The present study investigates linguistics and cognitive effects of bilingualism with a minority language acquired through school medium education. If bilingualism has an effect on cognition and language abilities, regardless of language prestige or opportunities of use, young adult Gaelic-English speakers attending Gaelic medium education (GME) could have an advantage on linguistic and cognitive tasks targeting executive functions. These will be reported, compared to monolingual speakers living in the same area. Furthermore, this study investigates whether (...) there is a difference in Home Speakers of Gaelic (speakers who had acquired the language at home) compared to New Speakers of this language, i.e. whether an immersive context -as the one offered in medium education- compensates for not being native. A group of 23 monolingual English young adult speakers was compared with a group of 25 bilingual speakers attending a GME school since five years old. Participants were tested on comprehension of a set of sentences with incremental complexity in English, on their capacity to inhibit a distractor using the Test of Everyday attention (TEA) and on their performance in a Digit Span task. A tendency for a better performance on more complex linguistics and cognitive tasks was reported in bilinguals compared to monolinguals with a further advantage for New Speakers compared to Home Speakers. The study supports the idea that being bilingual in a minority language is as beneficial as speaking any other combination of languages. An immersive context of acquisition can be a good ground for developing advantages on both linguistics and cognitive tasks, with a further advantage for New speakers of the language. (shrink)

This chapter presents the text of a lecture on Gaelic advent and expansion in medieval Scotland given at the British Academy's 2009 Sir John Rhŷs Memorial Lecture. This text reviews the evidence for Gaelic's arrival and expansion in the various different regions of Scotland in the Middle Ages and evaluates the different ways in which toponymic data can usefully be interpreted to inform our notion of the process of expansion. It argues that, contrary of received views, the twelfth (...) and thirteenth centuries remained periods of expansion for the Gaelic language. (shrink)

This paper examines the stage-level/individual-level hypothesis (Kratzer 1989; Diesing 1988) from the point of view of modern Scottish Gaelic. This language exhibits two syntactically distinct predicational structures, and in particular, two distinct subject positions distinguishable on the basis of word order. While the distinction between the two positions can be shown to support the stage/individual-level hypothesis in one sense, the picture is muddied by the fact that many habitual or ‘characteristic’ sentences seem to be formed according to the (...) stage-level subject construction type.The solution proposed relies on two novel elements. First, it distinguishes the classical Davisonian event variable from the Kratzerian one hypothesized to be the hallmark of the stage-level sentence type. And secondly, it makes a strict logical separation between two types of generics: generics proper, which involve quantifying over an individual variable; and habituals, which only involve quantification over an event variable. These are represented by two distinct logical types which may nevertheless give rise to similar truth conditions in context.I show that the analysis can be made to account for tense interpretation, the scope of genericity, and the facts of syntactic complementation in Scottish Gaelic. To the extent that the solution is successful, it is evidence for a quite direct mapping between syntactic and semantic representations and for the important intuitions behind the initial Kratzer/Diesing stage vs. individual-level hypothesis. (shrink)

"This book addresses recent developments in the study of tense from a cross-paradigm and cross-linguistic point of view. Leading international scholars explore challenging ideas about tense at the interfaces between semantics and syntax as well as syntax and morphology. The book is divided into three main subsections: 1) Tense in tenseless languages; 2) Tense, mood, and modality, and 3) Descriptive approaches to some tense phenonema. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience, some languages encode reference to time (...) without any grammatical tense morphology of the verb. Some of these exceptional "tenseless" languages are investigated in this volume: Kalaallisut, Paraguayan Guaraní and Movima. Modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both tense and modality. In this volume, an untypical modal is analyzed, a modal analysis of imperatives is argued for, and sentential mood, which is closely related to modality, is analyzed. It is always interesting to look at the expression of tense in understudied languages, which is done here for Scottish Gaelic, Austronesian Rukai and German dialects. The volume can be used for graduate and undergraduate level teaching."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a crosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to (...) some old problems anddebates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order. (shrink)

