Nat Hansen

@nathansen.bsky.social

1822 Followers 559 Following

Philosopher at the University of Reading (UK) working on new wave ordinary language philosophy, experimental semantics and pragmatics, and some aesthetics. I'm building playable simulations of historical philosophical scenes at ux-phi.com.

A short treatise on the game of Whist. Containing the LAWS of the GAME. An 18th century rulebook for the card game Whist.

A 1950s illustrated map of Oxford showing the center of town and some of the colleges.

Big Five personality cards for Thrasymachus and J.L. Austin

A student asking a philosophy professor: When will we get our papers back?

Eli Cash enjoying his literary celebrity and saying "EVERYONE KNOWS WRITING CAN'T ARGUE BACK // WHAT THIS PRESUPPOSES IS...MAYBE IT CAN?"

A Ministry of Truth Document Compliance Office thoughtcrime detection and newspeak conversion service that has identified 24 thoughtcrimes in the document I posted.

I'd ask him what would be involved in making a corpus of ordinary use, whether it's feasible. I expect he'll say it's possible, there's nothing even that computationally difficult about it, but to scale it up might take a lot of resources. What are the chances we could convince Oxford University to buy one of the machines that Turing is working on?

Austin lets out a short, sharp laugh that echoes off the stone walls. "Oxford University? Buy a computing machine? For philosophy?"

The entire room breaks into barely suppressed chuckles. Even Strawson, who had seemed sympathetic to your idea, is shaking his head with amusement.

"My dear fellow," Hampshire says, still smiling, "do you have any idea what one of those machines costs? Or how much space it takes up? The university can barely afford to heat the libraries properly."

"And imagine the conversation," Warnock adds gleefully. "Vice-Chancellor, we'd like several thousand pounds for an electronic brain to help us understand the word 'really.'"

John Haugeland saying “computers don’t give a
Damn” in his article understanding natural language

Kramnick also attributes a dubious virtue to the
method of close reading as he understands it: unlike
the human sciences that have suffered from a replica-
tion crisis in the twenty-first century, the work of liter-
ary studies is not replicable, ‘because there is no result
independent of perspective that could be replicated’
(p. 91). But the idea that the sciences produce results
or run replicable experiments that are ‘independent
of perspective’ is a myth. No two experiments are

Cover image of British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 65, Number 4, October 2025.

Figure from the paper: Figure 9. Another self-identified eclectic reader, who “love[s] reading just about anything.” The chart represents the
number of books she read in each of 10 time segments (2010-2021), with colors indicating their distribution across
major genres.

Screenshot from the article: "First, with respect to the replication of the six earlier tests on proper names, significant cross-cultural differences were successfully replicated in the conditions using the original MMNS (2004) vignette and that of Li et al. (2018). Using the terminology common in experimental semantics, Chinese-speaking participants
showed a tendency to endorse the descriptivist view, whereas British participants favored the causal-historical view."

"speech" is increasing in frequency over time

This is a screenshot that says: "This publication in The Philosophical Quarterly has been cited 3 times.

Compared to other publications in the same field, this publication is extremely highly cited and has received approximately 10 times more citations than average."

Here’s a possible experiment you can do if you have old philosophers (like my age) around you. Take the list of the top ten recent articles from one of the years they were in graduate school, and see how many of the articles they (had to) read while they were a graduate student.

Marquee for David Lynch's Inland Empire at Chicago's Music Box theater

Trevor paglen book titled adversarial evolved hallucinations

Iridescent clouds in Umeå Sweden

Cover image of the journal Mind, containing the paper "The Hope of Agreement" by Hansen and Adams

Bianca from the Day of the Jackal tells her husband he should go to his conference because "I know how hard you've worked on this paper"

A small table top trolley holding a bottle of wine

A view inside the sphere in Las Vegas