Owning Our Words: Sounding the Depths of Language

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. I understand both of those terms quite capaciously, which is another way of saying that I tend to write about technology as a way of getting at what I take to be fundamentally human questions. There are many such questions worth pursuing these days, one of which might be expressed this way: What does language have to do with human flourishing? This installment seeks to encourage our thinking about this question through a series of interrelated fragments drawn from a variety of sources. And, of course, such reflection is undertaken in the shadow of the rise of language machines in the form of large language models and their chat interfaces. The fragments can each stand alone and will, I trust, sustain a measure of reflection, but I’ve also attempted to arrange them along an arc so that they hang together meaningfully. In any case, I trust you’ll find something here worth contemplating. Read at your leisure.

Cheers,

Michael

1. I initially conceived of this post as a relatively brief reflection on the gift of language, and the responsibilities entailed by this gift. As the earliest draft took shape in my mind, these reflections were to be anchored by something the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote in a lecture titled “The Idea of Perfection.” “Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them,” Murdoch argued. “The living and radical nature of language is something which we forget at our peril.”

This warning has echoed in my mind for some time now, particularly in light of the rise of LLMs and chatbots over the past few years. Whatever else we might say about these technologies and however varied their capabilities, they operate on language as their raw material, language ordinarily constitutes their interface with users, and what they produce in many if not most cases is language. And because one of the foundational principles guiding my thinking is that technology cannot be understood merely as a neutral tool by which we enhance our capacity or secure a measure of convenience, then it seems ...