Thom Scott-Phillips

This account is no longer active. You can find me over at Bluesky or Substack

From cognitive science and evolutionary work on communication, Thom Scott-Phillips brings a new proposal to a classic debate on linguistic intuitions and grammar—linking judgments of “oddness” to communicative relevance. Read: doi.org/10.25189/2675-…

@katbeuls @paulvaneecke @fcgsocial @aibrussels @UNamurCSFaculty Hi! Abstract is interesting. Can you send me a pdf of the accepted version? Email is here cognitivescience.ceu.edu/people/thom-sc…

We are organizing a @ceusummer university course w/ @tscottphillips on the Human Mind and Open Society, with a special focus on political intuitions & stellar guest faculty: @markvanvugt1 @kmcaulif1 @RuedenChris & Lou Safra! Pls share the news! summeruniversity.ceu.edu/courses/2025/h…

@robsica I see now what happened. In the original submission I just mentioned 'common ground': what communicators do is make informative intentions common ground The editor felt this needed unpacking. Between me and the copy-editor, we've provided a gloss that confuses in a different way

@tscottphillips Also, here, near the end.

Dumb question: why are behaviors possessing the property of ostension caused by an intention to make overt an informative intention to *both* the communicator and audience (instead of only to the latter?

@acerbialberto I agree with the implications of the questions. Some people have real sexual desires towards children. Discourse rarely distinguishes the desires themselves from the actions that some take based on those desires.

Ok this guy started with images of real children. But what if images are completely synthetic? Wouldn’t be good? People that get aroused by these sorts of things wouldn’t look for real images. What is the discussion on that? theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/o…

@camhmorin @AdamCSchembri I sometimes use 'communicator' and 'audience' That terminology isn't specific to language of course, but the fact that language is a special case of human communication is often my point!

I am looking for inclusive terminology extending the notions of "speaker/hearer" to non-spoken language users. Any references? @AdamCSchembri

@OwenWntr Very clear! Thank you

@tscottphillips Yep, small sample size but there are plenty of Welsh/Scottish not British respondents

Yes, which is why it was a strange 2010s turn to treat them as antagonistic. In BES data, over 60% of English people say they are equally English and British on a 7 point scale. Very few say they are strongly one and not the other

The archives of the International Cognition and Culture Institute (active 2008-2021) are now freely online with past blogs, webinars, and discussions from anthropologists, biologists, cognitive scientists, historians, linguists, and philosophers. cognitionandculture.net/index.html

@danwilliamsphil Oh this is van der Linden! That’s very poor, he should know better.

🙃

@bayesianboy I assume you know of this? jobs.ac.uk/job/DJE524/ass…

"Many approaches to language, especially but not only those in the generative tradition, have long sought a minimal set of general principles that underpin linguistic intuitions." What are the best overt statements to this effect?

@DStibbardHawkes @robsica While the question behind these is the same/similar, these phrasings are microassertions and micro-recreations of quite different assumptions (about power, agency, etc). These assumptions can have pernicious effects at the level of society

@DStibbardHawkes @robsica As for microaggressions, whatever term we use, I don't think the empirical phenomena even need be aggressive Compare e.g. "Why haven't you just [do X]?" "I'm guessing there's a reason why you haven't [done X]?"

"a concept [microaggression] that cannot be objectively verified by outside observers is a poor candidate for scientific scrutiny... evidence doesn't even come close to proving that most of us walk around w/ unacknowledged & unconscious biases in our heads"direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monog…

@DStibbardHawkes @robsica Yes. Our socio-cognitive adaptations are for one-to-one or one-to-few interactions and relations static1.squarespace.com/static/64e385e…

@robsica @tscottphillips Simply think dyad-level explanations for normally dyad level behaviours are more powerful. This is true of status and hierarchy-related interactions broadly.

Are you a biologist working with non-human species? We are interested in finding out more on how similar or different to humans you perceive certain species to be! nupsych.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5m… (approved by local ethics committee, make sure you read the first page) @asab_org @eseb_org

@garicgymro Oh yes, they totally hold up. Replaying them today makes complete sense. But remaking is a different game altogether

@tscottphillips I will also say that, while I don't disagree about TTOI advancing the genre, I've been rewatching the original Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister recently, and it really still holds up.

Whenever I see clips of the Yes Prime Minister remake I'm ever more convinced that they perfectly hit that sweet spot of being different enough from the original to be grating but not so different as to be interesting