Philosophys

Sraffa's Gesture, the Crack in the Crystal, and Why the Stochastic Parrot Still Bites

Will Schenk March 12, 2026

Sraffa's Gesture, the Crack in the Crystal, and Why the Stochastic Parrot Still Bites

Wittgenstein's shift from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations—triggered by Sraffa's Neapolitan gesture—reframes the stochastic parrot debate. The danger isn't that LLMs lack secret understanding. It's our willingness to treat fluent simulation as the real thing.

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