Language Is Not the Bridge

Philosophics — Philosophical and Political Ramblings · May 6, 2026 · 21m

Language philosopher Bry Willis critiques a recent Substack essay, Jessica Talisman’s Language Is the Bridge, that makes a claim that is increasingly common in discussions of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs, ontologies, metadata, and semantic infrastructure: that language is the bridge between human understanding and machine action. The claim is attractive, and not merely because ‘bridge’ is one of those metaphors that allows technical discourse to cosplay as wisdom literature. It captures something real. AI systems, semantic architectures, ontologies, taxonomies, controlled…