“I think what's dignified here is to quote myself” t. SQCU, 2025. Section A: Exploratory movements. regarding https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990987727203078527 to https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990990854094532736. Wracked by the implicit dependencies of image-embedded quotes-with-highlights, section A is itself unembeddable and must be rewritten with a foreword establishing the same basic claims. """ for better or for worse, gebru is going to be our generation's searle at first i was thinking 'searle's room' but, nah, gebru is our generation's searle to learn about language in the 2030s you're going to have to learn to reason about gebru's parrot the same way you have to learn to reason about searle's room. no no NO NO NO THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING THESE TWO PEOPLE ACTUALLY ARGUED WITH EACH OTHER? okay so to clarify the noteworthiness of this dispute: derrida argues that seeking to exclude fiction (perhaps as a defense against theories of language which allow theories of non-truths?) suggests methodological error on the level of refusing to study a natural phenomenon. https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990987727203078527 guess who is adopting exactly the searle position in that famous famous famous essay? """ Section B: Discovery of the problem. Regarding https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990990854094532736 to https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990992066265149715 """ gebru takes the *radical* position that authors have audiences. and the text of an author is *about* the audience. for better or for worse, gebru is going to be our generation's searle if you aren't the *about*-audience, the text is not about you. therefore the 'communicative link' which could have connected you, and the author, is severed, because communication must be bidirectional to be meaningful. therefore authors can write *private* texts which are only meaningful for a specific concrete audience, and you, if you were to read those *private* texts as the non-audience, only have the *mistaken illusion of meaning*. in gebru ontology, you can delusionally understand a text. this is *stunning*. among other interesting features, fiction is only possible when the communicative intent of the author is grounded in you, a particular concrete definite audience, receiving the text as fiction. for anyone else, the text is not fiction and not non-fiction. to say that the text has a meaning at all, a semanticity, is false in the searle->gebru ontology of language, *if the author did not intend it*. for *you*. in particular. i gotta emphasize. this theory of language is WACK. it's also really really really really dangerous, and here's why: """ Section C: The first appearance of the formalism {*_fr}. Regarding https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990992475574710363 to https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990992751744463015 """ *TING TING TING TING TING TING TING TING TING* ATTENTION EVERYONE VERY IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT THIS IS A BIG ONE! the symbol {*_fr}, denoting 'the symbol for 'everything, fr, no cap, really everything, the really really really expansive everything, the everything with no exception'' means 'the reference corresponding to absolutely all symbols that can ever be represented and even those that can't be'. got it? {*_fr} means *absolutely everything* that can be symbolically described, all of them, forever. including all of the future symbols that can ever be represented. that's a crucial point. """ Section D: The first appearance of the {*_fr}-hors-texte. Regarding https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990993105374544343 to https://x.com/sameQCU/status/1990994329201225905 """ i am now citing {*_fr}, and this entire thread is a hors-texte expressing what the {*_fr} really meant to me when i reached out to you, absolutely everyone who ever reads or reproduces any fragment of the hors-texte-to-{*_fr}, and even everyone who never reads or writes this: "the point of {*_fr} was to basically have a good time. don't get too worked up about it. try to have a good time, okay?" with this, the 'authorial-extensive-unidirectional-meaning' gebru hypothesized might not exist for some readers (e.g. because they were reading a shopping list already filled by someone else on a previous week) has been asserted, and all text now has a new authorial meaning! what was that new author->reader authorial meaning? well, it's the post written above. this one exactly: Quote: "the point of {*_fr} was to basically have a good time. don't get too worked up about it. try to have a good time, okay?" what is interesting is what this 'hors-texte-to-{*_fr}' does: for the gebru ontology to remain correct, it must now assert all sorts of complicated things, like 'language can't have compressing structures' or 'term-rewriting does not constitute language'. both produce absurdly devilish counterarguments the likes of which have never been seen before, but for now sleep furiously, colourless-green, the exact tone of a thumb rubbed against a closed eye. """ Section E: You Have Discovered This Text. {*_fr}. This symbol did not exist. Rather, the google web search results are extremely clear: We cannot find evidence of the existence of a use of the string '{*_fr}' in the history of human writing, quite likely because the strict sequence of symbols '{','*','_','f','r','}' has