john kadvany

(co)author of Risk:A Very Short Introduction , Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@compositiomal Eg Role of intentionality in language acquisition & use. Phrase structure rules as constructions. Essential role for inscription to conceptualize the phoneme concept.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@compositiomal @mariemarm But language is our greatest invention, even though nobody invented it. An accumulation of little norms propagated across generations. Hence no single ‘decider’ much like other technologies. I agree special cognitive skills are needed to enable that.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@mariemarm @compositiomal As I recall pretty much that phonological, morphological, syntactic rules all are norms defining what counts or not as grammatical language. They’re all artificial, hence set by roles and rules we’ve internalized as a community of users. Kinda comes with the turf.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@compositiomal @mariemarm Of possible interest: Geoff Pullum, Formalism, grammatical rules, and normativity. At his web site with related work.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@compositiomal On movement, the Cambridge English Grammar uses it but only as purely metaphorical.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@jasonintrator Because of Kuhn we have Feyerabend, Lakatos, Hacking, Galison: a major infusion of historical thinking into phil science. ‘ paradigm’ is now used universally beyond philosophy as K defined it & not as it was before. Rorty 1998 in Achieving our Country predicts Trump.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@ianbremmer The excellent 2014 Hungarian film ‘White God’ is sadly all about Hungarian ethnic arrogance and its incipient danger.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@jasonintrator George Soros studied Popper at the LSE. He combined Popper with an explicitly Hegelian notion, ‘reflexivity’, as a psychological theory of market interpretation & behavior. Popper of course hated Hegel, enough to fabricate Hegel text by quilt-quotation.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@marchaos @jasonintrator & Paul Feyerabend

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@jasonintrator @DetersHenning Popper was an essential half-way house between positivists / Vienna Circle and the historicism+ of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos. Popper was even seen by some as proto-Hegelian via ‘falsification’, ‘conjectures & refutations’. That’s the cunning of reason for you.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@philosophybites For a pair of canines, Dogma & Skeptic

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@NoamChompers Arthur C Clarke: ‘every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@compositiomal This is Davidson somewhere …

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@compositiomal X-bar structure…

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@tallinzen You mean for speech of course. Signed languages are fully syntactic and all about gesture and bodily expression, all visual.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@xphilosopher Construction grammar includes non-compositionality as a major thread - see Goldberg, Tomasello, Croft &c. Unsure how much academic phil language has caught up with that. Compositionality still occurs but is far from its role as central dogma of the analytic tradition.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@littmath Conway & Guy’s Book of Numbers has a nice account of Knuth’s arrows. More interesting are the countable ordinals < epsilon_0. Latter proves consistency of Peano arithmetic & =least fixed point of omega_^eps_0, omega=least countable ordinal={0,1,2,..}. & more!

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@jasonintrator @dbessner ‘History of science w/out philosophy of science is blind. Philosophy of science w/out history of science is empty.’ Imre Lakatos adapts Kant on intuitions and understanding.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@docmilanfar It’s a good AI / Turing test statement.

[john kadvany @johnkadvany]

@richsignorelli Would all 13 be seated and vote simultaneously? Or only a subset?