What are we to do about this? A friend of mine who tutors high school students recently consulted AI (an acronym we now seem to be accepting as a proper noun) about the correct use of pronouns in a sentence like this: He calls her more often than me. The word than, he was told, …
Category Archives: Thoughts About Writing
What Are You Talking About?
If you have an idea and I have an idea and we don’t agree, we can find ourselves in an impossible situation if we ignore the one idea everyone has in common: truth. Pursuing truth in a conversation is distinctly different from having the truth beforehand. Seeking the truth between us is an act of …
Artificial Humanity
The jaw-dropping possibilities of artificial intelligence, some already realized and now part of our lives, seem to make it incumbent on us all to wonder who as a species we humans are and who we will become. Unlike organic life, technologies are made, not begotten. We might speak facilely of creating technologies, but the truth …
A Sense of Belonging
To think about something critically, to be able to ask questions and evaluate their answers, involves what is called coherence. We pose and reply to questions with words, of course, and in the study of language, whether written or spoken, coherence is of primary importance. We make sense of things by understanding how they belong …
Holding On Through a Thought
The word seems to be out that we could benefit, as persons and as a nation, of a little more critical thinking. But what does that mean? Emphatically, learning to think critically does not mean learning what to think; that is propaganda or ideology, which are forms of mental slavery and beneath the dignity of …