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

The Irish language represents a material link ensuring continuity between the past and present of the Irish experience, but as that link has gradually been obscured, the language has become a form of alterity, indicated in the notion of Gaelic Ireland going ‘underground’. The choice between maintaining the continuity of the Irish literary tradition and abandoning it was characterized by Franciscan theologian and philosopher Froinsias Ó Maolmhuaidh (Francis O’Molloy) as the choice between keeping one’s reason and embracing (...) folly. Thus, his envoi to the first printed Irish grammar in 1677 exhorts the people of Ireland to engage in a revival of literacy in the Irish language so as to transform their future by keeping faith with the past. Yet the desire to revive past knowledge or values is problematic. Is it possible, as the Irish revivalist Douglas Hyde desired, to ‘render the present a rational continuation of the past’? Or is it the case that revivals are attempts at a renewal of tradition, involving a dialectical transition similar to Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung? This inaugural lecture considers this question and the wider implications of revival by situating the Irish tradition of Revivalism within the broader history of ideas. (shrink)

The essays in this collection, many originally presented at a 2008 colloquium on Celtic Cosmology and the Power of Words, aim to examine the worldviews held by the Celtic peoples, particularly the Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) perspectives. Texts and inscriptions, some of them pre-Christian, in Celtic languages and in Celtic Latin provide the sources for the worldviews under study. This area of research is also linked to that of the power of words, which refers to human belief in powerful (...) speech acts. Naming and story-telling processes convey knowledge of the cosmos; this knowledge is connected to the landscape and its roads, rivers, mountains and hills. Cosmology is a description of the order and structure of the world as perceived by human beings, and its study is a study of layers – in the earth, in the language and in the tales. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whisper Before You GoJohn K PettyDavid came with a bang.1A momentary prelude from a dysphonic chorus of pagers announce “Level 1 Pediatric Trauma—MVC ejected” before the abrupt crescendo of the trauma bay doors opening. He is maybe two. Maybe three–years–old. It is hard to tell when a child is strapped in, strapped down, nonverbal, intubated, and alone.The flight team speaks for him, “Four–year–old boy improperly restrained in a single–vehicle (...) crash into a ditch. He was partially ejected. He was unresponsive and pulseless at the scene. He got CPR and code drugs, and they got a pulse back. Emergency medical service (EMS) took him to the nearest hospital where they needled his chest, called for air transport, and scanned him up. He has been shocky for us since we picked him up. Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) has been three the whole time. They said his head scan showed subarachnoid hemorrhage.”With the words of the flight team as background narrative, we get about doing our thing—hopefully more method and less madness. Bang, bang, bang! Check the tube. Vital signs. IV fluids. Place a chest tube. Hang the blood. Quick X–ray. Neuro exam—nothing. Get him off the board. Warm him up. Place the orogastric (OG) tube. Bang, bang, bang!The neurosurgery resident opens the CT scans from the other hospital. The brain and cervical spine scans show a disaster: some swelling and bleeding in the higher brain, but the worst damage is in the lower brain, brainstem, and top of the spinal cord. I have heard a neurosurgeon describe this pattern before as “internal decapitation.” Such language never makes it into the patient’s chart. For David the last two words of the neurosurgery consult note will eventually read, “Prognosis grim.”He remains unstable in the trauma bay. Inaction is death. We ultrasound his heart, abdomen, and pelvis. He has fluid that shouldn’t be around his heart. He is dying of the neuro injury we cannot control, but the pericardial fluid might be giving him shock, and we can control that. We can’t ignore the fluid. Shouldn’t ignore it. At least, wouldn’t ignore it. So, we bang up to the operating room. Squeezing blood. Spiking fluid. Oxygen tank and crash cart. Up we go.In the operating room, we do much and we do well. We release the fluid around the heart and find it was CPR, not heart injury that put it there. In the pericardial flash we get a view of the cardiac athlete, pounding like the 26th mile of the marathon. We explore the abdomen and find it swollen but innocent of an injury that would take his life. We place our lines and tubes as the neurosurgeons place theirs. If nothing else, we will be able to measure what lies ahead.