by William Benzon

This article has three main sections. Immediately following the image (created by ChatGPT) is an article by me, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5: The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself. Claude came up with that title. After that there’s a much shorter section in which I explain how the three of us created that article. I conclude by I taking the question of how to properly credit such writing. That issue is one aspect of the institutionalization discussed in what I will call the “included article.”

The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself

William Benzon, assisted by ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5

In the 1980s, when the linguist Daniel Everett went to live with the Pirahã people of the Amazon, he had a mission: to translate the Bible into their language and convert them to Christianity. What he discovered, however, was something he hadn’t anticipated. The Pirahã didn’t exactly reject his religious message. They just couldn’t take him seriously.

The problem, as Everett eventually came to understand, was grammatical. Pirahã requires speakers to mark the source of their knowledge. When you make a claim about something, you have to indicate whether you witnessed it directly, heard it from someone else, or learned it in a dream. This isn’t an optional rhetorical flourish. It’s as obligatory as verb tense in English. Everett had not seen Jesus himself. He knew no one who had. And he wasn’t reporting a dream. By the grammatical standards of Pirahã discourse, he had no business speaking at all.

This grammatical feature—what linguists call evidentiality—turns out to be far more than a curiosity about an Amazonian language. It opens a window onto something fundamental about how human societies organize knowledge. And, as we’ll see, it ultimately reveals why the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT represents not just a technological achievement but a conceptual rupture that forces us to rethink what language itself is. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I have put off reading G.H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology (1940) to the end for too long. Now that I have, I can say with conviction that if you ever find yourself needing to justify why people should learn at least some mathematics, then this is the text to avoid, and Hardy provides the arguments you should stay away from furthest. And yet, it grew on me as an honest presentation of Hardy’s perspective on why anything is worth doing.

Hardy doubted that composing his Apology was one of those things. In the first paragraph, he apologizes for it: writing about mathematics is the business of second-rate minds, unable to do innovative math themselves. He assures us that he is only embarking on it because past sixty, he is now too old to do the real thing. This sets the tone for an essay full of quick and haughty judgments. Compliments paid with authority to the greats, confident generalizations based on personal or historical anecdote, and a great deal of dismissive hand-waving towards people or things beneath Hardy’s attention. “Newton made a quite competent Master of the Mint”, Hardy knows; and on we go, to the next item of an enumeration illustrating that mathematicians past their prime rarely excel in anything else. In a footnote, he is generous enough to add: “Pascal seems the best.”

The Apology still constitutes an interesting argument, though a structural weakness lies in the stress Hardy puts on what Ian Hacking would call ‘elevator words’: terms such as real, beautiful, or serious do most of the work separating mathematics from everything else, and the worthwhile kind of mathematics from the rest. Throughout his essay, we can see Hardy alternating between throwing those terms around as if their meaning is self-evident, and feeling pressed to prop them up with some kind of clarification. Between chess problems and certain mathematical theorems, for example, there is “an unmistakable difference of class. [The theorems] are much more serious, and also much more beautiful; can we define, a little more closely, where their superiority lies?” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Blood.  August 2024.

Digital Photograph.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was very hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. John Ambrosio
2. Anton Cebalo
3. Jim Hanas
4. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
5. David Hoyt
6. Robert Jensen
7. River Lerner
8. Herbert Lui

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “3QD Magazine” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers on or before the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new writers!

Best wishes,

Abbas

by Michael Liss

A picture may be worth 1000 words, but this picture, the centerpiece of Christine Roussel’s engaging Lunch on a Beam: The Making of an American Photograph, shows a beam that sits atop 60,000 tons of structural steel, hoisted, positioned, and riveted into place in by as many as 400 ironworkers at a time in 102 working days in 1932.

That’s not an optical illusion you see, unless you think more than 800 feet is just a hop, skip, and jump. It’s a long way down from the top of what popular culture now calls 30 Rock—the building that was first named the RCA Building, then the GE building, and finally (perhaps finally) the somewhat less majestic “Comcast Building.” For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it 30 Rock, not just because that’s what everyone else does, but also because its original values derived from John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s vision for a retail and cultural center in the middle of Manhattan.

