the bottom rung is forced by the environment, not chosen by the theory. Never do we get to pick the ontology to taste; that's always given to us by the environment and what lives most naturally in it.
So, here's an open question: to what extent is "naturality" a two-place word? Different agents can have different simplicity heuristics (formalized as priors in VNM, trader ordering in LIA, etc.), which lead to different answers to the question "what is the most natural way to represent the world around me?" For instance, if human perception happens via a fourier transform, that might induce a """prior""" under which "we live in a wave world in which the waves just so happen to form clumps a lot of the time" gets higher """credence""" than "we live in a clump-world" (triple scare quotes around those words because these are ontological statements, so applying Bayesian concepts to them might be a li'l bit of a type error).
If all agents on Earth end up with a simplicity-measure like this, we're still not in terribly hot water. There is still a ~universally interoperable semantic ladder; you're just kinda wrong about the order of the rungs, but the core concept is rescuable. However, things could be even worse. Different agents could have very different simplicity-measures, or we could live in a world that's "ontologically chaotic" in the sense that slight differences in simplicity-measures lead to giant differences in the semantic ladders produced. In either case, there isn't much hope for interoperable semantics, or, rather, the interoperable semantics that do exist are not ladder shaped.
(this comment was optimized more for getting-out-at-all than anything else. I intend to write a much more comprehensive review of this post at some point)
1Disclaimer: I skimmed the post and skipped parts. If something I say is wrong and was already addressed in the OP, feel free to quote the OP (if a quote is too long you can hide it in a collapsible section). Sorry for being very critical without giving it a deep read. Also feel free to write me in DMs or on Discord.
When is a taxonomy of concepts not useless? I can think of 5 scenarios.
1) When you can prove that different agents converge on the same concepts. You don't do that.
2) When you can define a metric of interpretability/understandability of a concept, which you could theoretically use to write an algorithm that translates programs into the most interpretable representations. You don't do that.
3) When you can use your taxonomy to analyze specific words. I.e. make novel, specific, falsifiable statements about specific words. For example, what specific facts about the world would make the word "blue" more/less useful?
I believe most taxonomies, including yours and NAH, can't yet analyze anything other than nouns in this way.
4) When you can prove that your taxonomy is the only possible one or that any other taxonomy will be equivalent to it (in some particularly important way). You don't do that.
5) When your taxonomy unifies other proposals. But it has to do that in some important, insightful way.
I don't buy that your idea unifies the approaches you listed. The connections are vague / not insightful / not novel.
So after skimming the post, I don't understand why your taxonomy is useful.
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(Epistemic status: A promising but weird research direction in agent foundations and philosophy of language. A half-built conceptual tower whose mortar and paint are both still wet: please excuse our mess while we innovate. Some of it, I'm confident in as pretty much right; some of it is merely suggestive; probably much of it is wrong or incomplete. Certainly it lacks the math it'd need to be truly correct, which gnaws at me. The prior art here is strange and thin: Gärdenfors, Tarski, Gentner, and the later Mohists make for odd bedfellows, and I can't tell whether that's a warning sign or a moat I can peculiarly easily clear. I gave the simplest parts of this as a talk extremely recently in Berkeley at a luminously-named venue for a conference with a Grecian name. For @johnswentworth, but also @abramdemski, @Morphism, @Gretta Duleba, JRM, @Dalcy, MM, and EA; I hope they enjoyed the oranges. With thanks to @WhatsTrueKittycat as well. As an attention conservation note... this is maybe 12k words, and that's the abbreviated version. Take it slow, take breaks, have some water on hand, and feel free to pause anywhere that looks like a natural break. I'm sure this won't vanish before you get back. Probably.)
TL;DR:
The board from the talk!
Intro
Have you ever seen a pop culture corporation argue itself into a laughably self-defeating position, twisting ontology and linguistic philosophy around, undermining the very framework they painstakingly set up in their stories, just to make a few bucks? You're about to. Picture this: it's 2003, in the United States Court of International Trade, and the court has just now been asked to rule on whether the X-Men are human. According to US law, "dolls" are figures representing humans, and "toys" are anything else; under the tariff schedule of the day, it's the former that gets taxed at a higher rate. If you're Marvel, what do you do? Obviously, you send lawyers to argue the X-Men aren't humans and never were! Never mind that you've cut the legs out from under the entire frame your superhero stories live and breathe: you've made a quick buck, dodged import taxes, and ignored narrative in favor of legislative victory, and that's the real win. When unstoppable real money met an immovable class of noun, the noun class moved.
Now swap the tariff schedule out for a reward function and read that paragraph again. Specification gaming is the exact same maneuver run by a different litigant in a different court to similar ends: hostile category re-drawing, adversarial downward-binding, with categories relitigated from above by whatever's got stakes and leverage. (Hold on to that idea; we'll ground it better in the next post.)
One more piece of scene-setting, because we love our historical witnesses to our hot fresh epistemological constructions, here: some 2,300 years ago, the School of Names was one of the foremost philosophical traditions in China. We know this because any of their works survived at all. The Disputers, as they were sometimes known, spent entire careers on the paradox of whether a white horse is a horse; they were mocked for it by every other respectable school of the Warring States period from the Confucians to the Daoists, and then Qin Shihuang (probably) burned their scrolls. Here's the thing: I think that they were on to something - mockery, fire, white horses, and all. Blog posts are a little harder to burn than scrolls, and in the modern day I can appoint a great many more Disputers. (Gentle reader: your job is to break what follows and hand me the repair. Dispute like - and with - the best of them.) As for what follows? What binds; in what order; how it is shared; what deforms it; and given that this is a research direction and not a victory lap, what theorems are missing. (What shame, what agony, for JSW to point out that it is now me who lacks sufficient math in their work.)
What do I want this frame for?
