Tomayto Tomahto

Justin Khoo, an associate professor of Philosophy at MIT, begins this episode with the assertion that philosophy asks the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate—but this assertion is not innocent. Asking the most fundamental questions we can possibly articulate may come at the cost of undermining conceptual, schematic, ideological, and often disciplinary frameworks upon which scientific findings are predicated. Through discussion of code speech, political speech, philosophy of language, aesthetic objects, hypothetical epistemic advantages, and the foundations of our current political (dis)order, this episode draws attention to stubborn frameworks and axioms, not necessarily undermining them, but questioning their validity and utility. This episode at times historicizes, allegorizes, analytically analyzes, narrativizes, and outright complains about the objects we're discussing—be it the referents of language or a film or a quote by Trump or the blind-spots of a discipline. The very fact of our discussion of the so-upheld "distinctions" between various methodologies and ideological orientations demonstrates the apparent need for a division among academic disciplines—but why? If there's a degree of meta-discourse throughout this episode, it's in reference to our frightening political climate. Parts of the world are literally on fire and yet we pontificate about Trump's contradictions and the subversive strategy of code speech. I want to acknowledge this tension, and optimistically suggest that perhaps exposing contradictions or calling out hypocrisy is a small act of resistance, even if it does project the frame of rationality on completely irrational actions. Justin's Website 3am interview Judging for OurselvesPolitical and Coded Speech Willard Van Orman Quine ; Two Dogmas of EmpiricismPeter Van InwagenMichael Lynch: Trump, Truth, and the Power of ContradictionJason Stanley: Democracy and the Demagogue‘You Can’t Pin Him Down’: Trump’s Contradictions Are His Ultimate Cover Jennifer Lackey: Acting on KnowledgeJustin's podcast: Cows in the Field Minority Report The Shining Artwork: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27

Throughout this episode, Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a postdoctoral research fellow at Carnegie Mellon's Neuroscience Institute, asks us to consider the essentials of speech processing and its constraints. We hear phonetics, but we understand phonology. How and why? To answer those questions, Chiara takes a highly interdisciplinary approach. We know that linguistics is an interdisciplinary field—it has to be. We can't divorce language from its cognitive, physical, and social apparatuses, nor can language be extricated from human interaction. But academic inquiry has a way of siloing different subfields. And, frankly, it's easier to stick to a rigid set of questions and methodologies. Chiara Repetti-Ludlow's research is exactly what we often hope for in linguistics: interdisciplinary, multi-textured, and conscious of the strengths of different subfields. By bringing together methods and insights from neurolinguistics, phonetics-phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, Chiara's research attempts to answer granular questions about speech processing. Chiara is a current postdoctoral research fellow in the Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at NYU. Chiara’s Website Continuous Perception and Graded Categorization: Electrophysiological Evidence for a Linear Relationship Between the Acoustic Signal and Perceptual Encoding of SpeechRegularization in the face of variable input: Children's acquisition of stem-final fricative plurals in American EnglishVariable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of changeSahil Lutha

In early 2023, Susan Blum came on Tomayto Tomahto to discuss linguistic anthropology. 2 years later, she's back to discuss her work on schoolishness, ungrading, and linguistic ideology. From plagiarism to authentic learning, imperialist language ideologies to biased methods and metrics of Western science, this episode looks critically at what we "know," how we know it, and where the perpetuation of knowledge might hinder new discoveries. Science promises objectivity, but does it deliver? How might anthropology promise subjectivity, deliver complexity, but ultimately nudge our cultural, psychology, and linguistic understandings toward objectivity?  We can be angry with students for cheating and we can lament the existence of AI for aiding and abetting—or we can ask: why are students cheating in the first place? Surely there’s something amiss with our education system that a substantial portion of students feel no intrinsic motivation to learn and therefore happily outsource their essays and projects, right? Combining questions of methods, results, epistemological orientations, and the political ramifications of research, this episode highlights the merits of an anthropological approach to learning, language, and inquiry.  Susan Blum's personal website; Notre Dame profile Schoolishness: Alienated Education and the Quest for Authentic, Joyful Unseen WEIRD Assumptions: The So-Called Language Gap Discourse and Ideologies of Language, Childhood, and Learning John Warner: More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI Asao Inoue: Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom, 2nd Edition Contract Cheating Émile Durkheim: Collective Effervescence ⁠Charles Briggs⁠ ⁠William Labov ⁠

