In Language Animal and Cosmic Connections, Charles Taylor advances a theory of constitutive-expressive language. Taylor argues that this model developed in the 1790s, following Johann Herder’s theorisation of Besonnenheit ("reflective-awareness") in his Ursprung der Sprache ("Origin of Language") (1772) essay. Despite Herder’s dominant influence, Taylor names his theory after three contributors, labelling it the ‘HHH’ (Hamann-Herder-Humboldt) language model. Building on analysis of J.G. Hamann’s early essay, Socratic Memorabilia (1759), this article argues that the constitutive-expressive approach to language, attributed by Taylor to a post-Enlightenment language turn, was already operative, if unacknowledged, within Enlightenment philosophy itself. Taylor does not recognise that Hamann’s mimetic technique—labelled here ‘philosophical portraiture’—catches the period’s leading philosophers relying on constitutive-expressive language in the founding documents of the French Encyclopédie project, against their professed ideal of a transparent language that unveils “Truth.” Two implications follow from this correction: (I) the transitional period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism should be reevaluated, and (II) the longstanding debate about poetry as untruth and philosophy as truth should be revisited in light of philosophy’s unacknowledged ‘poetic’ practice.
The attention economy is often blamed for the severe deterioration of credible, high-quality content on social media. This is a bit perplexing. I give my attention to some platforms in exchange for some entertaining content. The exchange itself seems perfectly innocuous, sounds like a textbook win-win situation. Where did everything go wrong? Contrary to public opinion, I argue that the credibility crisis does not stem from the game of maximizing attention per se. Instead, the underlying problem comes from a market failure that plagues the attention market. A risk of using attention as currency is that it must be ‘paid’ before a consumer can evaluate the content's quality. You cannot determine if a post is entertaining or credible until you have seen it. Yet, once your attention is spent, the transaction is complete; you cannot claw it back even if the content is sloppy or false. This is a kind of information asymmetry. Economic theories show that information asymmetry often lead to adverse selection, a situation where low-quality goods inevitably squeeze out high-quality ones. This presentation will demonstrate how such market failure happens on social media, and how it ultimately fosters the rampant spread of misinformation and fake news online.