To take a leaf out of my own book (see "32. What Do You Want That Definition For, Anyway?"), time to tell you what I even want this conceptual structure for. Take two idealized reasoners - probably Bayesian ones - with similar predictions about the world but potentially different models of that same shared world; they trade messages, seeking to communicate. (This is the "interoperable" in "interoperable semantics".) The tokens that make up their messages may be categorized as a ladder's worth of types, which I'll call "binding-types" or "semantic types". Each such rung - each such type - is characterized by what types the two reasoners must already jointly understand in order to translate between them. Rung
The lower half: the noun and verb rungs; modifiers and smearing
Alright, enough alluding to the semantic ladder without defining it. What's going on with it? What we have is a hierarchically arranged set of conceptual spaces - a semantic ladder. Those spaces have assorted points within them, each of which represents an object or element from that space; they also have axes of variability. Here, we're operating among an existing family of frames: Gärdenfors's conceptual spaces, Wentworth's interoperable semantics, "words pointing to clusters in thing-space". (Nouns, actually, for that last.)
We look around, and the universe we see has lots of assorted stuff in it, and they're doing lots of actions, and the stuff has all sorts of qualities, and the actions are done all kinds of ways. Within all of this fertile chaotic primordial ooze, we declare: "Let there be nouns!". And there are nouns, given to us in some more or less natural way by clusters of qualities in the conceptual space of thing-space. So far, so anodyne, if you know what words are and how ontology works. The thing is, I take this significantly further. Here's the quick version of the one standing claim we'll carry up the ladder, stated one final time in full at the summit: each rung's machinery will turn out to presuppose the machinery of the rungs below. I stick to clear next steps implied by the LessWrongian frame: if we have a cluster in thing-space, we can move around inside of the region that some noun-shaped concept marks out - "rock", say - and subdivide any given such cluster hierarchically by properties that points within the subcluster share with each other, but don't share with other elements outside the subcluster. These internal coordinates give us useful subclassifications of the noun; ways in which we can locate a point more precisely within a cluster in thing-space, avoiding leaving that cluster. We can then figure out whether a given internal coordinate shows up decently often across noun-clusters; if it does, then we might tentatively abstract an adjective corresponding to that direction: "hard", say, or "blue", or "tasty". For every type, we can construct a typed hole: so it is here, where we get pronouns, pointers, and question words like "it", "that", and "which": words that ask to be replaced with the right sort of word. And that's where the story ends: adjectives are where we run out of road.
A schematic of thing-space, its clusters, and a shared axis of variation.
...is what I would have to say if I hadn't thought about this more - this is the part where I add to prior art. We've implicitly seen two operations already: "cluster", where we take in some raw point-cloud sort of distribution and return a set of conceptual buckets that comprise a type, and "specify", where we then look at internal variability shared across a few conceptual buckets and return a modifier corresponding to that shared direction. Now I can start adding a few more. The very first one, I call "predicativize": take an interior coordinate, a modifier, and mint a new 1-ary predicate from it. "Hard", the direction, becomes "is-hard", the predicate, the claim. Tied to this move, equally facile-looking, is "saturate" in Frege's sense: take something that has a place where one or more arguments are supposed to go and fill them. These may seem like trifling moves, but they buy us deceptively much: it's right here that we can first construct a full sentence, and so it's here that we can first be wrong, can be mistaken, can lie. We should take a moment here to note that in Korean, verbs and adjectives are not so cleanly separable as they are in English: you can tense-inflect adjectives fluently to talk about something that will be blue or used to be tasty just as easily as you can talk in English about the darkening of the sky in the evening. In Lojban, brivla blur the distinction between verbs, adjectives, and even nouns; it may be a constructed language, but it's one that people can speak naturally and have found useful. This may look like a problem for my frame. It is quite the opposite. Surface grammar - whichever language you use as lens and interface - doesn't quite bind structure: Korean and Lojban scramble the surface categories just a little, and the bindings stay put. Better yet, the theory says something sharper than "ignore surface grammar completely", and I want credit for the precise sharpness: the boundaries, the bridges, should show smear. Wherever the ladder posits a bridge, cross-linguistic typology should show an unstable surface category straddling it - a class of words a bit too complex to be the lower thing, but stretched a bit too far to be the next thing up. Korean's descriptive verbs and Lojban's brivla are the first such smear, sitting squarely on the first bridge. Keep count as we climb.
Next up for operators, "arity-climb": we already have unary predicates; we may as well do a little cheeky uncurrying: first, point to the abstractable modifier of (e.g.) "inside-the-box" as shared between assorted kinds of nouns for small concrete objects; then, unfold that deeply awkward modifier into a preposition of place, or a simple transitive verb of relation: "inside", "from", "with", "above"; "loves", "wants", "has"; all sorts of binary and general n-ary relations. For the moment we're still in a static frame, if we squint a little and treat relational verbs that most naturally play out over a period of time as existing in a single timeless moment.
Of course, the very next thing that we do is resolve this tension and "temporalize". (Though I'll cheerfully defend this admittedly arbitrary choice of how to linearize what's really best described as a partial order: binary configurations are strictly poorer semantically than time-indexed trajectories, and I want for this ladder to run from poor to rich, simple to complex.) Once time enters the picture - clock time, subjective time, even logical time - configuration-space enriches into path-space. This is the part where we get all the rest of the verbs: verbs of motion and location-change, possession-transfer (itself a small fan of relations - ownership, custody, control, and use, among others - each strand transferrable separately), and general transformation, along with path-prepositions like "along", "towards", and "from". The second smear arrives, right on schedule: place-prepositions against path-prepositions, along with Talmy's verb-framed/satellite-framed typology, in which the path component migrates between the verb and its satellite depending on the language. Jackendoff had the decomposition decades ago, though: PATH functions eat PLACE arguments, and TO(IN(house)) = "into the house."
