From a symposium on “The Problem of Data in Linguistics”, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Vol. 1980, Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers (1980), pp. 598-604
Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
“Internal” and “External” Evidence in Linguistics
May 13, 2026The Vishnu of philosophy
March 12, 2026The philosopher Bill Lycan (an old friend, once my colleague at Ohio State, a prolific writer, and an enormously entertaining person) came to my mind when a friend was amazed that I managed to write at least one essay a day — every day of the year — as a posting on this blog (this posting is the second for today, and it’s not yet 9 am; I’m on a roll). At least once at Ohio State, a student asked Bill how he managed to publish so much (perhaps, like Vishnu, he could write with four arms at once). Bill’s wonderful reply:
I have a very high tolerance for error.
This was, in fact, a deeply serious reply, worth some reflection.
Gods and tables
November 10, 2025In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
IMMIGRANTS EAT OUR DOGS
September 12, 2024So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
Blutonic dialogue
May 13, 2024In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Blutonic dialogue: an encounter in which a young woman discusses a platonic relationship with an apparently tamed (and clearly dismayed) incarnation of the villainous and brutal Bluto from the Popeye comics and animations:
(#1) A pun on platonic relationship (NOAD: adj. platonic: (of love or friendship) intimate and affectionate but not sexual) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Wayno’s title: “The Mistaken Mariner” — simple friendship not being what Bluto had in mind.
Meanwhile, there’s my Blutonic dialogue, a pun on Platonic dialogue:
Plato wrote approximately 35 dialogues, in most of which Socrates is the main character. (Wikipedia link)
The same great classic rock
April 8, 2024☀️ 🌑 for Solar Eclipse Day, Sisyphus and drive-time DJs intersect in a Venn diagram, where they generate a wonderful even-handed pun:
(#1) The hinge is the ambiguous NP great classic rock; what Sisyphus and drive-time DJs share — what’s in the area in the diagram that represents the intersection of the categories in the two circles — is that they’re people who bring you the same great classic rock every night (but in two different senses of the great classic rock)
We understand what the categories are in a Venn diagram from the labels on the intersecting circles and on the areas of their intersection, which are meant to be informative (and clear in their reference). But of course the labels are expressions in some language, which means that ambiguous expressions can be exploited for a joke. As in #1.
(#1 came to me on Facebook from from pun enthusiast Susan Fischer, the syntactician and psycholinguist specializing in sign languages; the ultimate source is the vox + stix website, on which see below)
Writers’ night at the Hotel De Luxe
March 28, 2024Last night: a long — stretching over three hours of sleep, with a whizz break in the middle — and vivid story dream in which Ellen Kaisse (an old friend and a frequent character on this blog) and I were holed up for an entire night in an elegant hotel — much like the actual Beverly Hills Hotel — where we had a suite in which we were expected to produce a script for a film. The place looked like your ordinary luxury suite, except that it was dominated by a huge desk. Which, at the pressing of several buttons, converted magically into a fully functioning office, with computers, printers, phones, paper files, assorted office supplies, and of course a coffee maker. (But no staff, not even assistants to take things down for us. If we got hungry, we were to order food from room service.) Our work site for the long dark night.
We were expected to hack out an entire draft script, as well as suggestions for casting for the parts, costumes, and sets, plus a sketch of a score for the movie (I suspect that the score was especially significant to my having this dream; details to follow).
Somehow the actual subject of the film, which Ellen and I labored over, elaborately, for all those hours of my sleep, has dissolved, as dream material often does on awakening.
We didn’t question being put to work at the Hotel De Luxe through the night; apparently, that was a regular thing in Hollywood, just the way things worked there.
The dream was not at all unpleasant, sometimes actually delightful. Well, Ellen is wonderful company and an excellent person to exchange ideas with.
Two OBHs
June 29, 2023I’m at home, recovering very erratically, with many setbacks and fresh issues. Yesterday I narrowly avoided being sent back to the emergency room at SUMC. This is all very difficult — and incredibly tiring. I don’t feel up to going over medical issues right now, but I have a big backlog of draft postings that were ready to go out on June 16th, when everything fell apart, so that I will diverge from SUMC moments to write up some of these for you.
First up, two vaguely related One Big Happy strips that appeared a while ago in my comics feeds: what I’ll call “Naked Lady” and “Define HAT”:
(#1) “Naked Lady”: on the artist’s intentions vs. the viewer’s perceptions of a work
(#2) “Define HAT”: on essence and appearance
Escape from the lab!
April 13, 2023From a comic book of my childhood, Weird Science #8 (July 1951):
(#1) In the story “Seeds of Jupiter” (Bill Gaines, writer; Al Feldstein, inks and pencils) — posted on 4/12 by Tim Evanson on Facebook
The panel evokes (at least) two themes from philosophy, literature, and popular culture:
— the Ungodly Knowledge theme — there are things we were not meant to know — the products of which are then inadvertently released onto the world; the prototype is the story of the monster created by Victor Frankenstein
— the Beast Within theme — we are both good and evil, a beast lurks within us — related to the larger theme of transformation into a monster (a werewolf, a vampire, whatever); the prototype is the story of the monstrous Mr. Hyde, released in the lab from within Dr. Jekyll and then onto the world