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Putting interaction centre-stage
I’ve been taking part (virtually) in a workshop today at the Cognitive Science conference in Sydney entitled “Putting interaction center-stage for the study of knowledge structures and processes”. Kicking off the workshop, my own contribution was a summary of our Beyond Single-Mindedness manifesto. This was followed by Nick Enfield, who argued that concepts are necessarily… ᐅ keep reading
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Opening up ChatGPT: Evidence-based measures of openness and transparency in instruction-tuned large language models
With the first excitement of ChatGPT dying down, people are catching up on the risk of relying on closed and proprietary models that may stop being supported overnight or may change in undocumented ways. Good news: we’ve tracked developments in this field and there are now over 20 alternatives with varying degrees of openness, most… ᐅ keep reading
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How robots become social: A comment on Clark & Fischer
— by Mark Dingemanse & Andreas Liesenfeld, Radboud University Nijmegen Clark & Fischer propose that people see social robots as interactive depictions and that this explains some aspects of people’s behaviour towards them. We agree with C&F’s conclusion that we don’t need a novel ontological category for these social artefacts and that they can be… ᐅ keep reading
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Consolidating iconicity research
Readers of this blog know that I believe serendipity is a key element of fundamental research. There is something neatly paradoxical about this claim. We might like ‘key elements’ to be plannable so that we can account for them on budgets and balance sheets. But here is an element that I think can make a… ᐅ keep reading
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At the smallest scale of human interaction, prosocial behavior follows cross-culturally shared principles
We have a new paper out in which we find that people overwhelmingly like to help one another, independent of differences in language, culture or environment. This is a surprising finding from the perspective of anthropological and economic research, which has tended to foreground differences in how people work together and share resources. ᐅ keep reading
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Playing with R: unrolling conversation
A lot of our recent work revolves around working with conversational data, and one thing that’s struck me is that there are no easy ways to create compelling visualizations. In the Elementary Particles of Conversations project we’re aiming to change that. Here’s a sneak peek. ᐅ keep reading
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Malinowski (1922) on Large Language Models
It’s easy to forget amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, but language is not actually about strings of words, and language scientists would do well not to chain themselves to models that presume so. For apt and timely commentary we turn to Bronislaw Malinowski ᐅ keep reading
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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the publishing landscape of academia is fast being homogenised, the thesis is one of the last places where we have a chance to see the unalloyed brilliance of up and coming researchers. Let me show you… ᐅ keep reading
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Beyond Single-Mindedness
No mind is an island (after John Donne). In a new piece, we make the case for putting interaction at the heart of cognition. This represents a figure-ground reversal for the cognitive sciences, which traditionally have focused on single minds. ᐅ keep reading
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On Bakhtinians
Perhaps only those who haven’t read Bakhtin can call themselves true Bakhtinians: the ideas have to reach you and influence you through a polyphony of other texts and people. ᐅ keep reading
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We zijn al lang elders
NRC vraagt zich af of wetenschappers hun werk blijven delen op twitter en vindt op twitter maar liefst 7 fervent twitterende wetenschappers die desgevraagd bevestigen nog op twitter te blijven. Twitter is inderdaad van belang geweest voor de wetenschap, maar het lijkt vooral de journalistiek te zijn die nog aan het twitterinfuus ligt. Het geweldige collectief WO in Actie ontleende een deel… ᐅ keep reading
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Thinking visually with Remarkable
Sketches, visualizations and other forms of externalizing cognition play a prominent role in the work of just about any scientist. It’s why we love using blackboards, whiteboards, notebooks and scraps of paper. Many folks who had the privilege of working the late Pieter Muysken fondly remember his habit of grabbing any old piece of paper… ᐅ keep reading
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Monetizing uninformation: a prediction
Over two years ago I wrote about the unstoppable tide of uninformation that follows the rise of large language models. With ChatGPT and other models bringing large-scale text generation to the masses, I want to register a dystopian prediction. Of course OpenAI and other purveyors of stochastic parrots are keeping the receipts of what they… ᐅ keep reading
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Talk, tradition, templates: a meta-note on building scientific arguments
Reading Suchman’s classic Human-machine reconfigurations: plans and situated actions, I am impressed by her description David Turnbull’s work on the construction of gothic cathedrals. In brief, the intriguing point is that no blueprints or technical drawings or even sketches are known to have existed for any of the early modern gothic cathedrals, like that of… ᐅ keep reading
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Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science
Been reading this paper by @blasi_lang @JoHenrich @EvangeliaAdamou Kemmerer & @asifa_majid and can recommend it — Figure 1 is likely to end up in many lecture slides http://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.015 Naturally I was interested in what the paper says about conversation. The claim about indirectness in Yoruba and other languages is sourced to a very nice piece… ᐅ keep reading
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A serendipitous wormhole into the history of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA)
A serendipitous wormhole into #EMCA history. I picked up Sudnow’s piano course online and diligently work through the lessons. Guess what he says some time into the audio-recorded version of his 1988 Chicago weekend seminar (see lines 7-11) [Chicago, 1988. Audio recording of David Sudnow’s weekend seminar] We learn too quickly and cannot afford to… ᐅ keep reading
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Sometimes precision gained is freedom lost
Part of the struggle of writing in a non-native language is that it can be hard to intuit the strength of one’s writing. Perhaps this is why it is especially gratifying when generous readers lift out precisely those lines that {it?} took hard work to streamline — belated thanks! Interestingly, the German translation for Tech… ᐅ keep reading
Sounding out ideas on language, vivid sensory words, and iconicity
