Who he? A sort-of Londoner of Italian and Spanish stock, David J. Lobina is an academic who is mostly interested in the philosophy of cognitive science, linguistics, and the psychology of language and reasoning. He is the author of Recursion (2017, Oxford University Press) as well as of an increasing number of articles on what may be termed the theoretical repercussions of generative linguistics (namely, the idea that the analytical tools of linguistics can be fruitfully applied to the study of such phenomena as human thought, human nature, and even political perspectives such as socialism; e così via). He is currently spending much time thinking about the present status of the language-of-thought hypothesis and is quite tempted to rewrite The Language of Thought all over again, though not quite à la Menard, and remains a wannabe Knight of the Order of the Finnegans.
by David J. Lobina Having lived in Madrid through much of my teen years, I remember the “20-N” rather well – November the 20th being the date Francisco Franco, the last of the far-right European dictators, died in his bed, and a date that is commemorated ever since by the far-right in Spain. The 20-N…
by David J. Lobina A spectre is haunting your favourite social network – the spectre of equity, and it won’t die.[ii] So yet another controversial topic from me, and thus another go at getting cancelled. A long series of pieces on the use and abuse of the term fascism by American commentators (here, here, and…
by David J. Lobina One of the most disappointing aspects of modern life is seeing peers in academia, and intellectuals in general, share their personal and private selves on social media. Now, it is not the case that prior to social media one didn’t know anything about the personalities of many academics or intellectuals, but…
by David J. Lobina Just as Donald Trump fires the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor [sic] Statistics because he didn’t like the data they reported, I am reminded of two things: Michael Gove’s infamous quote about experts during the lead up to the so-called Brexit referendum, when he was Lord Chancellor in the UK…
by David J. Lobina One of the most annoying aspects of living in an American – that is, US – world is not the imperialism of it all, with US military bases in hundreds of countries and the many wars and unpunished war crimes that have come with these bases in the last 80 or…
by David J. Lobina This is a question I was considering whilst reading this recent paper by Dorsa Amir and Chaz Firestone on the origins of a well-known visual illusion (a preprint is freely accessible here). It is an issue I have often thought about, and about which I have always wanted to write something.…
by David J. Lobina ‘Philosophy is a prolonged meditation on death’, so starts what may well be Mark C. Taylor’s 35th book, After the Human. A Philosophy of the Future, published by Columbia University Press. I must admit that I didn’t know Taylor’s work before reading this book, though this is perhaps unsurprising, as for…
by David J. Lobina Like almost everyone I know, I enjoy listening to music and going to live concerts. What’s more, once upon a time I used to place much importance on someone’s ability to perform at a concert. This was especially the case because I was listening to a lot of rap music in…
by David J. Lobina No, this column is not a retrospective of What’s Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, a book by the British journalist Nick Cohen, even though the title of that forgettable volume is apposite here (I’ll come back to this below). Rather, my title is a reference to a conference that took…
by David J. Lobina It can be lonely being a football player, especially when the ball is rolling. I live on the wing, my natural habitat. As close to the touch line as possible, old-fashioned. No-one really understands me. I think my teammates live in a completely different world to my own. I can track…
by David J. Lobina A specter is haunting Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the specter of the environmental costs of Machine/Deep Learning. As Neural Networks have by now become ubiquitous in modern AI applications, the gains the industry has seen in applying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to solve ever more complex problems come at a high…
by David J. Lobina A new year, and a new opportunity to write on some more contentious topics (and/or be cancelled), my new year’s resolution in 2024. I wrote about universality and diversity last year, as well as on the identity conditions of, well, identities, and I now start the year 2025 by reviewing a…
by David J. Lobina And by ‘them’, I mean, of course, the rich! I think it is fair to say that such a rallying cry has always resonated with certain people, and perhaps even more so now in the US, with a forthcoming Trump 2 administration seemingly to be filled with billionaires. And I’m sure…
by David J. Lobina Firstly: fascism is dead and it is not coming back. By fascism it is meant the historical fascism of the 1920-40s, in particular the primus inter (more-or-less) pares fascism of 1920s Italy – id est, Fascism – and to a lesser extent that of Nazi Germany, notwithstanding the fact that Nazism…
by David J. Lobina An apparently non-negotiable assumption of modern identity politics, though this was not always the case (see this regarding a certain non-philosopher), is that the individuation of personal characteristics is an intrinsic affair – that is, it is down to an individual to determine and state what they are, this often following…
by David J. Lobina For someone who sees himself as a person of the Left, at least in the sense in which the political right and left were conceptualised by Norberto Bobbio ages ago – that is to say, as moral and political stances towards equality (and inequality) – and more concretely, as a sort-of…
by David J. Lobina Imagine I place you in front of a computer screen, show you the image of two coloured shapes – e.g., a yellow triangle and a red circle – and then ask you if the sentence the triangle is yellow and the circle is red describes the image. You’ll very quickly answer…
by David J. Lobina So, then, is the American politician Ron DeSantis a fascist? Is former (and maybe next) US President Donald Trump a fascist? What about the Republican Party these two politicians belong to, is it a fascist party? Are some strands within the modern British Conservative party, to move to this side of…
by David J. Lobina In previous posts on AI [sic], I have argued that contemporary machine learning models, the dominant approach in AI these days, are not sentient or sapient (there is no intelligence on display, only input-output correlations), do not exhibit any of the main features of human cognition (in particular, no systematicity), and…
by David J. Lobina By now I feel like the linguist-in-residence at 3 Quarks Daily; and that would be quite right, as every outlet should have an in-house linguist (a generative linguist, of course), considering how often, and how badly!, language matters are discussed in the popular press. Perhaps I should start a series of…