What's been happening?

It has been a little over two years since I posted on this blog last. I have been doing a lot of writing elsewhere on similar topics - mostly Large Language Models and other AI things - it just never added up to a blog post here.

My writing exiles

Here are some of the places where I have been writing:

1. Random musings on practical epistemology:
   1. Promising Paragraphs
   2. X
2. Questions of Artificial Intelligence:
   1. Trends in AI
   2. Semantic Machines
   3. Practical AI
   4. Experiments in AI Creation
   5. AI in Academic Practice
3. Questions of practical pedagogy:
   1. Deliberate Practice as a Universal Learning Method
   2. Building Your Language Muscle
   3. Creating and Using Instructional Videos​
   4. Principles of Readability
   5. Digital Technologies for Academic Productivity
   6. Czech Language Navigator Companion
   7. Paragraph a Day for a Month: Academic Writing Boot Up Diary Template

Semi-official semi-retirement and migration

I've been planning to get stuck into a more substantive writing project for a while but I could never find the right "banner" under which to do it. It never quite felt right to post here. So, I am semi-officially semi-retiring this blog and will focus my writing efforts in a new place called Schemas and Propositions on, of all places, Substack.

I will definitely probably return to this blog at some point in the future with more metaphor focused posts - but for now, I am going to focus on...

Schemas and Propositions

I started this blog on a whim. I wanted to explore metaphors in principle and metaphors in practice. But even as I started it under the name, I had already moved away from thinking of metaphors as much more than pointing towards more general conceptual structures. Those could be called "frames" or "models" or (as Lakoff calls them "idealized cognitive models") or many other things, but metaphors are just one of the ways they show up in language and thought.

I chose to hang my shingle out under the label "schemas and propositions" because the one feature of these models is that they are schematic and underdetermined. Most people who think about language and mind think only about propositions that express them. But propositions are do not really exist in the mind (except as temporary mental images we manipulate while speaking), it's all about these other mental structures that I call schemas in this particular project.

Below is an extract from the about page of the new blog. Come by and see what I've been up to:

About - Schemas and Propositions

"Schemas and Propositions" is a set of notes towards a better understanding of language and mental models of all kinds. Both human and artificial. I am interested in all the inexpressible tacit knowledge that makes constructing and understanding propositions possible.

I start with a simple provocative statement:

Schemas is all you need.

Or, to be a bit less cryptic:

Language models represent and process their knowledge as schemas but express it in the form of propositions.

The point of this series of notes is to explore the nature of what schemas and their tension with propositions. But really it's even more about the consequences of this dichotomy on how we think about semantics. But it's not just the semantics we have as humans but also the sort of semantics we find in various models of language, meaning and cognition - be they Large Language Models or just simple toy models of constructed by linguists, philosophers and logicians.