Linguistic Relativity — What Language Shapes and What It Doesn't
An examination of whether language shapes thought, from Sapir and Whorf to modern experimental evidence.
Category
Language
6articles followthis line of inquiry.
Articles in Language
Epistemic Trust — When the Same Term Means Different Things
Three research traditions use "epistemic trust" to mean three different things. Searching for the literature reveals how terminology can mask conceptual fragmentation.
Garden-Path Sentences — What Misdirection Reveals About Processing
Garden-path sentences trick readers into committing to a wrong interpretation. Studying them reveals how language processing works in real time.
Ambiguity — When Precision Is the Problem
Precision is often treated as a virtue. In law, natural language, and design, ambiguity is not a flaw — it is a deliberate feature that makes systems adaptable over time.
What the Signal-to-Noise Metaphor Loses Across Domains
The signal-to-noise ratio is a precise engineering metric that became a loose metaphor across domains. Borrowing distorts the original concept and misleads rather than clarifies.
Tokenization — What Text Becomes Before a Machine Reads It
Text must be broken into pieces before any language model processes it. Tokenization decides what those pieces are, and the choice shapes everything the model can express.