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From Writing to Reading: Why AI Makes Critical Thinking More Important Than Ever

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To Chris Thesis The arrival of AI has not made writing obsolete. It has changed what education should value. If drafting becomes inexpensive, then the central academic skill is no longer producing a first draft but critically reading, questioning, revising, and improving one. In this sense, philosophers such as Derrida become suddenly timely, not because students must adopt their conclusions, but because they exemplify habits of reading that the age of AI demands. The Wrong Question Since the arrival of powerful AI systems, schools and universities have found themselves asking a familiar question: Should students be allowed to use artificial intelligence to write essays? Some teachers advocate banning these tools altogether, arguing that they encourage plagiarism, weaken critical thinking, or reproduce the assumptions found in the vast collections of human texts on which they were trained. These concerns are understandable, but they may also be asking the wrong question. Wh...
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Reading Like Derrida: Jakobson, Babel, and the Meaning of "Translation Proper"

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Jakobson's Breakthrough When people think about translation, they usually imagine moving a text from one language into another: an English novel translated into Spanish, or a German philosophical work rendered in French. Roman Jakobson argued that this common understanding is too narrow. Translation, he claimed, is not simply an activity that occurs between languages. It is a fundamental feature of meaning itself. Jakobson's starting point is a simple but powerful insight borrowed from Charles Sanders Peirce: the meaning of a sign is another sign. We understand words not because they somehow contain their meanings, but because they can be interpreted by means of other signs. Meaning is therefore always an act of interpretation. His famous example is the English word cheese . Bertrand Russell had argued that no one can understand the word unless they have had direct, nonlinguistic experience of cheese itself. Jakobson disagrees. Someone who has never encountered cheese can...
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Can You Learn the Meaning of "Cheese" by Pointing? Translation as a Philosophical Experiment

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Introduction Imagine trying to teach someone the English word cheese . You hold up a piece of Camembert, point to it, and say, "Cheese." It seems like the simplest possible language lesson. Surely the learner now knows what the word means. Yet this ordinary scene conceals one of the deepest questions in the philosophy of language. Has the learner really acquired the meaning of the word? Or have they merely associated a sound with a particular object? This question brings together three thinkers whose interests might initially seem unrelated: Bertrand Russell, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Roman Jakobson. Russell maintains that words ultimately derive their significance from our acquaintance with the world. Saussure argues that meaning emerges from a system of linguistic differences rather than from direct contact with objects. Jakobson, meanwhile, offers an unexpected way of testing these competing intuitions. Translation, he suggests, is not merely a practical activity. I...
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