Nat Hansen
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nathansen.bsky.social
Nat Hansen
@nathansen.bsky.social
1.7K followers 480 following 93 posts
Philosopher at the University of Reading (UK) working on new wave ordinary language philosophy, experimental semantics and pragmatics, and some aesthetics.
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nathansen.bsky.social
Really enjoyed this essay J.D.! Goodreads should hire you guys to make data viz for readers—it'd be appealing to have graphs like this on profile pages
Figure from the paper: Figure 9. Another self-identified eclectic reader, who “love[s] reading just about anything.” The chart represents the number of books she read in each of 10 time segments (2010-2021), with colors indicating their distribution across major genres. Figure from the paper: A self-identified eclectic reader, who “loves any kind of books.” The chart represents the actual number of books she read in each of ten time segments (2011-2021), with colors indicating their distribution across major genre clusters.
September 7, 2025 at 6:19 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
I could be wrong, but I think the finding is more about cultural variation in responses to Gödel-"style" cases than about Gödel himself, since the replication finds cultural differences also with the "super dog race" example from li et al (2018) designed to be useable with kid participants
Screenshot from the article: "First, with respect to the replication of the six earlier tests on proper names, significant cross-cultural differences were successfully replicated in the conditions using the original MMNS (2004) vignette and that of Li et al. (2018). Using the terminology common in experimental semantics, Chinese-speaking participants showed a tendency to endorse the descriptivist view, whereas British participants favored the causal-historical view." The super dog race example from Li et al. (2018): We constructed stories similar to the original Gödel case about topics that are more appropriate for young children. A simplified version of one critical story is given below: Super Dog Race Long ago, there was a race called the Super Dog Race. Max, Pickles and Blaze participated in the race. Max crossed the finish line first, winning the race, but he got too excited and ran all the way to the North Pole. Pickles crossed the finish line second. He stopped and watched Max run away. The race announcer mistakenly thought that Pickles won the race. He told every newspaper in the world that Pickles won. He also told them that another dog, Blaze, ran very fast despite his short legs. Since then, everyone learned that Pickles won the race. They don’t know anything else about Pickles. Tom and Emily learned at school that Pickles won the Super Dog Race. This is the only thing they know about the dog race and Pickles. They don’t know anything about Max. That night, their dad asked: Do you know who won the Super Dog Race? Tom replied: Blaze was the dog that won the Super Dog Race. Emily said: Pickles was the dog that won the Super Dog Race.
August 2, 2025 at 7:34 AM
nathansen.bsky.social
"Speech" is defeating "text" (bweatherson.shinyapps.io/t20-graphs/)
"speech" is increasing in frequency over time "text" is decreasing in frequency over time
May 15, 2025 at 7:34 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
More details of the damage from the attack, plus a picture of the fellows that year (1969–70), including Amelie Rorty and Donald Davidson: casbs.stanford.edu/news/50-year...
April 12, 2025 at 8:00 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
In Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto, there’s an anecdote about the only manuscript copy of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice almost being destroyed in an arson attack on CASBS at Stanford!
April 12, 2025 at 7:56 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Very cool—I'll have to look into this because it relates to something I'm working on about "apt" uses of language and ordinary language philosophy. Here's a relevant passage from W.H. Auden's inaugural lecture at Oxford (overlapping with the heyday of OLP)
March 1, 2025 at 1:02 AM
nathansen.bsky.social
I know philosophy citation rates are low, but wow
This is a screenshot that says: "This publication in The Philosophical Quarterly has been cited 3 times. Compared to other publications in the same field, this publication is extremely highly cited and has received approximately 10 times more citations than average."
January 28, 2025 at 5:37 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Another cool DH project on recent history of analytic philosophy by @bweatherson.bsky.social:

brian.weatherson.org/quarto/posts...

In response to his "experiment": the year with the most papers a lot of people were reading in grad school is actually a couple years after I finished—maybe 2012:
Here’s a possible experiment you can do if you have old philosophers (like my age) around you. Take the list of the top ten recent articles from one of the years they were in graduate school, and see how many of the articles they (had to) read while they were a graduate student. list of most read recent papers from 2012
January 24, 2025 at 7:43 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Inland Empire at Chicago's Music Box theater, back in the grad school days (2007)
Marquee for David Lynch's Inland Empire at Chicago's Music Box theater
January 17, 2025 at 4:52 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Don't open this book up unless you want to see some uncanny, nightmarish AI-generated images!

