Is language even symbolic, bro?

1 We behave as if we think language is symbolic

We think we can win arguments with information.

Think also of Aumann’s agreement theorem, which suggests that rational agents with common knowledge of each other’s beliefs should not agree to disagree.

We ask people to do things and assume that once we’ve made the request, they’ll do it. But is that how people actually learn to do what we ask? Getting someone to remember to do something at the right time involves many non-trivial steps beyond merely telling them.

2 Conduit metaphor

The Conduit metaphor (Reddy 1993) describes an implicit model of communication where language is an information channel: semantic packing and unpacking happen at each end via implicit encoding and decoding rules, with shades of information theory.

This contrasts with the toolmaker metaphor, which emphasizes the active co-creation of meaning between speaker and listener.

3 The experience of words is not like symbol processing

Buddhist texts often work performatively, aiming to transform the reader’s perspective or consciousness; that’s why koans are a thing.

Here are some things I should look up that a brief lit search surfaces:

1. Propositional vs. Transformational Communication
2. Informational vs. Performative Language
3. Cognitive vs. Experiential Modes

4 Argumentative Theory of Reason

Henry Farrell on Mercier and Sperber:

First — that reasoning has not evolved in the ways that we think it has — as a process of ratiocination that is intended independently to figure out the world. Instead, it has evolved as a social capacity — as a means to justify ourselves to others. We want something to be so, and we use our reasoning capacity to figure out plausible-seeming reasons to convince others that it should be so. However (and this is the main topic of a more recent book by Hugo (Mercier 2020)), together with our capacity to generate plausible-sounding rationales, we have a decent capacity to detect when others are bullshitting us. In combination, these mean that we are more likely to be closer to the truth when we are trying to figure out why others may be wrong, than when we are trying to figure out why we ourselves are right. … We need negative criticisms from others since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves, without them being pointed out to us.

The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning proposes that human reasoning evolved not primarily for individual problem-solving or truth-seeking, but as a means of argumentation—specifically to persuade others and to evaluate arguments in social contexts. Highlights:

• Evolutionary perspective: Reasoning developed as an adaptation for social living, where cooperation and persuasion play vital roles.
• Persuasion: It helps us develop and present arguments that convince others, strengthening group cohesion and collective decision-making.
• Bias and motivated reasoning: Our cognitive biases (confirmation bias, myside bias) aren’t evolutionary bugs but features that support argumentation—helping us build cases for our viewpoints.
• Group benefits: Although reasoning is often biased at the individual level, debate and critique within groups can lead to better collective outcomes, because poor arguments get challenged and strong ones get refined.

5 Do we even need symbols?

Lanier (2010) proposes “post-symbolic communication” as communication that exists beyond the symbolic forms that modernity’s legibility favours, and I suppose the “pre-symbolic communication” might exist in the metis regime.

Suppose we had the ability to morph at will, as fast as we can think. What sort of language might that make possible? Would it be the same old conversation, or would we be able to “say” new things to one another?

For instance, instead of saying, “I’m hungry; let’s go crab hunting,” you might simulate your own transparency so your friends could see your empty stomach, or you might turn into a video game about crab hunting so you and your compatriots could get in a little practice before the actual hunt.

I call this possibility “post-symbolic communication.” It can be a hard idea to think about, but I find it enormously exciting. It would not suggest an annihilation of language as we know it—symbolic communication would continue to exist—but it would give rise to a vivid expansion of meaning.

This is an extraordinary transformation that people might someday experience. We’d then have the option of cutting out the “middleman” of symbols and directly creating shared experience. A fluid kind of concreteness might turn out to be more expressive than abstraction.

In the domain of symbols, you might be able to express a quality like “redness.” In post-symbolic communication, you might come across a red bucket. Pull it over your head, and you discover that it is cavernous on the inside. Floating in there is every red thing: there are umbrellas, apples, rubies, and droplets of blood. The red within the bucket is not Plato’s eternal red. It is concrete. You can see for yourself what the objects have in common. It’s a new kind of concreteness that is as expressive as an abstract category.

This is perhaps a dry and academic-sounding example. I also don’t want to pretend I understand it completely. Fluid concreteness would be an entirely new expressive domain. It would require new tools, or instruments, so that people could achieve it.

I imagine a virtual saxophone-like instrument in virtual reality with which I can improvise both golden tarantulas and a bucket with all the red things. If I knew how to build it now, I would, but I don’t.

I consider it a fundamental unknown whether it is even possible to build such a tool in a way that would actually lift the improviser out of the world of symbols. Even if you used the concept of red in the course of creating the bucket of all red things, you wouldn’t have accomplished this goal.

I spend a lot of time on this problem. I am trying to create a new way to make software that escapes the boundaries of preexisting symbol systems. This is my phenotropic project.

The point of the project is to find a way of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques—similar to the ones I described earlier, which can recognise faces—to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn’t be protocol errors if there weren’t any protocols. It would also suggest a path to escaping the prison of predefined, locked-in ontologies like MIDI in human affairs.

I’m not convinced — I might explain why at some point.

6 Naive free speech advocacy treats language as symbolic

TBC

7 Incoming

• LLM-generated text is not testimony

• TfE: On Post-Searlean Critiques of LLMs – DEONTOLOGISTICS on inferentialism:

  I think the core component of meaning is given by the role sentences play in ‘the game of giving and asking for reasons’ and the contributions component words make to these inferential roles.

• “tl;dr” Is Stored in the Balls - by Duncan Sabien

• Mention the Wason selection task.

8 References