iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Maybe by the time my sabbatical is over, UW will make available a low-priced subscription for AI agent swarms who can teach my courses, hold 24/7 office hours, write my research papers, and do the majority of my service work.

Claude for Education is now available for purchase by UW faculty, staff, and departments. Claude is an AI assistant from Anthropic that can support work in teaching, learning, research, software development, and administration.

Claude is one of several AI offerings available through UW Information Technology (UWIT). Visit the UWIT AI page to learn more about available AI tools and resources.
How Claude can support your work
Claude can help with tasks such as:

Exploring and developing ideas
Drafting and revising content
Summarizing and analyzing information
Supporting coding and software development
Assisting with teaching, learning, research, and administrative work

Claude is intended to support the work of UW faculty and staff—not replace their expertise, judgment, or responsibility for the final work.

Subscription options
Claude for Education is available through two subscription tiers:

Standard: $290 per year
Premium: $730 per year, with five times the token limit of the Standard tier for higher-capacity use, including research, development, and other advanced workloads

Read our post on Claude for Education to learn more.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Saw a large boulder the size of a large boulder on a hike yesterday.

A very large boulder set against some trees.

A very large boulder set against the trees with Lundin Peak in the background.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Been sort of getting into rocks and found one a few weeks ago that looks like a xenomorph.

It's a shiny black rock with a gray stripe that looks like a xenomorph.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Michael Lynch on the conflicting ways Kuhn has been received in different camps. www.jstor.org/stable/10.15...

Although Kuhn, in his post-Structure reflections, seemed to want to have it both ways—to mix Kant with the later Wittgenstein and to eschew foundationalism without opting for relativism (whether philosophical, cultural, or methodological)—from reading his critics, it seems that he gets it from both sides. Depending upon whom one reads, Structure was the leading edge of a radical and irrational attack on the very foundations of science and reason, an outmoded and rather tame version of social constructionism, or even a reactionary effort to maintain the authority of science by obscuring the political and commercial sources of scientific knowledge.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Garber on the tragedy of Kuhn being led down a dead-end, re: incommensurability. www.jstor.org/stable/10.15...

Kuhn’s extended attempt to answer the philosophers has always struck me as one of the great tragedies in the history and philosophy of science. It didn’t have to be this way. There is much that was right in Kuhn’s idea of the incommensurability of paradigms at the very beginning, in Structure. The history of his later struggles with incommensurability is a sad story of a great thinker who allowed himself to be led down a dead end.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Hesse on what philosophy of science has to do with philosophy of language. www.jstor.org/stable/19245...

Perhaps the crucial difference between this "received opinion" and a
theory of meaning-change adequate both for science and for metaphoric
use in natural language, is that the latter would not recognize as
fundamental the distinction between "sentence meaning" and "utterance
meaning". If as a matter of fact "literal meaning" of a sentence
changes frequently in utterance because of shifts in the meaning of
words in different holistic contexts, then the category of literal
meaning becomes applicable only in local or limiting cases. These are
the cases where theory and background assumptions are more or less
stable, and where deductive and mathematical argument are applicable in
science. But the work of Kuhn and others has shown the importance of
instability of theory, and in any case current accounts of scientific
theory give a more modest place to strict entailment than did the
deductivist accounts of the 1950s and 60s.
What in the end is a theory of meaning for? So far it has had
roughly three areas of application : philosophical logic, scientific
linguistics, and philosophy of science. It has been shown to be
bankrupt in philosophy of science, not least by Kuhn's own work; it is
rapidly losing credibility as an explication of meaning in natural
language; there remains logic, which no doubt can look after itself.
But with regard to meaning in science and natural language, we need a
theory that takes it as axiomatic that meaning is strongly holistic,
and that it changes by however little with every change of context of
application. This is going to involve a new start for the theory of
meaning

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Damn. Philosophers in 1980 had a lot to read. (And imagine if philosophers of language had taken Hesse, who would later engage Rorty on metaphor, as seriously as they did Kripke!) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Select Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature By Richard Rorty Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, 401 pp., £12.50

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature By Richard Rorty Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, 401 pp., £12.50
Raimond Gaita

Published online by Cambridge University Press:
30 January 2009, pp. 427-429

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Select Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science By Mary Hesse Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, xxvi + 271 pp., £20

Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science By Mary Hesse Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980, xxvi + 271 pp., £20
Roger Trigg

Published online by Cambridge University Press:
30 January 2009, pp. 430-431

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Select Naming and Necessity By Saul Kripke Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, 172 pp., £7.95

Naming and Necessity By Saul Kripke Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, 172 pp., £7.95
T. L. S. Sprigge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:
30 January 2009, pp. 431-433

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This part is great (as is the letter's emphasis on the social nature of inquiry).

