I was about to do a task but was temporarily distracted by another task. In the interim, the first task was resolved on its own. Hurray for structured procrastination!

Defend Bryans/Brians/Brayans: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/29/w...

It really hit me that I'm not in Scotland when it started drizzling and everyone started ducking into shops and protected places.

Me and my sake.

My most anti-immigration opinion is that any company over a certain size that wants to hire immigrants should be required to have a recognised union.

Can one felicitously say, "What Sam told me surprised me. I didn't think we were that close."?

Is there any interesting literature on the difference between audience and addressee in pragmatics?

“Close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades”. -yeah, well guess which game we’re playing, pal.

If you’re worried your LLM will hallucinate, why not just put “don’t hallucinate” in the prompt?

This is quite simply an incredible headline.

I listened to an interesting interview on Ezra Klein today. He asked what meaning a task can have if an AI could also do it or if it is frictionless. What crystallised is (i) that it is already the case that someone else can do it better and (ii) everything is hard. (1/4)

One of my deepest commitments is that no one thesis in philosophy is ever "dead" and never worth discussing again, as much as each (person myself) include would like some to be and that this is related to the fact that there are continually new people popping into the world with their own ideas.

Take that Fregeans:

Every time I delete work email from my phone I am happier and more productive until I have to install it again.

I’m always surprised when people say that LLMs have no use cases. For example, rather than walking your dog to the park, you could have ChatGPT write a description of you walking your dog to the park.

My paper on Frege and Sense Variation with @jadamcarter.bsky.social is now out. Synopsis: sense variation is tolerable when---relative to the background beliefs of speaker and audience---the thoughts of speaker and hearer share entailments. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

There's some dialogue in the movie Metropolitan that mocks me as an analytic philosopher: That's how New York's seen, at least in the popular imagination.\\ I don't think that there is a popular imagination.\\ What do you mean?\\ Just that.\\ I don't think that there is a popular imagination.

Editing a paper and I fretted for 10 minutes about "a historical" or "an historical".

My son (12) told me that I have to stop giving the dog so many treats because it was like the emperor giving the legions unsustainable donatives and would lead to civilisational collapse.

Listening to this and completely flabbergasted that both just presuppose that if a phenomenon has a physical description, it is “random” and doesn’t matter. #stebbing_pilled. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

Marking essays in the park while my daughter swings. Some days are nice, even in Scotland.

LLMs are coming for our jobs, but not in the way we thought. garymarcus.substack.com/p/did-an-llm...

Did they introduce ten-day weeks during the French Revolution? I ask because Michael Dummett claims, “it is not a convention that there are seven days in a week, because a period of time would not be a week unless it was just seven days long.”

"In point of fact no question is merely concerned with words; yet no philosophical problem can afford to neglect words." (Stebbing, Ideals and Illusions, 217)

A solution to the answering machine paradox: people should be saying, "I'm not available now" (which is true) rather than "I'm not here now" (which is false).

Funny thing. It turns out, Julius Caesar is a natural number.

Somewhat at random, I decided to listen to Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor on Audible. Somehow it’s exactly the book I needed to read at this moment.

In my head, the name of this site still rhymes with ‘brewski’.

Supersemantics has gone swole: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I feel like I've reduced my anticipated workload significantly recently by simply acknowledging that I will not be in two places at once.

Yesterday, I gave an online talk about concept of truth through my research network with Giulia Felappi and received very nice feedback.

Yesterday, I taught Davidson on context sensitivity in philosophy of language to active students. I read a chapter of Fine's *Reasoning with Arbitrary Objects*. I read some Bhartṛhari on the unity of the sentence.

I sincerely believe that drinking culture would be greatly improved in this country if they served half pints in tulip glasses rather than the silly narrow miniature pint glasses.

Variables are responsible for the wars of direct reference that consumed so many journal pages.

Yesterday, I got to speak with @malcolmkeating.bsky.social about epistemology of testimony in Classical Indian Philosophy.

A brief of my paper (w/ Rabern) against Fregean Quantification: ergoblog.org

Sometimes, you have to mill dried hominy into grits, stir it over the hot stove for a long while, add cheese, top it with egg fried in olive oil and paprika, add some avocado, a few red beans, spring onions, and plenty of pepper.

Oh, you're a philosopher. How much wisdom do you love?

Every morning on my walk to work, I pass a window where it seems that a person is staring at me. Every day, I realise that the person is a cardboard cut out of a young Harry Styles at maybe 90% scale.

Had seminars with my Stebbing course and talked about Stebbing's Communication and Verification, Ayer's "non-solipsism" and other issues. It's just a really good group and really fun to talk to them. We're also starting Ideals and Illusions, my favourite book in analytic philosophy.

For today: I discussed variables with one colleague and the discussion veered into the difference between the structure of information and its representations. I then discussed scheduling events on propositions with Giulia Felappi for our AHRC Networking Grant. ...

For today, it was rethinking once again Kripke's Causal "Picture" of Reference in the context of a reading group on Large Language Models and Josh and Herman's book on AI. It was then Fiona Doherty's talk about mathematical structuralism.

Students today called the study of geometry "an American thing you see in movies".

Text from my wife: "Got Burns Night covered". What's in the refrigerator:

Continuing this theme, I got to teach about Stebbing on potted thinking today. The students came up with good examples. After marking, I'm going to get to read a chapter of Josh and Herman's book on AI.

Trying to reflect on the nice things I "get to do" as part of my job rather than what I have "gotten done". Today I had a very fruitful conversation with a student about authenticity in art and read this paper in preparation for a conversation with another: philpapers.org/rec/TUCIAP

"I already wrote to you once why I wanted to see the expression 'variable' banned. One never knows exactly whether it is supposed to be a sign or the content of a sign." -Frege to Jourdain (undated)