No need for new operators for the moment, either: just as nouns gave us adjectives, verbs and prepositions (especially in light of temporalization) give us adverbs as interior coordinates of configuration-space and path-space; this is where we also get tense (when it happened), aspect (when it started and stopped happening), mood (whether it happened), and evidentiality (how you know it happened). "Quickly" is to a trajectory in path-space as "hard" is to an object in thing-space, and that's not a cute coincidence, but rather glorious parsimony.
Rest stop 1: "The blue cup is on the table; I pick it up..."
Halfway up the ladder now. Let's pause to catch our breaths, not least so that I can make good on a promise from before. "The blue cup is on the table; I pick it up." "Cup" and "table": both clusters in thing-space - nouns, and pleasingly unremarkable ones. "Blue": an interior coordinate of the cup-cluster among others, doing honest adjectival work. "The": a bit of a curveball, but articles are a kind of adjective, and one which has a side-tale to tell about how you build up anaphora, deixis, and indexicality. "I" and "it": more anaphora and indexicality; as implied before, something adjacent to the main ladder, implied by it but not quite part of it. "Is on": an arity-two predicate over configurations - statics, before anything moves. "Pick (it) up": a trajectory through those configurations, and a transfer along the control-branch of the possession fan - verb-work twice over. Eight linguistic tokens' worth of everyday kitchen life, with every rung this side of rules exercised. That's not a proof of the ladder, though, just that ladder passing the first half of the clearest possible entrance exam, which is the least I owe you. We'll have a look at the second half of that same exam at the top of the ladder.
"The blue cup is on the table; I pick it up."
The upper half: the rule and pact rungs; conventions and pact-simplices
The next part is a little strange but justified. Just as we predicativized adjectives into simple stative verbs, thus do we also notice that "never" and "always" are such curious adverbs, and "should" is such a strange modal verb. Looking at whole sets of trajectories, especially those marked with "never"s and "should"s, what makes the most sense to call the resultingly filtered sets? I think the answer is rules. A new operator, then: "constrain". Just as the nouns could have been anything arbitrarily strange or stupid, depending on the things, and the verbs could have been anything arbitrarily strange or stupid, depending on the actions, so too the rules: "kept" versus "violated" is nothing more mysterious here than set membership; a given trajectory or relation either is or isn't in the permitted set. There's no need to posit enforcement here: this is just about convergent concepts and the syntactic and semantic substructure that makes them possible. You may find it tempting to stretch predicativization to fit this case as well, given that once again we have a universe of objects (nouns with properties before; saturated verbs now) which either are or are not in some choice of set (or perhaps end up best described by the classifier object of some topos, but that's out of scope). That's a good instinct, and it tripped me up initially as well; the problem is that of normativity. A noun, in and of itself, is timeless: it does or doesn't have properties, and that's that. A saturated verb, on the other hand, is an event, or perhaps a relation as holds, and it can be interrupted or repeat or be allowed only the first time or be enacted differently, and that means that a simple additional predicativization won't cut it; some events can be permitted while others are not, which is something that simple property-checks can't account for. That, for the record, is the first rung-detector: when observing and manipulating elements from the rungs below builds you everything except the thing you want itself, that thing merits a new rung. Verbs come not from observing nouns but from watching how things differ and change; rules, not from checking events one at a time but from filtering whole sets of trajectories. That prompts us to sketch out the interoperable semantics of normativity.
This calls for another operator: "deontic-lift". From "is-P" to "let-all-be-P", from description to prescription. As Hume and his guillotine would have us know, no matter how high you stack your descriptions of what is, you will never build an "ought". And just as we spotted smears from adjectives through predicates to verbs, so too does our prediction hold up here: generics and the gnomic mood - the bit of grammar you use to express proverbs and other such timeless, abstract, impersonal truths - are what let us move smoothly from adverbs up to rules. "Dogs bark." "Popes are Catholic." "Lemons are yellow." Grammatically, these are all descriptions, or at least they look like it in languages that don't mark the gnomic as explicitly - but every parent, teacher, drill sergeant, and judge knows exactly which one they're uttering. A gnomic, we could say, is revealed as the mood of bids; a generic, a move in a boundary-(re)drawing war dressed up as a field observation. Both engage in politics at cluster borders while claiming to do simple fieldwork. Leslie (2008) got to generics first, and the normativity literature (like Haslanger) might remark further that the boundary-policing aspect of normativity was baked in from the start; the whole school of study would surely call my forging the links among generics, gnomics, and normativity - and then applying it here, to interoperable semantics - overdue but welcome.
But a deontic lift requires a lifter; defining the set costs very little, so that can't be where its force lives - that comes with whoever or whatever has the standing, the stakes, and the steel to hold the constraint as written against its potential violators. That in turn means that the dynamics that we'll see in more depth at the pact-rung have already started reaching down a rung early, and more pertinently, that those abstract "pure rules", adopted by nobody, exist in the space of rules in the same way that unclaimed land exists on maps. "Shouldness", we then note, enters the ladder precisely where agents are first called for: they've been in the background the whole time as the ones doing the speaking and the hearing, the uttering and interpreting, but now they take center stage. When we prop this entire ladder up to climb towards learning and loading values, we must take this fact as crucial, and not as an embarrassment.
The modifier rail - the run of modifiers climbing alongside the entities, rung by rung - keeps pace, with rule-cluster-coordinates like "strictly," "usually," and "by default". While we're at it, we should take a moment to notice the Zipf-flavored tell we've touched on throughout: the highest-frequency binding machinery gets consistently compressed into short words, and then as time goes by, into affixes and grammar itself. Tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, inflection, case: wherever a language has ground a mechanism down to syntax, suspect a load-bearing rung underneath. This is yet another rung-detector; when objections arrive, we'll pull it out and wave it around until it beeps at the hidden rungs - though much like stud-detectors, when it beeps at some words, the rung often won't be found all that near to those words, but rather near whatever those short sharp words make possible.