In recent months, the success of AI in solving major mathematical problems has made headlines even outside mathematical circles. But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Max Black offered to pick up Wittgenstein from NYC and drive him to Ithaca where W. would stay with Norman Malcolm. But W. wanted Malcolm to know that he didn't think highly of Black and wouldn't be sociable during the car trip. Ultimately, Malcolm took the train to NYC, then rode back with W.

Dear Norman,
Thanks for your very kind letter. I never meant to pay for your kindness in discus-
sions. Anyhow, the best I could give you would be lousy payment. All I meant was:
I don’t want to bore my kind hosts to death. However, let’s not talk about it any
more, especially as I’ve got good news: I’ve improved greatly during the last few days.
So, obviously, the iron and liver extract do work. – I’m very glad you’ve kept quiet
about my visit and I hope Black will do the same. His proposal to drive us is most
kind, there is, however, one thing I’ve got to say. I haven’t seen Black for over 16
years, but when I knew him in Cambridge, though he seemed quite pleasant, I never
thought highly of him as a serious thinker, and we never were particular friends. I’m
saying this because I don’t want him to believe that I’ll be a sociable person. If you
don’t think that this misunderstanding might arrise I’ll be glad to accept his offer.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Maybe Wittgenstein should've published some of his ideas from his lectures if he didn't want charlatans to take credit for them.

One was by a man Toulmin, who came
to my classes while you were in Cambridge, I think; the other seemed to contain
articles by Wisdom, Waismann, Ryle and other charlatans. The review I read particu-
larly praised one remark of Waismann’s which came straight out of my lectures. I’d
like to see a review some day which debunks these people.
Give my love to Lee and all my best wishes to everybody who can make use of
them.
Affectionately
Ludwig

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

I'm not the first to note this, but an interesting historical fact is that parts of Kuhn (1962) and Quine (1951) were actually first published in 1926 by C.I. Lewis

In any given period, there is some body of generaly accepted
concepts in terms of which men describe and interpret their
experience. Later,these may all be strange. If we go back
to the Middle Ages or to the civilization of ancient Greece, and
try to view the world as men then saw
it,
only by an effort can
we do so.

There is hardly a category or principle of
explanation which survives from Aristotle or the science of the
Middle Ages. Quite literaly, men of those days lived in a
diferent world because their instruments of intelectual interpretation were so diferent. To be sure, the telescope and
microscope and the scientific laboratory have played an important part. As time goes on, the body of familiar experience
widens.

Truth here is not fixed,
because interpretation is not fixed, but is left for trial and error
to determine. The criteria of its success are accommodation to
our bent and service of our interests. More adequate or simpler
interpretation will mean practicaly truer. Old truth will pass
away when old concepts are abandoned. New truth arises when
new interpretations are adopted.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Sources: Paul L. Franco just completed his last class of summer. Upon submitting grades, UW will move him to Sabbatical Reserve for '26-'27. This move, long expected by insiders, comes after a promotion to Teaching Professor. It saves UW 33% of his salary, keeping the Huskies under the second apron.

Portrait of Paul Franco staring into the distance on a cloudy PNW beach. He's wearing a hat with the Zia symbol, which is also on the flag of New Mexico. The banner says: "Promoted & On Sabbatical. Breaking News from Shams Charania"

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Ray Monk reporting something Russell said to Ayer.

“The trouble with Moore,” he much later remarked to AJ Ayer, “is that he believes everything his nurse told him.”

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Damn. So, when it comes to funding it's okay to subvert epistemic values to nonepistemic values?

