Tag: linguistics
-
Strategic Conceptualization
When consequences are the result of categorization, people will perform categories to attain their desired consequences. Categories carry with them a mix of connotations (social reputations) and decision rules (conventions for associated practice). Decision rules, that is, are domain-specific actions conditionally undertaken on the basis of whether a object or event under consideration is ruled…
-
Précis for an action-oriented theory of language
What is a word, or message, or utterance? It is a move by an agent (~superorganism) undertaken in order to transform the environmental state, in a desired direction, by means of altering another agent’s information state. This transformation may occur directly, if the targeted slice of environment happens to be that agent whose informational state…
-
A landscape of communication
This is the sixth installment in a ten-part series. Sure, we can bite the bullet that communication is manipulation—but what does that actually look like? We’ll time-travel to the early 2000s, check out a day in Spendo’s life circa elementary and middle school, narrating the day as a series of communications. What is important to…
-
ACiM is a natural extension of cybernetic theory
This is the fourth installment in a ten-part series. At the core of cybernetics is the idea of agents—synthetic and organic, human and machine and animal—as servomechanisms, or “servos.” Servos are machines which use feedback to correct their actions, using some sort of sensory system and built-in encoder to monitor their environment, and ensure their…
-
All Communication is Behavioral Manipulation
This is the second installment in a ten-part series. I want to establish, from the get-go, the uncontroversial, borderline tautological aspect of what I mean when I say “All communication is manipulation.” As a recap on what I mean by “manipulation,” I define the word as “the alteration of an agent’s behavior.” When we sum…
-
All Communication is Manipulation
This essay is the first in a ten-installment series, but can be read as a standalone introduction: All communication is manipulation. Some manipulation is mutually advantageous. Alternatively phrased, the purpose of communication, broadly, is the alteration of others’ actions. Or, Communication is defined by its interest in altering the receiver’s actions. Actions, expressions, and speech…
-
Pfeilstorch Progress: Games, Dialectic, Spirit
I launched a [Discord server with a] small community of friends, which has this year, 2021, evolved into an online forum. Our mascot is the pfeilstorch. We’re interested in the inexact sciences, and moreover, in the rigorizing pipeline that got us from natural philosophy to biology, or alchemy to chemistry.
Suspended Reason 