Enough about pure rules. How do we get from there to pacts? If you've been paying attention so far, you'll be able to guess that the answer is "it's complicated, a little messy, and certainly not in a single step". The shape that takes here is conventions: unspoken rules, broken symmetries, doxa, and all other such quiet structure. To get a convention from a rule, there must be expectation and precedent, but no need for explicit adoption to be found. "Which side of a trail you pass a stranger on" is a central example, and likewise whether it's best manners to add milk to tea or tea to milk. No one signed anything; and all the same, everyone knows, and it mostly holds. Importantly, this is not a rung, but rather the telltale smear once again, the not-quite-this-not-quite-that which we've already seen three times now. In this case, it's Lewis (1969) and his whole apparatus of conventions and agreements, and the common knowledge and coordination about equilibria that underpin them. Here, that apparatus operates directly on rule-space, with no pact anywhere to be found: dynamics, and no statics. And this last smear is the messiest of them all: the vocabulary here - "custom," "norm," "tradition," "usage" - is the most category-unstable in the entire stack, exactly as a smear should be. Keep this last plateau's poverty in mind; it makes the next rung's wealth visible.
And that next rung is the very last one: the rung of pacts. Let me operationalize better what I mean by a "pact". Let
One conjecture before I move on: adoption needs parties, plural - but even a hermit's Tuesday-self and Friday-self already make two, so the woods suffice for a commitment, if that hermit can trust their future self to live up to the bargain they strike today. What the woods cannot supply is a second skull: pact-force binding someone whose expectations you don't author. That is the
And pact-space has structure worth the name. Call a subset
A schematic of pact-space, including its simplicial structure.
Hopefully this answers an important question before anyone has the chance to ask it - that of why pacts should deserve a rung of their own, rather than slotting in as the most complex elaboration of a rule. The machinery inventory is what's distinguishing here; that, and the fact that we had one last smeared border on the way up. In order to build a pact, we need: the power-set move over
The top of the ladder: the conjecture and some associated bounties
There's one more operator to talk about, pictured at top as a thin arrow running the wrong way, all the way down the whole left margin of the board, and we'll get to it. Before the thin arrow takes us all the way back down, let's take a moment at the summit of the ladder to bask a little, not least so that I can state my central claim outright, rather than letting the ordering imply it. The conjecture - machinery dependency - is this: each rung's binding machinery presupposes the machinery of the rungs below; no predicates without clusters to predicate over, no relations without predicates to extend, no rules without trajectories to constrain, no pacts without rules to adopt. This is a claim about construction, not about influence: what a rung's instances turn out to be can be pushed around from anywhere on the ladder, top included - which is a story for the next post - but what it takes to build a rung at all is strictly ordered. Stated this baldly, it's falsifiable in the ordinary way, so here are the standing bounties on my own program's head: if you can exhibit a system - a natural language, an emergent code, a child's acquisition sequence - running some rung's machinery without the machinery that the conjecture says it presupposes, then the tower falls. Show me a proposed bridge between rungs that fails to smear across surface categories anywhere in the typological record. Show me evidential-style marking that productively attaches below the sentence bridge, where there is nothing yet to be wrong about. Theories that forbid nothing risk nothing and so deserve nothing. This ladder forbids all three of the above and risks its neck in the process, which is right and proper.
Now for that last operator to talk about, the thin arrow uniquely reaching downwards: "reify", written "⌜·⌝" after Quine and his corner-quotes. (Not the ceiling function. I will be taking no further questions from the floor-function lobby, either.) Reification takes an object from any rung and mints a noun from it: quotation, nominalization, "the rule that X", "the pact whereby Y". This is where meta-levels come from, free of charge. Note the asymmetry: anything on the ladder quotes down into a noun, but not every noun can be done - Korean will let you 공부하다, study-do, but not 돌하다, stone-do, short of first coercing some process out of the stone. File away as well the fact that that reification is also the operator that manufactures exactly those deterministic-function variables that some of the formal programs we'll introduce later - latents and factored space models, in particular - are uniquely comfortable hosting.
Four bridges, four smears, all found: adjectives into verbs; place into path; description into rule; convention into pact. The contrapositive is the most useful part: a proposed bridge with no typological smear is evidence against the bridge. I've made a habit of claims shaped like that; I commend the shape to you generally. That just leaves the second half of the exam I mentioned at the start and half-finished when we were halfway up.
Rest stop 2: "...Then I put it in the dishwasher, since cups usually go there and not in the sink."
"[The blue cup is on the table; I pick it up.] Then I put it in the dishwasher, since cups usually go there and not in the sink." This half is a little more linguistically nebulous, and will take some more explanation and context-manufacturing, but we can do it anyway. "It" and "there": the same sort of anaphora we've already seen; for them, read "the cup" and "in(side) the dishwasher". "Cups go in the dishwasher" and "cups don't go in the sink": a nice clean two-part rule; a constraint over cup-trajectories, which can be clearly kept or violated. Nothing more mysterious than membership as given entirely by where the cup ends up. The unmarked generics doing the prescribing are everyday gnomics - politics and bargaining at the sink's boundary, dressed up as a fact about cups and where they can be found. The force behind that prescription arrives with whoever runs the kitchen; a frown from my housemate suffices to point out a violation. "Usually": the rule's modifier rail, no weirder here than the fact that the cup has a color. "Then": a little bit of explicit time-marking; again, something that we've already seen. "Then I put [the cup] in the dishwasher", then, becomes more than just an independent clause - it becomes an action in accord with the rule. And the whole arrangement holds because the household adopted it jointly - mostly without anyone signing anything, which is to say: a convention hardening toward a small domestic pact. Rules, rule-modifiers, the lift, the lifter, and the pact: the top half of the ladder, illuminated by the careful contemplation of one dirty cup.
