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…
Noam Chomsky
linguist · 4 mentions across 3 readings
In this course
Chomsky appears only as a passing reference in the course readings, invoked in the opening framing around Deleuzian control societies and technologies of prediction, though he is not directly cited in the excerpts provided. His linguistic work on formal language structures and generative grammar implicitly informs the course's investigation of how machine learning systems operationalize language as infrastructure, yet the readings themselves engage more directly with contemporary theorists of desemantification and formal systems. His presence signals the genealogy of formal computational thinking in the course's DNA, even if the specific arguments being developed move beyond classical Chomskyan linguistics into algorithmic culture.
Mentioned in 3 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Catarina Dutilh Novaes 2Dan McQuillan 1David Chalmers 1Donald Hoffman 1Gilles Deleuze 1Humberto Maturana 1Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland 1Tiqqun 1Wilfrid Sellars 1Augustus De Morgan 1Edward Hermann Haeusler 1Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1Jean-Baptiste Joinet 1Luiz Carlos Pereira 1Michel Foucault 1Pete Wolfendale 1Plato 1Robert Brandom 1Roland Hausser 1Valeria de Paiva 1William Kneale and Martha Kneale 1