Roussel is the Rockefeller Center’s archivist, a job which has afforded her access to voluminous documentary evidence. It has also given her legitimacy as she has hunted down leads to determine just exactly who were those guys so high in the air, and what intrepid photographer (or photographers) scaled the same iron they did to reach the top and get the view. That she consulted so many documents and spoke to so many people—everyone from family members with old photographs thinking they were a match, to members of the Mohawk community, apparently impervious to acrophobia, to union halls, and was still unable to gain certainty is both disappointing and oddly satisfying. These ironworkers were part of a larger brotherhood—men whose grit, strength, agility, and skill built 30 Rock as they built New York. Perhaps they are best seen not as individuals, but as a team, reliant on one another, focused on the same goals, sharing the same risks.

Telling their story is part of her mission, and she does it well. The second part is telling the story of how Rockefeller Center was conceived, how the parcel was assembled, how the design, building, and decor of 30 Rock itself was created and selected, and even how it was staffed. While I have some quibbles about the book’s organization, and, occasionally, Roussel’s choices of emphasis, her retelling of the efforts of men, management, and machines is worth the read. Read more »

Somewhere along the line I developed this thing
about Ekphrastic poetry, exploring in word what
a visual artist might have intended when he or she
created their expressions, their work, their vision of
understanding that invited me to look, to see, and think——

…………………………………………   .

As if About A Painting

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Christopher Hall

“The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.” –Freud, “Repression”

“Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of who have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-being of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.”  –Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The characters in Kasuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go are living in the midst of an atrocity, but they certainly don’t act like it. They go through their lives in much the way we expect characters to do in realist novels; there’s fallings in love and out of it, slight and major misunderstandings, a bit of sex here and there, etc. But the jarring difference (spoiler ahead) is that the main characters are all clones, and their destiny is to have their organs harvested until the point that they “complete” – die, in other words. This is not, it is to be emphasised, a novel of resistance. It is a story about people immersed in a system which treats them reasonably well until the time comes to fulfill a purpose which will mean their destruction. In tone and plot, Ishiguro’s work is not really much different from a Thomas Hardy novel; the characters are locked within a social structure which is crushing them and will eventually destroy them, but from which they can see no means of escape. But if we shake our heads at the confines of 19^th century social standards in one instance, that becomes (or at least it did my case) a yelp of rage once we come to Ishiguro’s heartbreaking conclusion. Do something! It’s right there and it’s wrong, don’t you see it? I shouted at the characters. Fight back! Protest! Run Away! But this is nonsense; the characters, and everyone else they encounter, clone or not, are caught within the matrix of “It’s just the way it is” and, as of course it is implied, so are we.

The triad of victim, perpetrator, and bystander presents itself oddly in Ishiguro’s novel, and the boundaries of each begin to blur. The protagonists are unquestionably victims, but their general stasis also presents them as near bystanders. They seem unable to adopt the cognitive tools necessary to escape their plight. They see, but do not see, the atrocity all around them. The perpetrators are, for the most part, distant entities, and themselves can play the role of the bystanders – they participate in a system they might disagree with, and perhaps try to mitigate its worst effects – but they participate all the same. Ishiguro does not seem to be making an overt political point here, but the sense of inevitability and helplessness everywhere in the novel, again as in a Hardy novel, either fills one with existential dread or a level of hope for some kind of speculative redemption. Read more »

by Chris Horner

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. —Hannah Arendt

A book should be an ice axe for the frozen sea within us. —Franz Kafka

…for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. —Rainer Maria Rilke

Here’s a view I’ve heard or read many times: art is entertainment, its purpose is to provide pleasure and diversion. I think this is mainly wrong. While it contains a grain of truth, it overlooks the profound ways in which art can challenge and transform us. Art’s  value lies beyond pleasure, in its capacity to question who we are and what we do. It may even say to us that we must change our lives.

Fun

Entertainment, at its core, is about diversion and pleasure. Fun. It occupies our attention, distracts us from boredom, and amuses. But many things in life can do that: food, games, conversation, idle distractions. If we define art solely as entertainment, we risk conflating it with any activity that gives pleasure, and end up with nothing distinctive about art. After all, I like to eat ice cream, have a hot shower, go for a walk and listen to Mozart. I enjoy all those things, but I’ve surely missed something about the specificity of the experiences if I just call them all just pleasure. That approach is ‘utilitarian flattening’: everything is about pleasure, and so anything one does is just for that goal: art as a tool for pleasure, a means to an end, a pleasant way to pass the time.

Passing the time: diverting, distracting: that entertainment? But passing the time isn’t always pleasurable. Anyone who has scrolled on their smart phone or flipped through videos on YouTube knows that diversion can be form of bored unpleasure, a way to pass time that leaves us emptier than when we started. If Art is to be entertaining it had better do more than that. Read more »

by Lei Wang

The world is scary right now. I know this to be true, and yet from 14 years of meditation exposure I also know to ask: is it scary… here and now? Here, where I’m writing, in the library of the campus music building, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking a Zen garden (there was a big donor a while back), surrounded by books on the loves of Mozart and the many intricacies of the art of singing?