"... Then I put it in the dishwasher, since cups usually go there and not in the sink."
Level
Space
Entities
Modifiers
Pro-forms (typed holes)
Reached by
0
thing-space
nouns (rock, fox, star)
adjectives (hard, tasty, blue)
it, this, who/which; such, so
literally just looking around and thinking
1
configuration-space
place-prepositions (within, on, around); static relations (genitives, binary relations, ...); some corresponding stative verbs (lives (in many senses), sees, likes)
adverbs (quickly, fully)
here, there, where; completely, almost; "the X-er"/"the X-ed"
predicativize and saturate, then arity-climb
1′
path-space (time enters)
verbs of motion, possession, and transformation; path-prepositions
more adverbs, TAME (tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality)
do so/it/the same; thus, so, how; thither, whence (largely obsolete in English!)
temporalize (remember, persist, predict)
2
sets-of-trajectories
rules
rule-exception modifiers (strictly, usually, by default)
ditto, likewise, as above, mutatis mutandis (register-bound); "unwritten rules"?
constrain path-coordinates, then the deontic lift
3
pact-space
pacts (commitments at n = 1)
pact-modifiers (with-carveouts, unilateral, revisable)
"the usual," same terms as last time, so moved / seconded, amen (ceremony-bound)
What's the pattern here? Why are some entities, so strangely precisely carved out, treated as first-class, and not others? What we have is a core ladder and its dependently resonating offshoot. Within each space I identify, there are things; the type is clearly inhabited. Those things can then be clustered into first-class entities: regions of density, things to point at. These form the primary ladder: nouns, something like "most verbs and also some other stative and relational words", "rules", and "pacts/commitments/agreements", as we ascend. Looking more closely at the clusters, we always find it useful to describe elements within a cluster in terms of something like local coordinates within its cluster - where those local coordinates need not be the same as those on the larger space, and might even be given in terms of other clusters (sky-blue, lightning-quick, state-legibly). Some concise operator then lets us abstract similarly used modifiers from across clusters to move to the next space up the ladder - enriching the space, minting predicates at bridges, and the like. It's worth putting some effort in to keep these two rails separate; surface-grammar in whatever your native language is often comes from eliding the operator.
Admittedly, the canonical object here is a partial order, and a decidedly provisional one, although surely rules must come after rocks. PR made the point that from the right frame, it's verbs, not nouns, that should lie at the very bottom; we will address her commentary in good time. The levels here hold types of entity solidly, and modifiers on those entities live mostly on the level of the entity they like to modify but put a foot on the next rung up; this is no accident nor messiness but exactly how we find the bridges we need.
A theory that accepts everything predicts nothing: what doesn't get a rung
Now for a bit of cleanup, for a theory is incomplete if it only points at and justifies what should be or is, and never says a word about what isn't and shouldn't be. When I first revisited this frame after a year or two away, I had the thought of a full second tower, and of a lot more rungs. In particular, the products of the "saturate" operation - assertions, full utterances, claims that can be mistaken or wrong or lies - initially looked like they deserved their own rungs, with pro-forms supplying the rest of the justification for a second ladder. By pro-forms, I mean anything that leaves a typed hole which something else with the appropriate type must either point to or directly fill - pronouns like "what" and "we", pro-adjectives like "this" and "such", pro-verbs like "do so", pro-adverbs like "thus" (and also "such"!), and whole pro-utterances like "yes", "no", "what she said", and "^ this" - the last of which languages like Lojban and Mandarin Chinese do stunning justice to. It was symmetric, elegant-feeling, and unearned - which, for a young theory, is just a gentler way of saying it was wrong. So instead, the axe that chopped down that second ladder, stated for reuse: "new ontology only where decomposition provably fails". The pact rung is the exemplar: it earned its rung by machinery inventory, and by arguing that no lower-rung construction could yield adoption. Everything else must pay the same toll or be folded into something existing as appropriate. Let's have a look at a few such candidates doing so, each in its turn.
First, assertions. The content of a claim is already a noun; that was the "⌜·⌝" operator's job description the whole time. That arrow makes nouns out of anything from any rung, entire sentences very much included. The asserting is an act: a move made by an agent, which lives where acts live, and it's thus answerable to the norms living on the smear between rules and pacts. Use and mention being different all along is frankly table stakes, one an act and one a noun; surface words like "utterance" or "sentence" straddle them - and as before, that blurriness is itself a prediction cashing out, not an embarrassment. The famous, literature-consuming tangle of "proposition" versus "sentence" versus "statement" versus "utterance" versus "speech act" versus "claim" is exactly the smear the bridge-smearing rule forecasts over a straddled distinction; it is philosophy's past century and change of disentanglement, reread as typological instability as observed in the wild.
Truth itself never needed rehousing: it entered at the ground-floor bridge, purchased with the ability to be wrong, and it's been sitting pretty there the whole time. And Tarski's seat at my thin-prior-art table now costs one sentence: "⌜snow is white⌝" is true iff snow is, in fact, white. Disquotation is the claim that ⌜·⌝ runs faithfully. No further apparatus here, and thus no need for its own rung - though speech acts and their hyperstitional (as in: claims that make themselves be true(/false)) nature, slippery to static truth values, deserve further treatment.
The pro-sentences sort accordingly, almost free for the asking: "what she said" and "^this" are both anaphora on reified utterances - basically, pro-nouns over ⌜·⌝-images - while "yes" and "amen" are tiny little speech-acts, bound up in a grain of ceremony. It should maybe have tipped me off that the pro-form column already had those seated beside "so moved".
