Thom Scott-Phillips
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thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Thom Scott-Phillips
@thomscottphillips.bsky.social
3.2K followers 350 following 940 posts
Language, Psychology, Culture, Philosophy, Society, Evolution • When not doing science I dance the lindy hop

https://linktr.ee/thomscottphillips
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thomscottphillips.bsky.social
The Conversation isn't as universally known as the other two, but it's just as masterful
December 29, 2025 at 9:34 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Wow, Zweig is really great writing!

I have The World Of Yesterday to read after this
A copy of Zweig’s novella, A Chess Story
December 22, 2025 at 1:17 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Worth adding: "relevance" here is not the everyday term. It's a technical term from Relevance Theory. This passage in the intro summarises an important point
December 17, 2025 at 4:16 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Hi Jelle. Yes, §4 of the paper is specifically about what the logical impossibility of optimal relevance means in practice. Here's the intro/summary
December 16, 2025 at 2:56 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
And it turns out that this theory directly predicts and explains (1) why these intuitions seem like they are about grammar, and (2) several some otherwise surprising features of linguistic intuition, that other theories have seen as a puzzle

18/20
Screenshot of part of the paper. It is the introduction to §5. It reads: Linguistic intuition has some distinctive and intriguing features. Four of the most salient are: ● Linguistic intuitions can be graded rather than discrete ● Acceptability can dissociate from grammaticality ● Utility in communication does not predict unacceptability ● Linguistic intuitions are independent of the social situation Any good explanation of why humans have linguistic intuition should be able to account for these features. On the grammaticalness assumption, the first two are at least somewhat surprising, or noteworthy. They have, accordingly, been the focus of enormous amounts of investigation over the past 50 or so years. The second two have been sometimes used as arguments against social and communicative approaches to grammar. In this section I describe how all four of these features are corollaries of the byproduct hypothesis of linguistic intuition. I say they are corollaries because to explain them I will appeal to no ad hoc hypotheses. Rather, these features of linguistic intuition are all straightforward consequences of the byproduct hypothesis. Specifically, they are all downstream of the three general ways, identified in §4, in which a sentence logically cannot have the property of optimal relevance.
December 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
It is just like the impossible objects above!

Here's a table I made for the paper, summarising the analogy between communication and object recognition

17/20
December 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Look at these images

In all of them, the image is contradictory to what our cognitive systems "expects" objects to be like. This leads to an intuitive sense that something is not right. It's why we call them "illusions"

This particular kind of illusion is called an "impossible object"

9/20
The Penrose triangle The impossible trident The Shepard elephant
December 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
The new paper uses this new synthesis to ask and explain why humans have linguistic intuitions at all. Here's a summary from the paper's Introduction

In the rest of this thread I'll try to motivate and explain the main idea by using an analogy with visual illusions

8/20
Block of text from the paper. It reads: Here I present and develop a cognitive and adaptationist approach to the question of why humans have linguistic intuition, grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge from several fields, in particular cognitive linguistics, the cognitive psychology of human communication, and adaptationist approaches to the human mind. I shall argue that linguistic intuitions are byproducts of cognitive capacities and dispositions that have as their proper biological and computational function the interpretation of communicative stimuli. One important corollary of my analysis will be that the grammaticalness assumption is both unnecessary and unwarranted. Here is the main idea. Research on the cognitive foundations of human communication has uncovered how all stimuli perceived as communicative are interpreted on the basis of an unconscious presumption of optimal relevance. I shall describe linguistic intuitions as byproduct effects of this presumption. Specifically, I shall argue that linguistic intuitions are triggered by, and only by, sentences that logically cannot have the property of optimal relevance. It is this logical impossibility that triggers the psychological sense of oddness. I call this the byproduct hypothesis of linguistic intuition. For clarity: the byproduct hypothesis is not that ‘being irrelevant’ triggers intuitions of unacceptability. That cannot be right. Saying something utterly irrelevant in a given context can be unusual, even strange, but it does not entail sentence unacceptability. The byproduct hypothesis is rather that linguistic intuitions are caused by sentences that logically cannot have the property of optimal relevance. Put simply, the psychological sense of oddness is not caused by irrelevance, it is caused by a logical impossibility of optimal relevance. These two qualities are not the same. I will elaborate further on this contrast in §4.3.
December 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
The Earth revolves around the Sun

Crucially, this breakthrough ("The Copernican revolution") wasn't just, or even mainly, about data. The observations of the night sky were consistent with either model: the Sun around the Earth, or the Earth around the Sun

3/20
Moving image showing two models the Sun, Earth and Mars, and their possible movements relative to each other. One is Copernicus's Sun-centric model; the other is the Earth-centric model that preceded Copernicus. Taken from Wikipedia.
December 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
New post: Modernity In Rhythm

