Philosophy, For Short

Halfway through the little tour I have started counting: the question I got most often was not about the buzzer, the reactor, or whether the intimate parts are autobiographical. It was, by a wide margin: what did you actually study? I would say Symbolic Systems and watch politeness wrestle confusion to a draw. Then someone would ask if that is computers. Yes. And linguistics? Also yes. And psychology? Somewhat. And philosophy? Now we are getting somewhere.

Symbolic Systems is what happens when philosophy, computer science, linguistics and psychology agree to share a corridor and keep arguing about what a mind is. The official questions are philosophical ones wearing lab coats: what is a symbol, what would it mean for a machine to mean anything, where does a rule end and an understanding begin. I went to California to ask what a machine is and ended up learning German for Kant. If that is not a philosophy degree, I do not know what would count as one.

A confession, since readers keep excavating the stranger corners of book catalogues. Some shop biographies out there claim I hold an M.A. in Philosophy from Stanford. That is my own doing. Years ago, at midnight, filling in yet another author form whose field wanted one word, I typed the short answer instead of the long one, and catalogues never forget anything except corrections. Somewhere on the same form I appear to have gained an extra year of age as well. I spend my working days restoring women who were misfiled by tired clerks. It seems only fair that the record misfiles me a little in return.

So, for the record, once and citable: M.Sc., Symbolic Systems, Stanford. Philosophy for short. The program's alumni tend to go off and build networks and phones; the short answer shelves me next to Peter Thiel instead, which my bank statement finds very funny. The Kant stays either way. It has survived worse cataloguing than mine.