Connectives - largely conjunctions - were never architecture, but rather vocabulary in borrowed clothes. Composition exists at every level; "salt and pepper" conjoins nouns without any hint that I should have built noun-logic a tower. The bare skeleton - "and", "or", "not", "if", "else" - is as short and frequent as maximally load-bearing syntactic machinery should be. Our rung-detector beeps at them, then, but it does so in a way that points to our existing rungs - nouns and their modifiers, verbs and their modifiers, and even rules and their modifiers. "What does each connective borrow?" is the more interesting question. "And then" evokes path-space's clock; "but" and "although" are conjunction when also wearing a rule-modifier, an exception flag raised against a standing usually; "because" borrows dependency structure, and splits - wherever a grammar bothers to split it, as English now and then does - into a causal and an evidential "because" (just ask Lojban with its profusion of words for "why"); "or else" is disjunction sometimes wearing the pact rung's enforcement face. If I wanted to write up a census for connectives, it'd be to track which rung or subrung each one most closely affines with.
Evidentials likewise relocate in good order: "allegedly", "reportedly", "as-I-saw-it", and the like are all modifiers on assertion-acts, and are provenance-coordinates. In the table above, I assert that they ride the modifier rail with a foot on the next rung up, though which floor the assertion-acts themselves finally file under, I'm leaving open for now. I'd rather carry an open question than a spare tower.
Honesty, or truthfulness - distinct from truth - is a norm on assertion-conduct: "assert only what you take to be true", after Grice. A norm of that shape doesn't stay out on the smear - it binds at pact grade. Lewis (the same one from before) built language itself on exactly this in "Languages and Language": a population uses a language just when a convention of truthfulness and trust in it prevails among them - else why suspect that mouth-noises bind to reality at all? Lying is defection against that primordial pact, which is why it stings so differently and so much worse than error does.
Lastly, proofs. A proof, in this frame, is primarily a sequence of reified contents as licensed by a core set of rules. That's why you can print one off: being a string of nouns and assertions is the entire point of formalization. Crucially, the reason why the exhibition of a proof decisively ends an argument is nowhere to be found in this entire sequence - that's because the reason lives entirely within the standing pact that mathematics as an enterprise runs and relies on to run. In the taxonomy waiting above the top of the ladder at the end of this post, a proof is a protocol for belief-transfer; a pact so elegantly compiled and so well-engineered as to be able to run trustlessly. "You needn't trust me, just run the checker." Everything higher requires lower stuff, just as expected: reification, then rules, then the settling force from the top of the ladder - the one ladder there need be.
Two of the ladder's strangest behaviors get their own posts: a sophism that climbs the whole ladder - ext(m·e) ⊆ ext(e) while latent(m·e) ≠ latent(e); that is, modification narrows the instances but often changes the predictions, and confusing those two facts is a scope error with a very long history - and a court case where the top rung rewrote the bottom.
The seating chart
For now: where this ladder stands in the current field. If all you came for is the table of rungs, you can skip the rest; you could even just skip to the part where I explain why any of this matters for agent foundations and AI safety.
Otherwise: here's the part where I am supposed to unveil the grand unification among what I think are the liveliest formal programs within agent foundations on the one hand, and the interoperable semantic ladder on the other. Unfortunately, I haven't got that. What I have is a seating chart and a list of empty chairs; a corkboard with red string, rather than the nice pat cyclic proof diagram I can only handwave at. Four live formal programs each hold one facet of this object, and they mostly do not talk to each other; three more provide important adjacent details (and also do not talk to each other). I'm at varying levels of review on the tables here, and I said as much on-stage, so if any row-owners or would-be seat-occupants want to speak up about anything I'm wrong or outdated on, I'd invite it. Anyway, those four major tables, in roughly descending order of how often I've broken bread at them:
One cell of the crossings table between these rows is halfway filled, by way of Gillen and Chiang in 2026. According to the theorems they give, we sort of get one direction - 'given an approximate condensation, we can construct an approximate weak natural latent, and a strong one only when there exists ~no lower-level structure to exploit', and we sort of get the other direction, too - 'given a natural latent, we can construct a condensation with double the error'. A stronger equivalence - and the rest of the necessary links - are suggestively-shaped lacunae; I can't even say yet what the cyclic graph for the appropriate "the following are equivalent" proof should be. The biggest one is the whole reason why an alignment post is hosting a linguistics ladder: the natural-rule conditions. Natural latents can tell you when your "dog" is guaranteed to be a function of my "dog". On the other hand, nobody has the corresponding theorem for when your "murder" - a constraint over trajectory-sets! - is a function of mine. That's what the translatability theorem for rules would have to look like. It doesn't exist, and such a shame it is; nor is it any coincidence that the missing one is the alignment-relevant one. Seen from this angle, more classic problems of AI alignment fall into place: a reward function is a rule which you hope binds the agent that it constrains in the way which you meant it; specification gaming is what the downward audit of that rule looks like when those hopes are dashed and you lose. The theorem I want is the one which sketches out, in stark terms, when it is you aren't forced to lose - and when you're doomed from the start.
Four chairs, three stools, two programs tied together, one new contribution, and zero unifying results.
Now for the three lesser seats, which don't tie into the main structure, are nowhere near well-enough sketched-out, or both, but which I think still contribute important ties out from pure semantics to yet more of why we should care and what we should think will happen:
I will as ever continue to be frank about the nature of the cracks and chasms here. I've pinned all these programs to a corkboard and bemoaned the missing string; this post is not the follow-through. That would be the motive force for an entire research program. That disappoints you? You were hoping to find answers here? Excellent. It disappoints me too; disappointment with a work order attached is a local currency. I hope I can find takers, but if I can't, I'll do it myself, alone, slowly, and hope that my "slowly" is still fast enough to count, and not too late.
