number 3 is one of my favourite posts, not least because it evokes a time, and a type of person, that I find very relatable.
Series #3. An anarchist on Nationalism and Culture: Rudolf Rocker and his time, Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture, and much later, Rocker and the disappearance of languages.
After this sort of detour, I finally moved on to the LoT properly, but here again I messed up with the order of things. After publishing two pieces on the thinking abilities of other species and pre-verbal infants, I included the following promise at the end of the second post of Series Number 4, devoted to the LoT (the date is August 2022):
With the new academic year upon us, to change tack, and starting with next month’s post, I shall start writing on more topical matters to do with language, philosophy, and psychology. Some of the topics in the pipeline including the sudden replacement of Kiev with Kyiv, the necessary “expropriation” of all rich people, the eternal dumbness of artificial intelligence (actually, of machine learning), the mental effects of uttering/writing the n- and other verboten words, and some others. Stay tuned!
And of course I didn’t do such thing (or not right away). Instead, I came back to the LoT (the third post of Series Number 4), then I did finally write on some topical issues, and after a long, long while I decided to close the series on the LoT, though I do wonder, once again, whether I will write some more about this topic too.
Series #4. Studying The Language of Thought: take 1, from perspective of other species, take 2: from view of infant cognition, then the promise above, but in fact next was logical properties of the LoT, and much, much later the inexplicitness and ambiguity of thought.
And so Series Number 5, where I started writing on more topical issues. The first such post didn’t receive much attention, but at the time I thought it would receive some pushback from certain quarters – I did argue, after all, that in English and many other European languages it is more justified to use the word “Kiev” rather than “Kyiv” to refer to the capital of Ukraine, contrary to current usage in the English-speaking world, but comments came none.
After this piece, I wrote about Jerry Fodor, my favourite philosopher, on the 5th anniversary of his passing, and I followed upon this with a not unrelated series of articles on Artificial Intelligence – actually, on Machine Learning (ML) models – where I tried to offer a more sobering take on what these models are doing and what they can tell us, or not tell us, about human cognition (Fodor, and his colleague Zenon Pylyshyn, whom I mentioned in the first post of Series Number 5, published some now-famous critical papers on connectionist models of cognition, in a way the precursors to contemporary language models).
As ever, I posted four articles in succession, then moved on to other things, and recently I started a two-parter on this topic again, only to leave the latter unfinished – I do have a draft for the second part, and this will form the basis for my first article in 2024.
Series #5. On more topical topics: Kief, Kiev, Kyiv?, on the fifth anniversary of Jerry Fodor’s passing, on AI [sic] being forever dump and inanimate, ML and not AI (or how the BBS missed an opportunity), LLMs haven’t actually learned a natural language, and what is a natural language, anyway?, and much later, what is thought so that a LLM can exhibit it?, the latter the first part of a two-bit sub-series which will be completed first thing in 2024.
Moving on, in Series Number 6 I tackled the, to my mind, clear misuse of the term “fascism” to describe contemporary political currents and undercurrents, especially in the US. This is my most popular post in terms of number of comments and the debate these comments generated, and here too I promised that I would come back to the discussion with some clarifications and rejoinders, only to publish pieces on other stuff since then. I have a draft of this post too, and I anticipate that this will be my second article in 2024.
Series #6. On misapplying the term “fascism” to describe current affairs: use and abuse, and I will be back to this second thing in 2024!
And finally, Series Number 7, a short and surprisingly complete two-parter, where I discussed the role of the international volunteering movement in Palestine, with a personal element to it to boot, given my own volunteering at a permaculture farm in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, a million years ago. It will surprise no-one at all to read that Palestine is very much in the news at present, and so there might be some commentary for me to offer on current events, but this is unlikely to happen any time soon – I do like to arrive late to the news, as I feel it gives one some necessary mental distance, if you see what I mean.
Series #7. A volunteer in Palestine, in two parts: on the ground, and as an activist campaigning for the resolution to the conflict (necessary first step: end the occupation).
*****
As for the new year, I plan to address some of the topics long promised as well as bring some order to my Column. First off will be a post on how ML models don’t do “thought” at all, completing a two-parter on ML and thinking, and then I will write about use and abuse of the term “fascism”, completing another series. From then on I intend to engage with ever more controversial topics, though always from the perspective of linguistics and cognitive science. To wit, I will sooner or later discuss the necessary “expropriation” of all rich people, followed possibly by a piece about the mental effects of using euphemistic expressions such as “the n-word” (namely, it has the same effects as if one were to utter/write the so-called n-word in full, always within a technical discussion of this and other verboten words), then maybe an article about the fact that no-one really “has pronouns” in any strict sense, e così via. And maybe 3 Quarks Daily will end up firing me. In the meantime, see you all in 2024!