A multimedia origins story for the lindy hop. Migration, technology and a special form of togetherness.

thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/modernity-...
Title of the essay, "Modernity in Rhythm", against a background of a painting by Charles Alston, "Lindy hop at the Savoy".
November 7, 2025 at 8:56 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
That argument is an irony for Orban and his base, who are supporting Russia in this war but who are also still upset about language was used to delimit the new borders of Hungary after WWI
Map of Hungarian territory before and after the Trianon Treaty of 1922.
October 19, 2025 at 1:18 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Why does Sally’s apartment have so many penguins?
October 14, 2025 at 10:27 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Adding @plosone.org to my personal blacklist of journals
Dear PLoS One, I have responded to this review request with the links provided. I am sending this email for a different reason, to complain about your processes. I received the first request to review on Saturday night / Sunday morning, at 02:28. Your systems have sent me a "reminder" on Monday morning at 07:44 i.e. just over 24 hours later, and before the working week has begun. This is far too short a period of time for a reminder even during the working week. To have your systems set to send a reminder so swiftly and over the weekend is insulting. You are not my employer. In light of this, I would like you to remove me from your databases. I am no longer willing to do any review or editorial work for PLoS One. Please reply to confirm that you have deleted my contact details. Best wishes, Thom
October 13, 2025 at 11:38 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Yes. This distinction is important, but sometimes neglected (I think because people want to stress the relevance of many perspectives)

I have written about this in a forthcoming piece, "Language evolution: A view from Relevance Theory"
Over the past 20 or so years, the trend in language evolution research has been to view “language” (however you might define the term) as a mosaic, created by the coming together of many different biological capacities, traits and dispositions (e.g. Hurford, 2003; Fitch, 2010). This is true, but the mosaic metaphor also hides an important contrast, between (1) traits that are necessary for anything like language to exist in the first place, and (2) traits that help to explain why language takes the particular forms that it does. An example of a trait of kind (2) is, say, the specific shape of the human vocal tract. This shape strongly impacts on the sounds that human mouths can produce, and hence on the nature and structure of spoken languages, but this specific shape is not a prerequisite without which language could not emerge at all. If the human vocal tract was shaped differently then there would still be language and languages: it would just be that their sounds and phonological structures might be different. In contrast, the cognitive capacities that underpin ostensive communication are firmly part of group (1).
September 24, 2025 at 1:15 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
How funny. I am right now putting together a grant application to find a better explanation
August 13, 2025 at 1:23 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Is mind-reading involved in ownership judgments?

By @rekablazsek.bsky.social & @heintz-c.bsky.social

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
August 5, 2025 at 12:36 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Incidentally, I am currently reading this. Very well written. And what I know of SBF very much fits what I am learning here. (Don’t know enough about Altman and others.)
Photo of book. Sociopath, by Patric Gagne.
August 2, 2025 at 3:22 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
“Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house”
— Henri Poincaré (1854-1912)

Artwork by Ursus Wehrli / Keith Haring
July 24, 2025 at 8:20 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Some of the images I will talk about
Aspiration. Aaron Douglas, 1936 The Migration Series: Panel 1. Jacob Lawrence, 1940-41. Jitterbugs II. William Johnson, 1941. The Savoy. Dayton Brandfield, between 1935 and 1943.
June 25, 2025 at 10:36 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
This concluding paragraph is spot on but the word "British" is redundant, no? The problem is surely global (indeed @stephenkb.bsky.social has oft emphasised how having a national broadcaster puts us in a better place than many other states)

Or am I missing something important? (Real Q.)
June 17, 2025 at 10:16 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
"I've had more concussions than my doctors are happy about"

Seen on last week's @hignfy.bsky.social

Seems to be one of those rare "grammatical illusions": it seems ok but doesn't follow the grammar. Similar to the famous example, "More people have been to Russia than I have"
June 9, 2025 at 7:00 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Incredible headline
June 5, 2025 at 11:50 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
"In the next 5-10 years, there is a 50% chance we will have systems with the ability to exhibit all the cognitive capabilities of humans."

These are the words either of a liar, or of someone who does not understand human cognition.
June 4, 2025 at 1:52 PM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Good essay

One thing missing is that there are different ministers and ministries for HE Teaching and for Research. So the two major kinds of activity that universities do are separated at Govt level, which leads to contradictory activities like those described here
May 29, 2025 at 9:19 AM
thomscottphillips.bsky.social
Currently reading Ong, Orality & Literacy. Very interesting and perceptive

Has the main thesis ever been updated/renewed? It was first published in 1982 and there have been relevant developments since
Image of book, Orality & Literacy, by Walter Ong
May 19, 2025 at 11:59 AM