A defining quirk of fields like English, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, etc is that the the objects of study mirror the medium through which the objects of study are explicated. Literary scholars produce literature to explain literature. We explain language through language, not always the same language,  but a linguistic medium matches a linguistic medium nonetheless. Climate change is not the same as language, not at all. So why is it that we make sense of our climate through language? Josh Willis, a Principle Research Scientist at NASA joins Tomayto Tomahto to discuss the communications war of global warming (or is it climate change?). We discuss why the explanatory language of global warming can be exclusionary or inaccessible and weigh the benefits of using plain-er language. Ultimately, it’s on hegemonic systems and power structures, not individuals, to reduce our global emissions, so why is it that individuals feel such pressure to  make consequentially sustainable consumer choices?  Josh Willis studies ocean warming and rising sea levels at NASA. He also teaches improv. His research profile can be found here Frank Luntz Jihad vs. McWorld

"What frame allows you to take seriously the consequence of ideological overdetermination without conceding that it has a reality or a natural position?” This is one of many questions that Jonathan Rosa poses throughout this episode. What perspective allows us to see race and language as ontologically overdetermined without essentializing that overdetermination to the point of inextricability? Taking a few steps back, this episode is largely about questions and questioning. Why have certain fields maintained the practice of using race as a variable, thereby stabilizing the idea of race? Whose interests are served by entrenching the categories of race, ethnicity, and so on? Through discussion of a raciolinguistic perspective and its reception, raciontology and ontological overdetermination, and critique of power in general, this episode centers around hierarchies of the human and the problems that humans are made into based on their particular position within hierarchies. Rather than viewing race, ethnicity, disability, (fill in the blank), as intersectional phenomena, Jonathan asks that we move instead towards thinking of identity as a process of interconnection, and question the goal of intersectionality as a framework. For me, this all comes down to a rather unsettling problem: what if the inequities, pernicious ideologies, and their enabling structural frameworks aren't dismantled but rather perpetrated through the academic inquiry that originally sought to obliterate them? And what if that academic inquiry still purports to serve a remedial, ameliorative function? What then? This isn't to say everything is a paradox; this is to say that paradoxes abound. Description can become prescription. So if nothing else, I invite you to struggle through the frustration of irony. I invite you to squirm at the failures of academic inquiry and hegemonic ideas which have prevailed for quite some time. But hopefully we'll get to better questions and answers, and perhaps better ways of failing. Jonathan Rosa is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. He is the author of a terrific book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race. I recommend reading it. Jonathan Rosa Stanford profile, all publications Kesha Fikes The Viral Underclass by Steven Thrasher Beyond Yellow English: Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America Angela Reyes' Language and Ethnicity Wesley Leonard Black Skin, White Masks Ana Celia Zentella's Puerto Rican Code Switching Labov's '4th Floor' Study Michael Berman's Toward a Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Listening Josh Babcock's Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations

While legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics, it has been estranged (until now) from the practice of adopting linguistic theory and methods. In Part 2 of our conversation, Alex Walker and I discuss the implications of applying optimality theory (OT) to law. By utilizing the formalism of OT, Alex argues our entire legal system and conceptualization of law will change for the better. Rather than conceptualizing law as a set of rules, Alex argues we should view law as a tapestry of ordered preferences. For example, during the 51 years that Roe v. Wade dictated the “rules,” anti-abortion laws were never repealed or struck down, they were simply suppressed. Our system has never been about any given rule, but rather about the multitude of preferences continually shifting in their hierarchy. From AI judges to forum shopping, OT has something to offer the legal system both practically and Platonically.  Somewhat ironically—perhaps paradoxically—I’ve found that the application of OT to law pushes legal questions further away from linguistic ones. If law is about consequences and outcomes and why those outcomes exist, then it’s not really about the semantic change of a singular noun or the bounds of an entailment condition, right? And if law’s fulcrum isn’t language, then perhaps our legal outcomes—our laws, current precedent, and so on—shouldn’t be predicated upon questions of linguistics or deontological “rules.” But in order to come to that conclusion, perhaps we need the formalism of a linguistic theory.  Watch a short video on optimality theory here  Read about optimality theory  Alex Walker’s website  Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins Asking ChatGPT for the Ordinary Meaning of Statutory Terms Stare Decisis  The history of Arizona’s Civil War-era Abortion Ban Center for Law, Brain & Behavior 