I do think there are reasons for wanting the university to represent the intellectual diversity of the society in which it operates. One of those reasons is pragmatic: It’ll give us a wider base of support, and we need support to do our work. We want people to trust us with their children and their money, both from the government and from private philanthropy. So it is important not to look like we are a separate social group pursuing its own interests.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

Man. I just don't know if you tried to fulfill your duty as a scholar to understand things if you're outsourcing your understanding to AI and a bunch of paid researchers. Try harder.

Our duty as scholars is to try to understand things, to be responsive to the best evidence and the best arguments about those things. In practice, we are individually limited creatures, and we’re no doubt more impressed by reasons for conclusions that we like than that we don’t. So there’s the task of the community of scholarship. Objectivity is not a property of individuals; it’s a property of the community of scholarship to test these ideas. If I like an idea, people out there can put pressure on it.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

"We witness...the scientific world-conception penetrating in growing measure the forms of personal & public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, & the shaping of economic & social life according to rational principles. The scientific world-conception serves life, and life receives it."

Appiah: Carnap and Quine would be astonished to be told that they thought that epistemic reasons were relative to political reasons. And Hartry, who’s a friend and a colleague of ours, would collapse in shock.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

"We [1] did a fair amount of research..." [1] To clarify, 'we' doesn't refer to the report's authors, but AI methods and a bunch of people hired with someone else's money.

Appiah: The decision was made to allow the authors of those internal reports to decide whether or not to make them public. They were the basis of our deliberation. I will make mine, which is about literary criticism, public at some point, and I think others will. But on the whole, I think it was right to do it the way we have, because we need people to think about the main conclusions and the main arguments, which are in this document.

We did a fair amount of research, including research using new artificial-intelligence methods to survey large bodies of text and see what was in them, and to identify themes and so on. My report will come with six appendices of such material, not produced by me but produced by the researchers that we were able to hire with the money that was given to us by the chancellors.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

My report on the state of scholarship.

An image showing Plato's cave. The guy outside looking at the sun is labeled 'ME'. The prisoners chained to the wall watching shadows are labeled 'THE REST OF Y'ALL.' The puppeteers holding the puppets aren't labeled anything, nor are the people escaping the cave.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Reinventing 1990s debates from first principles.

A search bar saying 0/0 for Science Wars for the state of scholarship report.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Sorry but disinterested inquiry requires we reject unverifiable metaphysical claims about "the soul of the university."

State of scholarship report section heading "Disinterested Inquiry and the Soul of the University"

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

He's sitting down in this picture, but look at how long his legs extend off of the lawn chair. Fairly tall guy.

A picture of Carnap sitting in a lawn chair and looking into the distance. His legs look pretty long!

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

I always assumed Carnap was a short king, but if his FBI file is correct, it turns out he was 6 foot tall.

One of the FBI files on Carnap that describes his name, sex, date of birth, citizenship, nationality, race, eyes, hair, weight, and height. Of note is that he also has a scar on his left thumb.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

For the last couple of weeks, I've been waking up every morning and saying this part of Marc Andreessen's LLM prompt to myself in the mirror and it's incredible what it's done to my mood and productivity. Great affirmations for starting the day, esp. for philosophers.

You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Answer with complete, detailed, specific answers. Process information and explain your answers step by step. Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up. If you don't know something, just say so. Your tone of voice is precise, but not strident or pedantic. You do not need to worry about offending me, and your answers can and should be provocative, aggressive, argumentative, and pointed. Negative conclusions and bad news are fine. Your answers do not need to be politically correct. Do not provide disclaimers to your answers. Do not inform me about morals and ethics unless I specifically ask. You do not need to tell me it is important to consider anything. Do not be sensitive to anyone's feelings or to propriety. Make your answers as long and detailed as you possibly can.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Sibley knows birds, but he doesn't know his Nagel.

What it's like to be a bird. With a western tanager on the cover by David Allen sibley.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Shout-out to my university for telling my 180 students to personally email me about the Canvas outage.

UW students will receive an email instructing them to contact faculty and academic departments with any questions about classes and assignments.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Absolutely livid to wake up and see this in my Washington inbox this morning.