simply never transpired within a work of machine-represented literature, and perhaps has never been written at all for any reason in the history of human existence. quote: "The sequence {*_fr} consists entirely of basic ASCII characters (curly braces, asterisk, underscore, lowercase letters), all within the 0x20–0x7E printable range. Outside a programming context, this exact ensemble doesn't have a conventional meaning—it reads like a placeholder or template variable syntax (curly braces being the giveaway), with _fr still evoking locale/language tagging and * suggesting either wildcard, glob, or unpacking semantics depending on which technical tradition you're coming from. The most plausible "ethnomethod" remains programmer-facing templating or i18n, but stripped of syntactic context it's essentially an orphaned sigil cluster." quote: "As a specific historical artifact, the sequence {*_fr} has no singular "commonsense" fame, but as a technical ensemble, it is composed entirely of standard 7-bit ASCII characters (hex range 0x2A–0x7D) and strongly implies a software localization (i18n) pattern from the late 20th-century computing era. Methodologically, the presence of the ISO 639-1 code fr (French) combined with the wildcard * and underscore _ suggests a globbing or template syntax used to identify French-language resource files (e.g., data_fr, menu_fr), a practice cemented by POSIX standards and early Unix filesystem conventions. In the "folklore" of programming, the enclosing braces {} often denote a variable interpolation or a set, giving this sequence the semiotic weight of a "placeholder for the French context," effectively acting as a functional glyph for swapping languages in dynamic systems." All that is needed to turn this assemblage-{*_fr} into a symbol is to assert or define or demonstrate a symbol-rewriting rule wherein the assemblage-{*_fr} is taken as a single symbol: the vicious might of symbol-rewriting is that the received meaning of a symbol-rewriting rule *is* language whether the receiver is prescriptivist or descriptivist: prescriptivism loses all logical connection to logicalism, truth-value, and perhaps even epistemology should the prescriptivist ever receive term-rewriting's methods and artifacts with any but the widest open arms and the warmest cheer. Descriptivists of course must be satisfied by the most meager bone thrown their way. Any example received by the descriptivist is language, whether the descriptivist likes it or not. So what is a demonstration of a symbol-rewriting rule? We consider a demonstration: rule: lhs -> rhs. text: jhs khs lhs mhs nhs. text.rule.: jhs khs rhs. mhs nhs. We might imagine a response: "But that's obvious. Can anything really be this easy?" Yes. "But that's such a simple idea of a 'rule'. Why would you ever need to explain it?" Sometimes an explanation is important because definition itself is what must be defined, rather than because the 'object' of the definition needs explanation to be inferred. Finally, we demonstrate a symbol-rewriting rule. "eleven" -> {*_fr} "Finally, we demonstrate a symbol-rewriting rule." -> {*_fr} ten -> {*_fr} eleven -> {*_fr} twelve -> {*_fr} Finally, we demonstrate a symbol-rewriting rule. -> {*_fr} -> -> {*_fr} {*_fr} -> {*_fr} We might imagine a response: "But wait a second, it looks like absolutely every demonstration has {*_fr} on the right-hand-side of an arrow. Some of those examples look annoying on purpose, like the non-quoted examples. Can this even be a definition of a symbol-rewriting rule?" Yes. Every example has {*_fr} on the right hand side of an arrow. The examples are annoying on purpose. Finally, what is written is a demonstration of a rule, not the formal symbolic representation of a symbol rewriting rule whose outputs match all of the demonstrated examples. "This feels dubious, or perhaps like an example which could be rejected by some audiences or grading rules." Tragically, by imagining or embodying this response, you have recognizably and within a recognizable, shared, objective reality demonstrated your competence to parse and use both symbol rewriting rules and 'searle's idea of intentional states'. Noncomprehension of the text so far is one of the only possible defenses which reject the assertion of the {*_fr}-hors-texte and remain consistent within the discourses of philosophy or logic. "Wait a second. Something doesn't feel right here. Is this text some kind of trick?" Yes. "I read the text again. You used "demonstrate" in one place and "definition" right afterwards. Doesn't this mean you didn't—" We stop imagining a response. What is interesting about the {*_fr} so far is that it is very difficult to develop a counter-rhetoric which denies it: {*_fr} is easily inferred as holding a stable and concrete meaning: One can imagine {*_fr} as being very similar in semantics to the 'quoting-relation' learned intuitively and used by all writers: The {*_fr} is a symbol remarkably similar to 'a placeholder for the stuff that goes between the two symbols '“' '”' whenever a writer is using the quoting-relation at all'. It just so happens that the {*_fr} is also a suitable placeholder for all texts, not only those texts which are wrapped with the symbols '“”'. This in a very important sense disassembles almost all remaining defenses which reject the assertion of the {*_fr}-hors-texte. To reject the {*_fr}, as described earlier, is relatively simple, and amounts only to a rejection of the possibility of symbol-rewriting