Actually, the Deleuzeans have a point: other ways agents could have interpreted spacetime
Speaking of "fast enough" and "too late", I want to do PR and whatever other Deleuzeans wander in a service and talk about the nature of time, and why it seems to enter into the story so late; they deserve their own mention as prior art as much as Gärdenfors or the Mohists do. Two of the sharpest shouts from Rat Park were a single question in two guises: "why do nouns get the bottom rung?" and "why does time enter so late?". The first of those in particular was PR's commentary in absentia, which I promised above would get an answer; consider this good time. The answer to both is that the bottom rung is forced by the environment, not chosen by the theory. Never do we get to pick the ontology to taste; that's always given to us by the environment and what lives most naturally in it. (I'm sure she'll find that remark unsatisfactory.) The bottom rung of the ladder is wherever the most redundant, translatable information lives; in our neighborhood of the universe, that lives overwhelmingly in persistent, localized, spatial correlations - that is, clumps. Rocks, cups, grandmothers; that kind of thing. A universe (or a smaller system, modelled as a universe of its own) gets a noun-first ladder if and only if its cheap redundancy is spatially clumped; ours, conveniently for the invention of pointing, happens to possess that quality. Developmental psychology got here first: Gentner (1982) argued that children learn nouns before verbs because objects are "natural partitions" that human perception hands over already neatly cut - which is to say, clumps.
It didn't have to be that way; the natural ontology of the universe we live in and must deal with could have been set up very differently. Indeed, you can order a different universe off-menu. Consider wave-worlds: open ocean surface, acoustics, and a plasma are all strong examples. In them, nothing persists in place, and durable identity is primarily given by a mode of oscillation. There, the cheap redundancy is the recurring temporal motif, and there is often nothing clumped to point at, so the natural bottom rung comes out verb-shaped. Borges shipped that world's ladder twice over back in 1940, and I recommend that you read the account: "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". As for us, time enters our own ladder "late" because our clumps, spatially localized and temporally vague as they are, ask us to defer it; a world of waves or flashes spots you nothing of the sort, preferring to identify entities compact in frequency - periodic behavior and resonant modes, ringing steadily - or else compact in time - flashes, gone at once - but likely never treating both as foundational, given the Gabor limit and the uncertainty principle... and spatially vague either way, so that time gets to enter on the ground floor.
In general, each world's ladder pays late for the complement of its cheap redundancy, and Gabor sets the menu: on each axis - space and time - a world's cheapest entities can be compact in that axis or in its frequency, but never both. In time, that means duration, or else persistence and period (persistence being just frequency zero); in space, location or wavelength. Ours picks location and persistence, so space comes free with the nouns, and time as events - when, and for how long - is the late purchase: "temporalize". A wave-world picks wavelength and period, so place is the late purchase, and the dual operator is something like "localize", binding a recurring motif to a standing "where". A spark-world would pick location and duration, and so have to "patternize" or "thread" its way to anything lasting - if it can host observers at all, since an observer is already one of those. (The fourth cell, wavelength and duration, is a ripple everywhere and gone at once; I can't picture what kind of observer could live in such a thunder-world.) Tlön's "twice over" turns out to be two of these cells, one per hemisphere: impersonal verbs that let it moon night after night without much caring when or where the mooning began, and heaped-up adjectives about how round and airy things are right there and now without opining on tomorrow. Neither picks location and persistence together, which is why it's a famous heresy there that nine copper coins, lost on a Tuesday and found later that week, existed in between - exactly what a noun would have handed its speakers for free. (The heresiarch's sloppy reasoning doesn't make matters any easier. Two coins on the veranda, indeed.)
Different universes with different space-time primitives interpret the same things very differently.
Cellular automata make a lovely natural test-bed for both halves of the question. A glider in Life is a process through and through; pure pattern, with no persistent substrate. We nounify it all the same the instant it proves localized and persistent, clump-worlders that we are; we can't help but apply our native universe's natural filter, not without some cognitive effort. A wave-worlder might instead gesture at the same glider as an imperfect soliton of fixed size and period 4, verbifying it without thinking about it too hard, and would continue on to verbify a rock the instant that they noticed it persisting. A spark-worlder would see a chain of brief excitations on successive patches of grid, and would have to thread them together to get a glider at all - exactly the kind of thing a spark-world has to patternize. As ever, Lojban's bare-gismu ostensive construction runs ahead of us delightedly: "look, a rock!" is a single word, about as simple as a Lojbanic utterance can possibly get. (And we nounify flashes, and we also worry about tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality - when and whether events happen, start, and end, and how we know.)
I have, it turns out, written this filter down before, in a different post. I ran the same two-step in "78. Why Everything is a Spring": first, selection - what sticks around to be observed is the approximately-or-eventually periodic, with the too-fast and the never-repeating both being observationally forbidden to us; second, mechanism - when you perturb a stable equilibrium, you get oscillation or some different locally-stable state. The springs post's observables and this ladder's nounables are one filter applied at different rungs, and in a wave-world the two exchange places: the normal modes are the springs, those verbables that are now the most natural primitives, and the substrate of the springs themselves is now the exemplar of an off-beat nounable. When two posts written months apart click together like that without either being consulted, I take it as weak evidence I'm carving somewhere near a joint - weak, I said; put down that confetti.
Whichever ground floor a world hands its residents, what gets built on top should look the same, from rules on up. So why do bounded agents keep building trees over a world that is, if we're honest with ourselves at 2 in the morning, rhizomatic? Because a tree is the data structure with affordable invalidation. When the world moves, a tree lets you find and fix the entries it broke; a flat associative soup makes you re-audit everything. Taxonomies and modes are what precipitate out of the flux under coordination pressure plus compute budgets - and sometimes, no irony anywhere, you really do need a tree.