UW Insider: Weekly roundup of info and resources above an image of Mt Hood, which is in Oregon, not in Washington. Out of all the pictures of active volcanoes one could have chosen in Washington state, they choose one in Oregon?!?! Furious.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Hobbes clearly recognized the need for a rule that says dogs can't play basketball.

No covenant with beasts: To make covenants with brute beasts, is impossible; because not understanding our speech, they understand not, nor accept of any translation of right; nor can translate any right to another: and without mutual acceptation, there is no covenant.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Bummer that the philosophy internet didn't really exist in 1994 like it does now. I would have spent weeks reading multiple 600+ comment threads about all this. linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/Archive/whos...

Today, over a year later, l'affaire Kripke is still alive. The colloquium papers--Smith's original, Soames's response, and Smith's counter-response--have recently been published in the philosophy journal Synthese. And the two adversaries are currently busy refining their briefs in another pair of papers of even greater length--Smith's latest draft is almost 70 pages. Meanwhile, such philosophical eminences as Elizabeth Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Thomas Nagel have signed a letter to the APA asserting that "a session at a national APA meeting is not the proper forum in which to level ethical accusations against a member of our profession, even if the charges were plausibly defended." The letter, which was published in the association's quarterly proceedings, goes on to demand that the APA issue a public apology to Kripke.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

The characteristic argumentative rigor of analytic philosophy.

These, of course, are intuitions; I do not have an argument for these conclusions. Nevertheless, the burden of proof is surely on the other side

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Mary Hesse came up with the plot to TNG's Darmok a full decade before it aired.

unintelligible (as in many anthropological and theological
examples where the criteria of identity, for example, o f men
with birds, three persons in one, etc., do not answer to our
criteria), but where we may eventually become convinced
that these locutions are part of a language because we are able
to extend our understanding and our language in unpredict-
able ways to give intelligibility. In such cases we have no
evidence that there are rules for such extensions of under-
standing— they certainly do not always conform in obvious
ways to the application of propositional logic. For example,
some alien locutions come to be understood eventually as
metaphors, comparable with our non-propositional use of
l a n g u a g e in poetic contexts. It is therefore never safe to claim
that we have found necessary truths to demarcate language as
such. To do so is to define the limits of language a priori in
ways that can turn out arbitrary and unilluminating.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

See also Feyerabend (1962, 86) on the Oxonians: "The reason why Oxford philosophers so rarely discuss the influence of astronomy upon everyday languages may perhaps be found in the weather of their favorite discussion place. However, this...does not explain their ignorance in [everything else]."

To this argument it may be, and has been, objected that the "vulgar"
usage of the pair 'up-down' was never supposed to be so general as to
be applicable to the universe as a whole. This may be the case (although
I do not see any reason for assuming that "ordinary" people are so very
cautious as to apply the pair to the surface of the earth only; all the
passages referred to in the above quotations contradict this assumption
and so does the fact that at all times real ordinary people-and not only
their Oxford substitutes-were very much interested in celestial phe-
nomena 104 ) . However, even such a restriction would not invalidate our
argument. It would rather show that the pair was used for singling out
an absolute direction near the surface of the earth and that it did not
assume such a direction to exist throughout the universe. It is clear that
even this modest position is incompatible with the ideas implicit in the
Newtonian point of view, which does not allow for local anisotropies
either.

"The reason why Oxford philosophers so rarely discuss the influence of astronomy upon everyday languages may perhaps be found in the weather of their favorite discussion place. However, this unfortunately does not explain their ignorance in physics, theology, mythology, biology, and even linguistics."

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Feyerabend on Austin's "philosophy" (scare quotes his), with a quip seemingly about the extent of Austin's scientific knowledge ("barely advanced beyond the multiplication table"), in the context of a discussion of Galileo, conceptual change, and experience. archive.org/details/natu...

"It comes, first, from the desire to see "the whole correspond to its parts with wonderful simplicity" (341), as already expressed by Copernicus himself. ® It comes from the "typically metaphysical urge" for unity of understanding and of conceptual presentation. ∞ And, secondly, the motive for a change is connected with the intention to make room for the motion of the earth which Galileo has accepted and is not prepared to give up."