In Beyond Anxiety, sociologist and self-help author Martha Beck said she became free of anxiety once she realized most of her fears were based on things that were not actually in the room with her—things that were imagined. In an interview with Big Think, she said, “I remember one time, terrible things were happening in the world, as they always are, and I was sitting in meditation. I thought, ‘How could I be expected to feel calm under these circumstances?’ Another part of me said, ‘You mean the circumstances of your bedroom?’”

It’s true: my bedroom, my café, my music library is not in Minneapolis, or Gaza, or Tehran. The predator is not in the room with me. The predator is imagined, and yet at the same time, it is very real. In “A Brief for the Defense,” the poet Jack Gilbert writes:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

I’ve attended several world peace group meditations over the last few weeks: to transform human ego consciousness, to send love to all beings—is this what God wants? Read more »

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW THIS ONE

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

One common theory of intelligence is that it is an emergent phenomenon. One-on-one, termites aren’t exactly geniuses. But get enough of them together, and they build incredibly elaborate communities that can be 30 meters across with sophisticated ventilation systems to control heating and cooling. And these communities can last for thousands of years.

It’s a bit of a mystery how this happens. After all, even the Frank Lloyd Wright of termites doesn’t know how to keep a towering nest from falling over, or the physics of passive HVAC design. Heck, they probably aren’t even aware of the far side of their nest. Nevertheless, amazingly, termites as a collective have evolved to do something far beyond their individual capabilities.

Similarly, our individual neurons are each busy doing their own thing. They are responding to inputs and communicating with neighbors. From these simple cells and their many interconnections arises something greater than the sum of the parts: a person who can paint, create music, tell jokes, and build skyscrapers [1].

It is a founding dogma of the current AI bubble that scale is all you need: with enough data, computational power, and dollars, all you have to do is sit back and let super-intelligence emerge from the digital soup. Not really, of course. Progress in AI also involves a good dose of intelligent design.

Remarkably, sometimes you don’t need evolution or intelligent design. Read more »

Islands of ice form around the rocks in the river Eisack on very cold days as it passes through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Tim Sommers

“Happiness is that which all things aim at” according to Aristotle. All virtues – arete (ἀρετή) or “excellences” – are the mean between two extremes. We should choose courage over cowardice, sure, but also over being too bold. Stick to the tame middle.

Epicureans and Stoics counsel against risk and in favor of moderation and in cultivating simple tastes in all things.

Confucius was strongly against reckless behavior. The Daoist counseled, “He who knows when to stop does not find himself in danger.”

But it is Jeremy Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism, that I think about when I think about philosophy’s historical distaste for thrill-seeking. According to Bentham the only human good is happiness. Happiness is just pleasure minus pain. Just as we are morally obligated to seek, above all, the greatest happiness for the greatest number, for ourselves we should also want only happiness. Nietzsche retorted, “Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.”

Unfair. John Stuart Mill took Bentham’s view of happiness a step further, unintentionally, providing a rare and beautiful thing: an actual argument for thrill-seeking. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Looking Down the Tree, The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins, Mitchell B. Cruzan, Oxford University Press, 2025

This book has an ambitious and praiseworthy agenda, to discuss a wide range of specifically human characteristics, in the context of the selection pressures operating on our ancestors once the forests of East Africa were replaced by savanna. The more open terrain favoured bipedalism, and bipedalism led on to a cascade of further changes. These, we are told, included loss of fur, bulbous breasts, female orgasm, monogamy, large penis size, cooperation, and exclusive homosexuality. Anatomical side-effects of bipedalism gave us hands capable of fine movements, which in turn favoured the development of large brains, and hence prolonged infancy and the development of cooperative social structures. This evolution took place under circumstances very different from those under which almost all of us live today, and we need to understand the constraints imposed by our evolutionary pathway if we are to understand ourselves as we are now. The book is well produced, and fully illustrated with drawings and diagrams.

The approach is laudably multidisciplinary. As the author puts it, his aim is

“To facilitate an understanding of the origin of human traits, I draw upon evidence and inferences from fossils, genomics, phylogenetics, coalescence theory, analyses of calcium isotopes, and the anatomy and physiology of our ancestors and other animals.”