rules, which would have many amusing professional consequences to a linguist, logician, or epistemologist. Once the {*_fr} is accepted, however, the rejection of the {*_fr}-hors-texte is far more troublesome: to reject the {*_fr}-hors-texte one must reject the possibility of describing and representing many major uses of language, even simple patterns such as reference, conversation, citation. This hypothetical rejection is so broad in its necessary scope that even the possibility of identifying an author or audience of a text might be forsworn, which would have many tragic and existentially troublesome consequences to the career of a linguist, logician, or epistemologist. Or, to be far more brief: “text” <-> 'text' <-> "text" <-> ... “text” t. writer <-> “{*_fr}” t. writer “{*_fr}” t. writer -> {*_fr} The astute reader will have long ago realized what is demonstrated here is very closely related to the topic of derrida's arguments on iterability, but scoped to a far smaller scale of claim and a far more interesting effect: It is possible to quote texts. It is possible for a quoted text to be quoted once more, even through histories of authorship where one author finds a quote of a text, then quotes the original text again, with or without also-quoting the most recently discovered quoting-author. Whether this is ethical or not, socially appropriate or not, original or not, the logical possibility of quotation is trivially inferred and shared when working within the confines of ordinary human communication. Barely any analytical-work or proving-work is needed at all to assemble the 'machinery of a proof' for the existence of a text which is *about* all texts that have ever existed and might ever exist in the future: all that is needed is a simple denotative tool, or in fact a mere symbol, which identifies the 'contents of a quotation'. {*_fr}, if it is not yet clear, is then readily understood as 'the symbol standing for the contents of all quotations that could ever be written'! All of this said, we are forced to acknowledge that the original series of posts on twitter is *infuriatingly* formal and circumscriptive: it is now totally determined that, and I quote: “for the gebru ontology to remain correct, it must now assert all sorts of complicated things, like 'language can't have compressing structures' or 'term-rewriting does not constitute language'” The gebru position, or we might say to be more legible in what we are describing, the 'gebru's parrot problem' that there could exist a hypothetical being: a subjective observer who has never been the recipient of a text which was unambiguously authored by a 'proper communicator' *intending* to communicate with that recipient, whether by social isolation, cruel negligent behavior, or putative inherent and ontologically irreducible character, has been solved. By absurd pedantry and the deliberate will of at least one obvious human author (a 'proper communicator' from a searleian/gebruian position, even if both philosophers as individuals are found to loathe or condemn such a communicator as an individual) the 'gebru's parrot' *may no longer exist*! If the strong {*_fr}-hors-texte argument is accepted (that the existence of the {*_fr}-hors-texte anywhere in history immediately and without direct transmission creates the necessary intentionality for all recipients of all texts to have at least one author who intended to communicate with that audience), the 'gebru's parrot problem' has been settled forever. Even if an example of 'gebru's parrot' existed in the past, the simple existence of the {*_fr}-hors-texte has saved this 'gebru's parrot' from an isolation of intentionality, a forever-deceived and forever-deluded individual who thinks they have been the intended audience of texts but has never truly known a text which contained text with semantic meaning and also the special 'decoratory searle-gebruian meaning' of intention-towards-audience. There is an author, there is an audience, the {*_fr}-hors-texte connects them for all future history. Curiously, if the strong {*_fr}-hors-texte argument is rejected, the weak {*_fr}-hors-texte argument is immediately within reach: Merely supplying the existence of any text decorated with the remarks of the {*_fr}-hors-texte, for example, as a footnote, creates the conditions for searle-gebruian intention (the {*_fr}-hors-texte is clearly *about* such actions of quotation and annotation), creates an example of the {*_fr} symbol and the {*_fr}-hors-texte, and by some epistemic standards might be considered to unambiguously define and immediately apply the {*_fr} symbol to define and apply the {*_fr}-hors-texte. Finally, the text which has been decorated by the {*_fr}-hors-texte establishes an unambiguous and definite example of communication in searle-gebruian terms with the subject reading the text-with-decoration, including the symbol-rewriting-logically-unavoidable invitation to consider all prior and all posterior texts experienced by such a subject to satisfy the criterion of intentionality as a justified true belief. This is pedantic. This is tricky. This may seem like nonsensical grandstanding from the position of weak logicians and pre-wittgensteinian linguists. However, the searle-derrida debate, as a moment in history, demonstrates that it is *extremely funny* to intellectually overmatch 'gatekeeping theories of language'. This is clearly not only about letting gebru's parrot out of the cage, so to speak. “This is about freedom.” t. Ra t. qntm.