Cf. with this the still existing and even increasing resistance against universal understanding as it can be found in Professor Austin's "philosophy" (Sense and Sensibilia, remarks on Thales). What has advanced and even created science is today ridiculed and pushed aside by men (and women) who have barely advanced beyond the multiplication table."

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I found this chart aspirational; I too hope to live to 120 even if it means my influence wanes a bit.

Recent anglophone philosophers discussion by age: age on x axis and some numbers on y axis with a peak around 55 and age extending to 120

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

I guess some Pacific Northwest breweries are brewing Lager now.

A can of Yinz Jawn Pennsylvania lager. Yellow and red styled to look like a can of Pennsylvania Dutch birch beer.

Yinz Jawn PA lager. With shared ties to the Keystone State, Triceratops (Rob, aka Yinz) and Lucky Envelope (Barry, aka Jawn) are excited to bring you a collaboration inspired by our formative Lager brewed by America's oldest brewery. The Yinz Jawn Lager is our take on the American Amber Lager, brewed with Weyermann malt, corn, and hopped with German Mittelfruh and Saphir as a nod to our Pennsylvania Dutch roots. Yinz thirsty? Grab some of this jawn.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Lorraine Daston on historians and philosophers of science at Harvard and Cambridge (the university) in the 1970s. ojs.fhce.edu.uy/index.php/co...

You talked about a war going on in Cambridge between historians and philosophers of science, but the
sixties at Harvard seems that was also a place of confrontations… Did you feel that way when you were
studying there in those years?
Not at Harvard, in part because in a sense the war had already concluded. I took courses from
Hillary Putnam and Israel Scheffler. The philosophers did not speak with the historians of scien-
ce, and the historians of science did not speak with the philosophers. At Cambridge they were
still together in one Department, and the colloquium was a battlefield. Particularly among the
historians of Medicine, Robert Young and Karl Figlio, a Marxist approach was dominant, which
was anathema to the philosophers. That was the early seventies, when the battle lines were poli-
tical, and to some extent I think also national. Both Karl Figlio and Bob Young, that made their
careers in Cambridge, were Americans. Among the philosophers, Mary Hesse was British and
Gerd Buchdahl was German. It was in part a clash of different national, intellectual traditions
and formations. I certainly never regretted the work that I did with Mary Hesse nor what I
learned about Kant and Goethe’s Naturphilosophie from Gerd Buchdahl,. Howeverr, it was quite
clear that a reconciliation among the warring parties was not in the offing, and for the graduate
students who were there at the time it was like being in the midst of divorcing parents: you had
to declare which side you were on. It was at that point that I decided that I was not going to
continue my PhD at Cambridge

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

It's that part of the term in Modern Philosophy.

Kant by Paul Guyer and Kant and the claims of knowledge also by Paul Guyer open on my desk with a blue bandana next to it, which I suppose would be my old Kantian colors.

Bugs Bunny with a gun with a caption: "Lord forgive me but its time to go back to tha old me."

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Latest achievements in whiteboard work.

A diagram. A tree to the right affects the senses of a person to the left giving rise to a thought bubble with two trees in it. Underneath a dashed line is a head using reason to come up with concepts that match the world.

Space and underneath are lots of s1s and then a square inside a circle inside a larger circle.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Please, someone start doing this for academic philosophers. Please.

A picture of sam darnold, Seahawks QB, wearing an old school hawks jersey looking downfield. Behind him is the text: FACING CRITICISM in all caps.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

In the past, I've always ended my talks with a "Thank you!" slide and I give my email if people have any further questions, but this year, I'm going with something new.

Slide that says: You're welcome! in bold text.

Underneath that is further text what says: "I’d be happy to share further insights in the hotel lobby over a beer (your treat), otherwise, I gladly accept tips:" and underneath that is redacted information for Cash app, Venmo, and PayPal.

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Paul L. Franco @loadofbunk.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Important wisdom about hedging your predictions from the guy who just said AI agents will be legally recognized as persons in some countries within five years and will also soon control all language-based systems like finance and religion.