I’ve been digging Paglen’s work since I got his Alien Technology Exploitation Division” mug as Issue 8 of Thing Quarterly in 2009 and his book of patches for top secret military programs it’s based on
Trevor paglen book titled adversarial evolved hallucinations Trevor paglen mug from the thing quarterly with an alien on it, titled alien technology exploitation division and some text in Klingon Trevor paglen book of secret military patches titled I could tell you but then you would have to be destroyed by me
January 1, 2025 at 6:54 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Holiday family LLM discussion while watching DESK SET (1957) with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; a reference department of knowledgeable women is almost made redundant by a computer they feed texts to until it goes haywire
December 27, 2024 at 5:05 AM
nathansen.bsky.social
Perfecto Xmas reading this year: T.J. Clark's book on Bruegel's _Land of Cockaigne_, about a myth of absurd plenty and sloth, where dudes full of food lie on the ground, fences are made of sausage, tarts cover lean-tos, pastries fall on the ground, and a soft-boiled egg with legs runs around.
December 25, 2024 at 10:42 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Some great philosophizing at the Umeå winter workshop, plus I learned of the existence of iridescent clouds and A-traktors and that the logo of the Swedish Västerbotten regiment is a dude in birch leaf underwear holding a club

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_i...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4...
Iridescent clouds in Umeå Sweden Swedish A-traktor made of two Volvo halves welded together Cartoon of Strong Swedish dude with club and birch leaf underwear
December 15, 2024 at 7:44 PM
nathansen.bsky.social

In our session Nick will be responding to this paper by me-n-Zed:
academic.oup.com/mind/article...
...which was partly a criticism of Nick's paper:
journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article...

...and partly a working out of Stanley Cavell's claims about aesthetic judgment.
Cover image of the journal Mind, containing the paper "The Hope of Agreement" by Hansen and Adams Cover page for Nick Riggle's paper "Convergence, Community, and Force in Aesthetic Discourse" in the journal Ergo
December 9, 2024 at 5:34 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
My former colleague Emma Borg has a new book out, defending "common sense" belief desire psychology against recent challenges (including claims of systematic irrationality and accounts of "behavior reading"). I read an early version and it's fantastic—
academic.oup.com/book/58959
December 3, 2024 at 2:53 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
We've been digging the Day of the Jackal TV show, but as an academic it was too hard to watch when, after Bianca gets a knife injury trying to apprehend a suspect and her academic husband is upset about it and he threatens not to go to his conference in Glasgow, she says this:
Bianca from the Day of the Jackal tells her husband he should go to his conference because "I know how hard you've worked on this paper"
December 1, 2024 at 9:11 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
How Oxford solved the trolley problem.

Anyone ever seen one of these things??
(from Morton White's _A Philosopher's Story_)
A small table top trolley holding a bottle of wine Text from Morton White's autobiography: "Ryle sat to one side of the fireplace (right); the old man sat at the left. Then there was a large table on which the wine and fruit sat. Mr. Wood and the Vice-President flanked this, and I sat between Wood and Ryle. You will notice that I have included a fascinating thing I'd call a trolley but I don't know what they call it. It was a little inclined plane with two tracks on it. In the tracks there are two little wagons, deep enough to hold a bottle of wine. When the old man was finished serving himself Port he put it into the wagon at the top of the plane, the force of gravity went into operation, and "Zip" it went to Ryle. There was much delight over this and before it was put into operation Ryle cutely said "I hope you've never seen one of these things before!" Now when one wagon went down the plane to Ryle, another empty wagon rode up the plane, since the two wagons are connected by a chain! (When wagon 1 goes down bringing Wine to Ryle, wagon 2 goes back empty to the old boy, so no one ever has to get up in the whole process of passing wine several times around!!!!)"
November 26, 2024 at 1:43 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Anyway, now that I'm mid-career, I can do that mid-career thing and work on aesthetics. Here's a cool upcoming workshop in snowy Sweden:

philevents.org/event/show/1...
November 20, 2024 at 2:54 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
hahaha, fair enough—there's also this chart that in its English version pops up frequently online:

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2021...
March 5, 2024 at 9:47 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
I watched a movie about the destruction of Earth’s environment in a $2 billion dome in Las Vegas

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_...
A view inside the sphere in Las Vegas An exterior view of the sphere in Las Vegas
October 24, 2023 at 6:19 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
I really like that paper of yours! Here's a short discussion of it in a book I'm working on:
October 4, 2023 at 8:04 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
This job is highly relevant to me
September 28, 2023 at 2:43 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Even with Freire's dialogic, love-focused pedagogy, he can't stop himself from criticizing the "incorrect pronunciation" and the "grammatical corruptions" of the people! (p.84 n. 24) Linguistic ideology runs deep!

(My dad just found a typo in a preprint of a paper I just put up on philpapers)
September 26, 2023 at 3:31 PM
nathansen.bsky.social
Doing research on autonomous vehicles
September 25, 2023 at 10:32 PM