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 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…
by David J. Lobina Like the study of any other complex idea, the analysis of nationalism requires building up boundaries between different phenomena, drawing various theoretical distinctions, and recognising the inevitable splits that arise within what may look like a whole ideology at first. It is by teasing out the building blocks of nationalism that…
by David J. Lobina Well, first post of the year, and a new-year-resolution unkept. Unsurprising, really. In my last entry of 2023, I drew attention to the various series of posts I have written at 3 Quarks Daily since 2021, many of which did not proceed in order, creating a bit of confusion along the…
by David J. Lobina —Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet? Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light? So Joyce imagines in the interior monologue of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as I discussed in What Joyce Got Wrong. Is it a psychologically plausible…
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…
by David J. Lobina Artificial General Intelligence, however this concept is to be defined exactly, is upon us, say two prominent AI experts. Not exactly an original statement, as this sort of claim has come up multiple times in the last year or so, often followed by various qualifications and the inevitable dismissals (Gary Marcus…
by David J. Lobina So, what is the role and place of Bustan Qaraaqa within the community they are based in? What connections have they made there? What volunteering, if any, have they promoted in other farms, or in general in the West Bank? And what is their place within the worldwide permaculture network, and…
by David J. Lobina In an article on anarchist thought and action, Noam Chomsky draws a crucial but often neglected distinction for politically-inclined activists: that between visions, the ‘conception of a future society’ one might aspire to, and goals, the actual ‘choices and tasks that are within reach’, the latter ideally guided by one’s vision.[i]…
by David J. Lobina It is often stated that natural language is both ambiguous and inexplicit to be the medium of thought – to be the medium in which we think, as opposed to the conceptual language of thought I have gone on about for some time here at 3 Quarks Daily. But what do…
by David J. Lobina Is Ron DeSantis a fascist? Well, no, not really, and the question itself is not a little ridiculous, but I will come back to this properly next month (and, can you even pronounce his name properly?). In the meantime, I thought I would revisit some ideas of Rudolf Rocker briefly, the…
by David J. Lobina For someone who grew up in the South of Europe but has lived in the UK for the last 20 or so years, and who, moreover, is a sort-of linguist, the recent proliferation of the word “fascism” to refer to certain political events and tendencies in the English-speaking world, especially in…
by David J. Lobina The hype surrounding Large Language Models remains unbearable when it comes to the study of human cognition, no matter what I write in this Column about the issue – doesn’t everyone read my posts? I certainly do sometimes. Indeed, this is my fourth, successive post on the topic, having already made…
by David J. Lobina In this misguided series of posts on large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science, I have tried to temper some of the wildest discussions that have steadily appeared about language models since the release of ChatGPT. I have done so by emphasising what LLMs are and do, and by suggesting that…
by David J. Lobina Where was I? Last month I made the point that Artificial Intelligence (AI) – or, more appropriately, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, the actual paradigms driving the current hype in AI – is doomed to be forever inanimate (i.e., lack sentience) and dumb (i.e., not smart in the sense that humans…