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I thought some readers might be interested in a couple entries my favorite author, Scott Bakker, has recently posted on his blog, Three Pound Brain.

The first is called and the second is

In "Davidson's Fork," the author offers

an eliminativist radicalization of [Donald Davidson's] Radical Interpretation, one that characterize[s] the scene of interpreting another speaker from scratch in mechanical terms...in terms of two stochastic machines attempting to find some mutual, causally systematic accord between the causally systematic accords each maintains with their environment.

"The Blind Mechanic" is a followup to the first post and is a preliminary attempt to "...suss out the mechanical relations pertinent to reason and interpretation." In this post, the author asks and answers the following question:

What do evolved, biomechanical systems such as humans need to coordinate astronomically complex covariational regimes with little more than sound? For one, they need ways to trigger selective activations of the other’s regime for effective behavioural uptake. Triggering requires some kind of dedicated cognitive sensitivity to certain kinds of sounds—those produced by complex vocalizations, in our case. As with any environmental sensitivity, iteration is the cornerstone, here. The complexity of the coordination possible will of course depend on the complexity of the activations triggered. To the extent that evolution rewards complex behavioural coordination, we can expect evolution to reward the communicative capacity to trigger complex activations. This is where the bottleneck posed by the linearity of auditory triggers becomes all important: the adumbration of iterations is pretty much all we have, trigger-wise. Complex activation famously requires some kind of molecular cognitive sensitivity to vocalizations, the capacity to construct novel, covariational complexities on the slim basis of adumbrated iterations. Linguistic cognition, in other words, needs to be a ‘combinatorial mechanism,� a device (or series of devices) able to derive complex activations given only a succession of iterations.