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.

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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.