In its specialized format as the infrastructure of all theoretical structurations of the world, language is essentially formal. The significance of formal languages lies in their capacity for what Catarina Dutilh Novaes terms ‘desemantifica…[^49]: The term ‘universe of discourse’ originates from Augustus De Morgan’s phrase universe of a proposition specifically meaning ‘the whole of some definite category of things which are under discussion’ but not at all ‘the totality of al…
Catarina Dutilh Novaes
philosopher · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Catarina Dutilh Novaes contributes to the course's thinking about formal languages and their capacity for meaning-making through her concept of "desemantification and resemantification"—the stripping away and reassignment of semantic content that allows formal systems to operate as infrastructural tools for worldmaking. Her work enables the readings to argue that language, stripped to its formal skeleton, can be remade to serve different theoretical and computational purposes, which is central to understanding how AI systems manipulate meaning at the structural level.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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