“Good work, team,” and we bump the door on the way to the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU).The care in the PICU is more Apache brave than Gaelic knight—more bottles, fewer scissors. The curtains and carpets mute the tones. Our efforts continue, but I get a word that David’s father has arrived. He is sitting in a small, private waiting room off of the main PICU waiting room. The PICU staff colloquially refer to this as “the bad news room.” I take a seat next to a solitary man who is having the worst day of his life. His worst day so far.“I am Dr. Petty, and I am one of the doctors who is taking care of your son. I am very sorry about what has happened. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about what you understand is going on, and I’ll tell you what I know.” [End Page 17]He tells me that his wife was driving David back from her sister’s house, just the two of them. He doesn’t know what happened, but he got a call from the other hospital about the crash. His wife was badly hurt. He heard that David had died, but they got him back. Both were transferred up to the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ossian and the Invention of Textual HistoryKristine Louise HaugenIt is now controversial to call James Macpherson a forger or the poems of Ossian a hoax. 1 Encouraged by Derick Thomson’s 1952 demonstration that Macpherson’s Ossian indeed echoes authentic Gaelic verse, 2 a group of critics has undertaken to “rehabilitate” Macpherson, not least through a new critical edition of Ossian’s poems and related texts. 3 The edition makes it (...) easier than before to encounter Ossian directly:Morna, thou fairest of women, daughter of Cormac-Carbre? [sic] why in the circle of stones, in the cave of the rock, alone? The stream murmureth hoarsely. The blast groaneth in the aged tree. The lake is troubled before thee.... But thou art like snow on the heath. Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold on the top of Cromleach.... Thy arms, as two white pillars in the hall of Fingal. 4The authentic source of this passage seems to be the eighteenth-century commonplace that the savage and uneducated delight in figurative language, especially similes and metaphors—a commonplace enunciated often in the writings [End Page 309] of Hugh Blair, a literary critic deeply interested in Macpherson’s Ossianic productions. 5 As Harold Weinbrot and others suggest, the Ossian poems were celebrated largely because they confirmed readers’ most picturesque preconceptions about the “infancy of mankind.” 6There was room for disagreement. Many influential litterati were convinced of the poems’ antiquity, among them Goethe, Herder, Cesarotti, and a host of Scottish intellectuals. 7 But there were also detractors, mainly English—for example, Dr. Johnson and Edward Gibbon—although David Hume soon joined the skeptics, and the Scotsman Malcolm Laing issued the most crushing attack in the exchange several decades after Ossian’s first appearance in 1760. 8 The Ossian poems served a potent mixture of scholarly and political concerns, of which some were new but some were venerable. With a subtle but important shift in balance, the same mixture underlay the willingness of the most prominent eighteenth-century critics to discredit problematic texts and textual myths, even at the cost of an apparent reduction in historical knowledge. 9 For all parties Macpherson’s Ossian invited not only aesthetic delectation, but sustained thought about the relationship between early poetry and history and the value of early texts for reconstructing the past. [End Page 310]The question of British origins had preoccupied seventeenth-century antiquaries for a number of reasons, including Polydore Vergil’s unflattering Anglica Historia (first published 1546). 10 In the campaign to establish respectable national roots the Celtic druids had quickly become a kind of favorite example; they were presented early and often as heroes of British culture. The druids and their associates the bards had been described in their French setting by classical authors; William Camden, John Selden, and others transferred them easily to Celtic Britain. It was then straightforward to suggest further that the British Celts were the first discoverers of writing and philosophy, or at least discoverers concurrent with the ancient Hebrews, or both, this theory having been elaborated for the French Celts through Annius of Viterbo’s historical forgeries of 1498 and Annius’s French partisans. 11In fact this theory placed England at a disadvantage as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales had the more convincing joint claim to Celtic ancestry. Individual claims for Scotland and Ireland were frequently heard as well. The text most relevant to Ossian was the deist John Toland’s 1726 history of the druids, in which Toland both satirized the eighteenth-century clergy and argued that the ancient Celts of France and Scotland were colonists from Ireland—the original home of druidism, learning, and Toland. 