Cruzan follows the account of humans having emerged in East Africa, with more than one out-of-Africa migration, but anatomically modern humans outside Africa having most of their genetic material from a group that left there around 70,000 years ago. As a narrative device, he follows a fictional woman (Launua) from childhood to her eventual death, pointing out the specific challenges she is presented with, and the evolved abilities with which she overcomes them. Much of the argument is controversial, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, and the style makes the material accessible to a wide audience. I would warn the reader, however, that there are questions about his heavy use of selection at the clan level, and the assumption that the individual clans would have been highly inbred. There is some evidence that by 34,000 years ago, admittedly halfway between the time under discussion in the present, anatomically modern humans had formed networks that avoided inbreeding. More details (paywall) here.

There are, unfortunately, drawbacks. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Sherman J. Clark

Is your uncle racist? Is the American educational system? Are military beard standards? Is our president? I won’t try to answer those questions here. I don’t even know your uncle. Instead, I want to talk about what we mean when we use that term—and the confusion we experience as a result of the ways we use it. This won’t solve our underlying problems having to do with race; but it might help us address those problems more clearly.

The terms “racist” and “racism” appear daily in our political debates, social media, and institutional communications. They shape hiring decisions, educational curricula, and corporate policies. They can end careers, transform elections, and rupture communities. Yet for all their prominence—or perhaps because of it—we rarely pause to notice that we use these words in fundamentally different ways.

This semantic multiplicity creates dysfunction. We believe we are engaged in substantive disagreements about race and justice when we are often simply talking past one another. One person declares a policy racist, meaning it produces disparate outcomes; another hears an accusation of malicious intent and responds defensively. One person insists they are not racist, meaning they bear no personal animus; another hears a denial of systemic advantage and reacts with frustration. The confusion compounds: accusations of racism are met with accusations of bad faith, which generate accusations of fragility, which prompt accusations of ideological extremism. The cycle accelerates, positions harden, and the possibility of genuine exchange evaporates.

Before attempting to map these different uses, let me address two predictable responses. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

One of my favorite ways of beginning the morning is by having Siri put on “Grand Canyon Suite” by Ferde Grofe. It’s pleasant and gives a sense of the day beginning and going on its way. Also, in the middle, if you’re an old guy like me, you’ll hear the music that used to introduce “Call For Phillip Morreez,” the voice of Johnny, the hotel bell boy calling across America inviting us all to smoke. At one time I wanted to be an ad man. I wonder if I would have refused to work on a cigarette ad at the possible cost of my job. Of course, the question wouldn’t have come up when I was younger and smoked, but if I had been older and knew better, what would I have done. In truth, I’m not sure. There are many ways of convincing yourself that you’re not doing a wrong thing.

I have the door to the patio outside my second floor flat (I like that British word better than the American apartment) to let some fresh air in in the morning. I never sit on my patio though it would often seem to be attractive except it overlooks Greenwood Avenue N where the traffic is constant and noisy. Just now a car went by claiming it’s place for a larger share of world domination by having its muffler removed. There are many of those and we live too by a fire house and emergency vehicles emerge both night and day. I’ve just ordered some earpods with a noise cancelling feature. Maybe that can recover lost space or at least the ability to listen to music with the door open.

I wanted to write this this morning because of a sentence in my notebook that I read in the NY Times Book Review. The book (it’s so long ago now, I can’t remember title or author) is about a woman’s attempt to live “an honest life. More than that,” actually: “a good life. You can do nothing or you can do better.” What a helpful last sentence. It relieves you from the burden of solving the world’s difficulties while offering a way to live well. “You can do nothing or do better.” I hope I can at least do something in some ways. While I was brooding over this, Facebook recovered something I wrote years ago, forgot about, but now find helpful. Read more »

Allan Rohan Crite. Sometimes I’m Up, Sometimes I’m Down. Illustration for Three Spirituals from Earth to Heaven (Cambridge, Mass., 1948),” 1937. 

(Photographs of framed prints by Sughra Raza).

“… Back there in the ’30s, the concept of Blacks was usually of somebody up in Harlem, or the sharecropper from the Deep South, or what you might call the jazz Negro,” Crite said in a 1979 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. “But the ordinary person—you might say middle-class—you just didn’t hear about them. So what I did in my drawings was just to try to do the life of people as I saw them round about me.”

Crite’s “neighborhood paintings,” while his most famous works, are just one facet of a long and varied career. A devout Episcopalian, he combined his love of religious art with his affection for his city, creating urban vignettes with Christian themes.”

More here and here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.