Thom Scott-Phillips

@thomscottphillips.bsky.social

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Language, Psychology, Culture, Philosophy, Society, Evolution • When not doing science I dance the lindy hop https://linktr.ee/thomscottphillips

If what is arguably the most coveted academic position in this field can be given to an apparently exorbitantly fraudulent scholar with a crepe-paper-thin record of serious publications, and he is then protected by lots of Very Important People who might as well be promising that up is down and left is right and that only bigots disagree, serious scholars in aligned fields, with less coveted positions at less prestigious (and protected) universities - and I know several such people - all stand to suffer in perpetuity.
I became increasingly, even deeply unhappy. I could not shake my anger: at the sector in general and at my present employment. Every other night I would wake at 3am and lie in the dark repeating past incidents over in my head. Sometimes it was the whole night. For the first time in my life I started to gain serious weight, and then I began to have thoughts I hadn’t had since I was teenager, about self-harm and suicide. I was never close to doing anything unwise, I have good people around me and I am old enough to recognise these things for what they are; but still, the facts as I saw them were that I’d done good things and pursued original ideas, I’d been industrious and had a lot of success, I’d pulled my weight, I have all the skills, yet the only employment I could get was opaque, duplicitous and far away. It was extremely hard not to feel humiliated by these facts. Then I’d log on and I’d read stories about professors who, having gotten good jobs, then ignore, belittle or bully their students; who exploit asymmetries of power; who fake data and plagiarise; who hype thin and shallow work; who waste millions in research funding — and they keep their jobs and their steady wage! What message does this send? The academic market is hugely competitive and my honest, genuine assessment is that cheating and cynicism look like pretty good bets. It should not be this way, but dishonesty seems to pay off.
the legislation does not fulfil the criteria for which most people want it: indeed, that this law explicitly puts people not “in sound mind” outside the scope of its reach means that it is actually the opposite of what people say they want in my experience
Photo of Ed Miliband wearing a t-shirt that reads "I voted for chaos with Ed Miliband"
A copy of Zweig’s novella, A Chess Story
Screenshot of part of the paper. It is the introduction to §5. It reads: Linguistic intuition has some distinctive and intriguing features. Four of the most salient are: ● Linguistic intuitions can be graded rather than discrete ● Acceptability can dissociate from grammaticality ● Utility in communication does not predict unacceptability ● Linguistic intuitions are independent of the social situation Any good explanation of why humans have linguistic intuition should be able to account for these features. On the grammaticalness assumption, the first two are at least somewhat surprising, or noteworthy. They have, accordingly, been the focus of enormous amounts of investigation over the past 50 or so years. The second two have been sometimes used as arguments against social and communicative approaches to grammar. In this section I describe how all four of these features are corollaries of the byproduct hypothesis of linguistic intuition. I say they are corollaries because to explain them I will appeal to no ad hoc hypotheses. Rather, these features of linguistic intuition are all straightforward consequences of the byproduct hypothesis. Specifically, they are all downstream of the three general ways, identified in §4, in which a sentence logically cannot have the property of optimal relevance.
The Penrose triangle
Block of text from the paper. It reads: Here I present and develop a cognitive and adaptationist approach to the question of why humans have linguistic intuition, grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from several fields, in particular cognitive linguistics, the cognitive psychology of human communication, and adaptationist approaches to the human mind. I shall argue that linguistic intuitions are byproducts of cognitive capacities and dispositions that have as their proper biological and computational function the interpretation of communicative stimuli. One important corollary of my analysis will be that the grammaticalness assumption is both unnecessary and unwarranted. Here is the main idea. Research on the cognitive foundations of human communication has uncovered how all stimuli perceived as communicative are interpreted on the basis of an unconscious presumption of optimal relevance. I shall describe linguistic intuitions as byproduct effects of this presumption. Specifically, I shall argue that linguistic intuitions are triggered by, and only by, sentences that logically cannot have the property of optimal relevance. It is this logical impossibility that triggers the psychological sense of oddness. I call this the byproduct hypothesis of linguistic intuition. For clarity: the byproduct hypothesis is not that ‘being irrelevant’ triggers intuitions of unacceptability. That cannot be right. Saying something utterly irrelevant in a given context can be unusual, even strange, but it does not entail sentence unacceptability. The byproduct hypothesis is rather that linguistic intuitions are caused by sentences that logically cannot have the property of optimal relevance. Put simply, the psychological sense of oddness is not caused by irrelevance, it is caused by a logical impossibility of optimal relevance. These two qualities are not the same. I will elaborate further on this contrast in §4.3.