12 In Toland’s version the theory made much of certain unpublished Irish manuscripts, supposedly dating from Cicero’s day and written in the “native” Irish alphabet. St. Patrick had burned hundreds of druidical religious books when he arrived in Ireland—proof that the Celts had a written language—but the bardic histories, couched in rugged verse, had escaped the evangelist’s flames. 13 Clearly, any respectable reply would need to draw on ancient manuscripts too.Even for readers unfamiliar with Toland, Macpherson’s texts... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Historical Representation and the Nation-State in Romantic Belgium (1830–1850)Jo TollebeekThe transformation of the Ancien Régime society of estates into the modern state system as it exists in Europe today was concluded during the “long nineteenth century.” This process of transformation came about in two waves. In a first wave—during the decades preceding and following the French Revolution, roughly the years 1780-1848—the framework for the nation-state was created. It was (...) mainly the liberal bourgeoisie which stood at the forefront. After the Congress of Vienna, where the “ante bellum” situation had been restored, it led more or less successful national revolutions in Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Poland. In a second wave, starting with the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and ending with the First World War, the framework of the nation-state was filled in. In those years a growing number of social groups found accommodation in the liberal house, which they also managed thoroughly to rebuild. This period can be described as the phase of integrated nationalism.Together with the nation-state came the rise of modern national his-toriography. The most well-known exponents of this typically nineteenth-century genre were the monumental outlines of national pasts which started appearing from 1890 onward. Karl Lamprecht in Germany (Deutsche Geschichte, 1890–1909), Pieter Jan Blok in the Netherlands (Geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Volk, 1892–1908), Henri Pirenne in Belgium (Histoire de Belgique, 1900–1932), and Ernest Lavisse and his collaborators in France (Histoire de France, 1901–11) all gave their respective countries’ pasts an impressive, scholarly design. The first phase of the emergence of the nation-state, however, was also ac-companied by a stream of national histories. Johannes von Müller in Switzerland (Geschichten Schweizerischer Eidgenossenschaft, 1786–1808), Simonde de [End Page 329] Sismondi in Italy (Histoire des Républiques italiennes du Moyen Age, 1807–18), Augustin Thierry in France (Lettres sur l’Histoire de France, 1820–27), and Willem Bilderdijk in the Netherlands (Geschiedenis des Vader-lands, posthumously 1833–53) all became authors of patriotic and romantically tinted surveys and studies of (fragments from) their own national history.The work of this second group of historians fits with the cultural nationalism which took root during the last decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries and which is sometimes considered to have been the heart of romantic nationalism. 1 The supporters of this nationalism were con-vinced that culture, lifestyle, and social institutions could only be understood as the expression of the “soul,” the “spirit,” or the “character” of a people or nation. They tried to deduce this individual character through the language, popular literature, art, and “national” (as opposed to Roman) law, as is demonstrated by the Gaelic revival in Ireland. 2 History, however, also attracted their interest; the nation and the people were after all considered to be dynamic entities which developed along the lines of a multiple causal process. In England, for example, where nationalism arose as a protest against excessive foreign—French—cultural influence, a group of historians, among them Catherine Macaulay and John Pinkerton, started publishing nationalistic histories during the early years of George III’s reign, paying special attention to the origin of the English people. 3 Such cultural nationalism could, however, easily take on political overtones, especially when it was the nationalism of a people who were either stateless or dispersed throughout different states, or whose state was still young.These earliest national histories were meant as a contribution to the formation, consolidation, and confirmation of a national identity. Their writers had to lend unity, specificity, and continuity to the national past. They had to, as Novalis observed in 1798, “organize historical essentials.” 4 Their work was less a matter of reconstruction than of construction. It not only required the exploration of a hitherto unknown field, but first and foremost the resolution of new problems of representation inherent in the writing of “national biographies.” In this essay, I shall discuss some of these problems in the light of Belgian national historical writing from 1830 through 1850. The year 1830 constitutes an important watershed in the history of national movements... (shrink)

Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs (...) to be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs. (shrink)

In Rethinking Language Arts: Passion and Practice, Second Edition , author Nina Zaragoza uses the form of letters to her students to engage pre-service teachers in reevaluating teaching practices. Zaragoza discusses and explains the need for teachers to be decision-makers, reflective thinkers, political beings, and agents of social change in order to create a positive and inclusive classroom setting. This book is both a critical text that deconstructs the way language arts are traditionally taught in our schools as (...) well as a visionary text with clear, no-nonsense directions on how to provide much needed change in our schools. (shrink)

Human languages vary in many ways but also show striking cross-linguistic universals. Why do these universals exist? Recent theoretical results demonstrate that Bayesian learners transmitting language to each other through iterated learning will converge on a distribution of languages that depends only on their prior biases about language and the quantity of data transmitted at each point; the structure of the world being communicated about plays no role (Griffiths & Kalish, , ). We revisit these findings and show (...) that when certain assumptions about the relationship between language and the world are abandoned, learners will converge to languages that depend on the structure of the world as well as their prior biases. These theoretical results are supported with a series of experiments showing that when human learners acquire language through iterated learning, the ultimate structure of those languages is shaped by the structure of the meanings to be communicated. (shrink)

Saussure as a linguist and Wittgenstein as a philosopher of language are arguably the two most important figures in the development of twentieth-century ...

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this (...) chapter, we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

First published in 1959, this original study argues that the main characteristic of music is that it expresses and evokes emotion, and that all composers whose music has a tonal basis have used the same, or closely similar, melodic phrases, harmonies, and rhythms to affect the listener in the same ways. He supports this view with hundreds of musical examples, ranging from plainsong to Stravinsky, and contends that music is a language in the specific sense that we can identify (...) idioms and draw up a list of meanings. The book's final section analyzes two symphonies, Mozart's Fortieth and Vaughan Williams's Sixth, to explore the nature of musical inspiration and the process whereby the notes actually convey emotion from composer to listener. (shrink)

This chapter is an initial survey of some philosophical questions about divine language. Could God be a language producer and language user? Could there be a divine private language? Could there be a divine language of thought? The answer to these questions that I shall tentatively defend are, respectively: Yes, No and No. (Because I use some technical terms from recent philosophy of language, there is an appendix to this chapter in which I explain (...) my use of those terms.). (shrink)

Part I The Imperative Mood 'Virtue, then, is a disposition governing our choices '. ARISTOTLE, Eth. Nic. 36 Prescriptive Language. ...

Language and the birth of "literature." A preface to transgression. Language to infinity. The father's "no." Fantasia of the library.--Counter-memory: the philosophy of difference. What is an author? Nietzsche, genealogy, history. Theatrum philosophicum.--Practice: knowledge and power. History of systems of thought. Intellectuals and power. Revolutionary action: "until now.".

What is philosophy about and what are its methods? _Philosophy and Ordinary Language_ is a defence of the view that philosophy is largely about questions of language, which to a large extent means _ordinary_ language. Some people argue that if philosophy is about ordinary language, then it is necessarily less deep and difficult than it is usually taken to be but Oswald Hanfling shows us that this isn't true. Hanfling, a leading expert in the development of analytic (...) philosophy, covers a wide range of topics, including scepticism and the definition of knowledge, free will, empiricism, folk psychology, ordinary versus artificial logic, and philosophy versus science. Drawing on philosophers such as Austin, Wittgenstein, and Quine, this book explores the nature of ordinary language in philosophy. (shrink)

Introduction Quine was born in. He studied as a graduate student at Harvard, and apart from short visits to Oxford, Paris and other centres of learning, ...

Professor Hilary Putnam has been one of the most influential and sharply original of recent American philosophers in a whole range of fields. His most important published work is collected here, together with several new and substantial studies, in two volumes. The first deals with the philosophy of mathematics and of science and the nature of philosophical and scientific enquiry; the second deals with the philosophy of language and mind. Volume one is now issued in a new edition, including (...) an essay on the philosophy of logic first published in 1971. (shrink)

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate (...) forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. (shrink)

Bad Language is the first textbook on an emerging area in the study of language: non-idealized language use, the linguistic behaviour of people who exploit language for malign purposes. This lively, accessible introduction offers theoretical frameworks for thinking about such topics as lies and bullshit, slurs and insults, coercion and silencing.

Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

A seminal 1921 work by the linguist Edward Sapir, outlining his influential ideas and hypotheses on language and its speakers.

Paul H Hirst; Language and Thought, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 1, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 63–75, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1967.tb.

From a leading authority in artificial intelligence, this book delivers a synthesis of the major modern techniques and the most current research in natural language processing. The approach is unique in its coverage of semantic interpretation and discourse alongside the foundational material in syntactic processing.

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires (...) and beliefs, and then make and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)