Podcast episode 58: Ryan Nefdt on linguistic relativity and AI

In this interview, we talk to Ryan Nefdt about the light latest work in “artificial intelligence” can cast on questions of linguistic relativity.

Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Intro and outro: Von Wegen Lisbeth, “Podcast”

Image: Cover of Linguistic Relativity by Pelletier and Nefdt (Oxford University Press)

References for Episode 58

Bickerton, D. (2014). More than nature needs: Language, mind, and evolution. Harvard University Press.

Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, syntax, and semantics. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 61–79). MIT Press.

Chemla, E., & Nefdt, R. M. (2024). No such thing as a general learner: Language models and their dual optimization. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008355

Dennett, D. C. (1996). Kinds of minds: Towards an understanding of consciousness. Basic Books.

Haspelmath, M. (2010). Comparative concepts and descriptive categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language, 86(3), 663–687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lan.2010.0021

Huh, M., Cheung, B., Wang, T., & Isola, P. (2024). The platonic representation hypothesis. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.07987

Kallini, J., Papadimitriou, I., Futrell, R., Mahowald, K., & Potts, C. (2024). Mission: Impossible language models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 14691–14714). Association for Computational Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.787

Mitchell, J., & Bowers, J. (2020). Priorless recurrent networks learn curiously. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 5147–5158). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

Moro, A., Greco, M., & Cappa, S. F. (2023). Large languages, impossible languages and human brains. Cortex, 167, 82–85.

Nefdt, R. (2023). Language, science, and structure: A journey into philosophy of linguistics. Oxford University Press.

Nefdt, R. (2024). The philosophy of theoretical linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Pelletier, F. J., & Nefdt, R. (2025). Linguistic relativity: An essential guide to past debates and future prospects. Oxford University Press.

Pullum, G. K. (1989). The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, 6, 579–588. (Reprinted in The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language, 1991, University of Chicago Press.)

Reines, M., & Prinz, J. (2009). Reviving Whorf: The return of linguistic relativity. Philosophy Compass, 4, 1022–1032.