Moving image showing two models the Sun, Earth and Mars, and their possible movements relative to each other. One is Copernicus's Sun-centric model; the other is the Earth-centric model that preceded Copernicus. Taken from Wikipedia.
Title of the essay, "Modernity in Rhythm", against a background of a painting by Charles Alston, "Lindy hop at the Savoy".
Map of Hungarian territory before and after the Trianon Treaty of 1922.
Dear PLoS One, I have responded to this review request with the links provided. I am sending this email for a different reason, to complain about your processes. I received the first request to review on Saturday night / Sunday morning, at 02:28. Your systems have sent me a "reminder" on Monday morning at 07:44 i.e. just over 24 hours later, and before the working week has begun. This is far too short a period of time for a reminder even during the working week. To have your systems set to send a reminder so swiftly and over the weekend is insulting. You are not my employer. In light of this, I would like you to remove me from your databases. I am no longer willing to do any review or editorial work for PLoS One. Please reply to confirm that you have deleted my contact details. Best wishes, Thom
Over the past 20 or so years, the trend in language evolution research has been to view “language” (however you might define the term) as a mosaic, created by the coming together of many different biological capacities, traits and dispositions (e.g. Hurford, 2003; Fitch, 2010). This is true, but the mosaic metaphor also hides an important contrast, between (1) traits that are necessary for anything like language to exist in the first place, and (2) traits that help to explain why language takes the particular forms that it does. An example of a trait of kind (2) is, say, the specific shape of the human vocal tract. This shape strongly impacts on the sounds that human mouths can produce, and hence on the nature and structure of spoken languages, but this specific shape is not a prerequisite without which language could not emerge at all. If the human vocal tract was shaped differently then there would still be language and languages: it would just be that their sounds and phonological structures might be different. In contrast, the cognitive capacities that underpin ostensive communication are firmly part of group (1).
Photo of book. Sociopath, by Patric Gagne.
Aspiration. Aaron Douglas, 1936
Image of book, Orality & Literacy, by Walter Ong
Screengrab from Rozin, 2001 paper. It reads: I claim that as a result of a misinterpretation of the approach of the basic natural sciences and a focus on design, experiment, and certainty over relevance, reality, and durability, much of the current field of modern social psychology has an unnecessarily narrow focus that, among other things, (a) pays little attention to powerful cultural influences (though this has been changing in the last decade), (b) discourages the discovery of new phenomena and creativity, (c) discourages the description of basic regularities in the social world, and (d) presents a rather narrow model of what is acceptable science to graduate students in the area.
It shouldn’t be this easy to cleave universities from one another, but, so far, it seems to be easier even than making law firms compete for the don’s business and favor. This may be because law firms define success in a way that is at least marginally closer to their ideal function (helping to uphold the rule of law) than the way universities define success is to their ideal function, which is producing and disseminating knowledge. Most prominent American universities, most of the time, measure their success not so much by the degree to which their faculty and graduates contribute to the world as by the size of their endowment, the number of students seeking admission and their ascent in rankings by U.S. News & World Report and others, which assess the value of a university education in part by looking at graduates’ starting salaries. As for professors, while universities do compete for the best minds, they more frequently compete for the loudest names, in the hopes that these will attract the biggest bucks.
Future historians, pondering changes in British society from the 1980s onwards, will struggle to account for the following curious fact. Although British business enterprises have an extremely mixed record (frequently posting gigantic losses, mostly failing to match overseas competitors, scarcely benefiting the weaker groups in society), and although such arm’s length public institutions as museums and galleries, the BBC and the universities have by and large a very good record (universally acknowledged creativity, streets ahead of most of their international peers, positive forces for human development and social cohesion), nonetheless over the past three decades politicians have repeatedly attempted to force the second set of institutions to change so that they more closely resemble the first. Some of those historians may even wonder why at the time there was so little concerted protest at this deeply implausible programme. But they will at least record that, alongside its many other achievements, the coalition government took the decisive steps in helping to turn some first-rate universities into third-rate companies. If you still think the time for criticism is over, perhaps you’d better think again.
A table contrasting forms of Yin and Yang. geometry; algebra discover; invent sight; hearing painting; music prescriptive; descriptive theory building; problem solving security; adventure patterns in space; processes through time Newtonn; Leibniz Poincaré; Hilbert Einstein; Mach design; evolution socialism; capitalism Platonic; social construction theoretical; experimental
Photo of Katherine McAuliffe
Image of book cover, The Gutenberg Parenthesis