Do we understand a word by the company it keeps?

By Francesca Carota / 13 December 2021

Imagine you only speak your own native language. You find yourself “locked in a room”, let’s say, with a Chinese book, a Chinese dictionary, and a set of rules in your own native language. By applying the rules, you learn to relate the Chinese words in the dictionary to the book, only by recognising the shapes of the characters they contain. You learn to manipulate the strings of Chinese symbols so well that you start to resemble a native Chinese speaker who actually understands Chinese words and sentences. Yet, what you are doing is just manipulating formal symbols without knowing what they mean. Are you behaving any differently than the artificial mind of a computer?

Creating androids that dream of electric sheep

By Naomi Nota / 29 November 2021

It is the year 2049. We now co-exist with artificial intelligence. Human-like agents are completely integrated into our society and work regular jobs. They act and look fully human. Like in the dystopian movie ‘Blade Runner’, inspired by Philip K. Dick’s novel ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, or the more recent TV series ‘Westworld’, the humanoids can imitate all the outward signals we attribute to consciousness, and appear entirely self-aware. In other words, we have reached the point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization.

Language and power in the Dutch empire

By Alessio Quaresima / 15 November 2021

Language policies are structural elements of colonial domination because they undermine the cultural identity of the subdued populations. Here I will discuss the checkered relationship between language and imperialism, paying special attention to the Dutch case. A story of language, power and inequalities.

Hot stuff: Talking about temperature

By John Huisman / 1 November 2021

The weather. Ugh, yeah I know, the weather. Possibly the most common thing we all like to complain about and also a (stereo?) typical topic of small talk. In every language course I have ever taken, words and phrases describing weather phenomena are among the first I learned. Speakers of languages all around the world love talking about it and with the UN climate report released recently, I cannot imagine us stopping any time soon. However, we don’t all talk about the weather in the same way.

The infinite space inside your head: The birth of conceptual spaces

By Guillermo Montero-Melis / 18 October 2021

Some writers are ahead of their time. When Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, not many of his readers (perhaps not even Verne himself) thought the journey to the moon would ever become reality. But it did. Similar stories can be found in science. The gist of an idea may be born as a metaphor, a way to better understand the object of study itself, a crazy hypothesis about how things could be. This blog tells one such story. The basic idea is that the concepts we have in our minds form a space, a conceptual space. And not just in an abstract theoretical way, but quite literally so. But let’s start with the basic question: What is a concept?