Legal academia is no stranger to questions of linguistics. After all, law is, in some sense, a linguistic construction. But our entire legal system interfaces with language far more than we might think. For a long time, the relationship between linguistics and law has concentrated on philosophy of language and forensic linguistics. Lawyers and linguists become friends over debates about entailment conditions or Constitutional arguments predicated upon the semantic change of a singular noun (arms, anyone?). But Alex Walker (the current Rappaport Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School), works not at the intersection of linguistic structure and the law, but rather on the legal system's reception of linguistic utterances. In Saussurean terms, this is about parole, not langue. In Part 1 of our conversation, Alex explains his work on linguistic discrimination in the legal system. Why are some voices unable to be heard properly in courtrooms? What is Dialectal Due Process and how will its implementation improve the situation? While linguistic prejudice and misinterpretation are ubiquitous, the consequences can be graver when someone can’t be understood on a witness stand as opposed to a job interview. That's a key part of this conversation: the ideas discussed here closely resemble ideas and concepts discussed in the past by sociolinguists. What's different is the methodology. As a legal scholar, Alex is interested in proposing policy and legal frameworks (backed-up by philosophical, economic, and historical arguments) to address problems that are not inherently linguistic, but rather instantiated through language. Racism won't be eradicated through linguistic justice alone, and linguistic justice won't solve the problem of mass incarceration, either. This is about making sure all people are understood and respected—linguistically and legally. As always, it was an honor to interview someone so committed to interdisciplinary scholarship. The questions I ask and the arguments he offers are nothing if not legal—litigious, even—but they are concerned with language. And if all people are to be taken seriously in legal contexts, we need to hear them first. Alex Walker's website Publications Black English for Lawyers Rappaport Fellowship Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)

Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is a self-described "linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut," but I think this episode proves him to be a paragon of linguistic curiosity. He's committed to bringing the nuances and complexities of language to a general audience, and all through his work on words—which, as we know, are often persona non grata in the linguistics community. But nevertheless, this episode focuses on words and their political impact. Words—signifiers—have power; they can index history (re: slay), political allegiance (🍉), in groups and out groups, overt and covert prestige, age, gender, and a whole lot more. Whether it's cunty, -ussy, rizz, nasty woman, enshittification, or ucalagon, we will discuss words' potential to be used and abused for political power. What happens when language becomes a conscious phenomena wherein the symbols we invoke index a political telos? This episode stretches across time and space to get at the importance of language when it’s invoked in a word-like form. From Bakhtin to Saussure to discussions of Trump and Biden, this conversation is alive with the awesomeness of language. On a personal note I would like to thank Ben for being such an inspiring figure for young language scholars like myself. Thank you for the work you do, and thank you for doing it so thoughtfully. Full interview on YouTube Ben Zimmer - WSJ Ben Zimmer - Twitter Traveling Among the New Words: Lexical Adventures in the Digital Age Ben Zimmer on CNN Slang Trends Through History Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)

People often talk about language as "a window" into many things. Language can teach us about the mind, the brain, history, etc. But language is also a medium for discrimination, ridicule, oppression, unequal labor, and various other insidious practices. Linguistic oppression, as Kelly Elizabeth Wright tells us, isn't really about language, it's about how practices of oppression exploit language in their conquests. Kelly E. Wright uses language to study and address forms of oppression, labor, racism, sexism, ableism, and the ideologies of what makes something "standard." This episode will address the question of sociolinguistic labor: why it exists, why it persists, and how to address it. We discuss how language is used as a barrier, a tool for discrimination and inclusion, a proxy for race and gender and class, among other things. If nothing else, this episode will show how studying language empowers you to make a difference in the world and highlight systemic issues. For the full, unedited version of this episode, head to youtube. Kelly E. Wright Website Dr. Wright's Public Scholarship Housing Policy and Linguistic Profiling Hearing Rachel Jeantel You Met My Ambassador Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of US Latinos

There’s a lot that I can say about Emily M. Bender, but I think that a philosophy professor of mine said it best when he described her as the “cutting edge of technology and AI and linguistics and ethics.” Obviously some of her cutting-edge-ness concomitantly stems from the cutting-edge-ness of large language models,  deep fakes, and 'artificial intelligence' inventions. But out of all the computational linguists, Emily M. Bender stands out to me because she's made the problem of unregulated AI pertinent and understandable to everyone—linguists, computer scientists, climate activists, lawyers, everyone. Her message about LLMs and other AI inventions is clear: we have to do something, and soon, preferably yesterday. Because there is great incentive for AI to remain unregulated at the cost of our democracy, our right to privacy and ownership over our data, our planet, and (as she calls it) our "information ecosystem."   This episode answers all the questions you've had about 'AI' technology: how is the language of an LLM intrinsically different from the language of a human? What are the legal implications of un-watermarked synthetic media? What's going on with deep fakes? How can linguists use their knowledge to effect change? And throughout it all, you'll hear Emily's wisdom and empathy radiating through her wealth of knowledge. Emily's Website Collection of links about the 'Stochastic Parrots' paper and the subsequent firing of multiple coauthors On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜 Baldwin: Understanding the link between joint attention and language George Carlin NBC News: Deepfake porn Patricia Kuhl TedTalk: The Linguistic Genius of Babies Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel Abeba Birhane ⁠Wesley Leonard ⁠