And that budget may do more than just make a tree affordable; it may be what grows it. Color is the cleanest test, since the world offers us no joints to cleanly cut color on. There's nothing halfway between a dog and a table; there's a smooth continuum between green and blue, and yet languages agree on where the best examples of each color sit (Berlin and Kay, 1969). What's more, they gain color terms in a nearly fixed order: mostly, as later work recast it, by splitting older terms, as when one word for green-or-blue becomes two. Information-bottleneck models of color naming (Zaslavsky, Kemp, Regier, and Tishby, 2018) recover something close to that order from a single trade-off between how precise a vocabulary is and what it costs to keep. Splits of splits make a tree; the budget grows it, and affordable invalidation keeps it. (The Deleuzeans in the room are surely fainting in shock over the instrumentally convergent arborescence.)
As time goes on, more precision in color terms is called for.
So, to the the Deleuze-and-Guattari contingent, as promised, your due: you are decidedly right about flux being real. You've expertly described the wave-world's ladder - or the pre-cache substrate of ours, over which we run our instrumentally convergent arborescence for the invalidation-cost reasons given above. The disagreement between us is about where the redundancy lives, and just how much it's worth giving in to Platonism - and that is an empirical parameter of a system or of a universe, not a metaphysical loyalty oath. Bring me a rigorous rhizome-first binding structure and I will personally mix the drinks while we look for its bridges - the better to ease the headache that the rigor will most likely bring you.
The parking lot
Speaking of promises, the parking lot. Recall that that talk just now ran under a traction rule: objections counted and were indeed welcomed - that is, iff they came packaged with a repair, a test, or a sharper definition. Thankfully, you all obliged. Here's that parking lot, transcribed, lightly triaged, and partially already addressed by the foregoing text. None of these are adjudicated; all of them are appreciated; several are now work orders; a few of those are closed work orders. Attribution where I remember it.
Why care? Pragmascopes, mysteries, and yet more bounties
That's that done. Having tidied up a little, we're left with a single crucial question: why should anyone care about any of this linguistic philosophy, if what we really care about is ambitious AI alignment? The quick and glib answer is that it sketches out how to avoid the fate of clearing all the other bluntly impossible hurdles (like eval-awareness, and arms race dynamics, and brutal surveillance regimes, and nihilistic misuse, and the the intelligence curse) only to die horribly or live in sorrow anyway, because at the last we tripped over our own failure to do our philosophy-of-language homework up to standards. That sounds awful. I don't want to have that happen; it'd really spoil my day.
I don't think pragmascopes are meant to do that...
...Alright, that's definitely not enough. Less heat, more light. The thing is, there's a solid four different deep mysteries of the field that it lets me (or us, you could always join me) take a decent stab at resolving. In descending order of how confident I am about them:
The only numbers requiring no justification are 0, 1, and ∞, and "4" is not on the list
Climbing above pacts, we find stranger and more nebulous objects just as rarefied as the air: norms, institutions, cultural mores, conventions-at-scale, protocols, constitutions, jurisprudence, currencies, egregores, operant philosophies, and gods, to name a few. But we shouldn't be surprised: even pacts are themselves substrate for phenomena that any middle-schooler in civics class or dilettante paging through "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" can rattle off. My present unifying guess, as a strong opinion held weakly: these are all technologies for scaling pact-force beyond the horizon of mutual expectation. Lewis-force, like anything with massive force-carriers, is a short-range interaction; common knowledge stops scaling embarrassingly early. Accordingly, everything on the list is a hack for propagating the knowable bindingness of a pact past that horizon. A constitution is a pact about further pact-formation. Protocols and proofs (especially zero-knowledge ones) are pacts compiled to run trustlessly. A currency is a pact reified into a bearer-tradable object; here in particular I can decline all accusations of armchair speculation, given that I run a small personally-backed instance of exactly this sort of pact, and can report from inside the lab; see the entire "lorxus confederal reserve" tag for all sorts of details on how that goes. A god is a pact internalized via a personified enforcer, or so Jaynes (1976), Norenzayan (2013), and Johnson (2016) would all have us believe, all in their different ways. And language itself is the strange loop in the middle of the whole apparatus: the one instance of the ladder that the ladder is written in, climbing itself, hand over hand.
The meta-levels I called free back at the summit were, in fact, prepaid. Packaging a process into a thing other processes can act on costs structure - a more professional category theorist might call it closedness - and a ⌜·⌝ that can be applied to everything is the part where language's structure already had that priced in. That's how we get to use language to talk about itself, legislate about its own legislation, and host Gödel sentences.
Final asks and yet more bountied open questions
All of the foregoing prompts more than a few open questions, asks, and assorted conjectures. Here are a few of those, in descending order of what I'd pay for them:
Coda
The Disputers' scrolls mostly burned, and whatever answers they once held are now gone. Ours are cloud-hosted, which is a different kind of flammable. So here is the tower, half-built on purpose in public: scaffolding showing, mortar wet, holes labeled in my own hand. If you can break a rung, break it - and then, as per house rules, hand me at least a sketch of what goes in the hole: a repair, a test, or a sharper definition. Demolition without a move is mere vandalism, and the Mohists have been disappointed in that kind of thing for 2,300 years. They're tired. So am I. Bring me rows for the table. Bring me smears for the bridges - or better yet, a bridge with no smear at all; that one pays double. Bring me, above all, the rule-theorem, or the reason it can't exist; I'll take either, and pay richly in the house currency for both.
Where was the blue chair? Right here, is where; right beside a blue cup on a table and some multi-agent pacts made of silver and rules.
Next time, the top of the ladder reaches back down to redraw the world; after that, a white horse that is not a horse. The ladder is real. This drawing of it is provisional. That's the whole theory; now go put your weight on it.