Emanuele Bottazzi

Social institutions are considered as generally stable entities but, at the same time, prone to unpredictable and even dramatical changes. The paper draws some considerations on this issue by means of an analysis of the notions of validity and objectivity, seen in the light of the critical situations that institutions may face. Consider the case of an irregular election that leads anyhow to a result accepted by authorities and population at large. Such an election seems to be valid and not valid at the same time. These contrasting intuitions reflect the twofold nature of institutional reality: it depends on one side on what is accepted by those who are dealing with it, but on the other side also on what it is actually going on according to its rules. The article frames this problem in terms of response-dependence. In this respect, it follows, but also expands, Hindriks (2006), to reach the conclusion that institutions are easily prone to fall apart. Anyway, not in all cases this actually happens; on the contrary, institutions seem to be quite stable. We propose that what makes them stable, but also unpredictable, is, in a sense, a sort of misunderstanding among the involved agents. Explaining such misunderstanding amounts to analyze the notion of objectivity in social reality. We argue that objectivity is more a requirement than a feature of institutional systems, being institutional objects mind and context-dependent.

Research in the Digital Humanities requires computer systems that can document and analyze interpretations of creative works, such as literary texts. These systems are designed to provide access to existing interpretations and identify their similarities and differences. To this end, we propose an approach to formally representing interpretations. In particular, we develop an ontology of observations aimed at capturing, through what we call observational vocabularies, what interpreters claim about the texts that they interpret. We distinguish between different types of observations, in particular, basic observations, which represent specific and domain-dependent claims (e.g., regarding the analysis of literary characters’ traits), and observations such as assertion, denial, support, and defeat to document more nuanced claims. We also introduce formal mechanisms that can be used to analyze particular (sets of) observations, texts, and so on. Throughout the article, we illustrate the discussion with examples from literary studies.

We investigate the ‘bewitchment’ of understanding interactions between humans and systems based on large language models (LLMs) inspired by Wittgenstein’s later view on language. This framework is particularly apt for analyzing human-LLM interaction as it treats understanding as a public phenomenon manifested in observable communicative practices, rather than as a mental or computational state—an approach especially valuable given LLMs’ inherent opacity. Drawing on this perspective, we show that successful communication requires not merely regularity in language use, but constancy in maintaining reference points through agreement in both definitions and judgments. Crucially, LLMs lack the constancy needed to track negations and contradictions throughout a dialogue, thereby disrupting the reference points necessary for genuine communication. The apparent understanding in human-LLM interactions arises from what we characterize as a ‘bewitchment’: the interaction between LLMs’ statistical adherence to linguistic patterns and humans’ tendency to blindly follow familiar language games. Moreover, when interaction with LLMs is based on stereotyped contexts in which the system seems capable of identifying reference points, we humans automatically apply the practical principle that there is understanding until proven otherwise. The bewitchment becomes thus more profound as LLMs improve in modeling stereotypical aspects of human interaction. This improvement, far from addressing the highlighted limitations, can only deepen the illusion of understanding, raising significant concerns for meaningful control over such systems.

This text is the introduction of the special issue “Rhythm in social interaction” edited by Chiara Bassetti and Emanuele Bottazzi in Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa, vol. 8, n. 3, December 2015. We thank Chiara Bassetti, Emanuele Bottazzi and the journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa for the permission to republish it. But, friend, when you grasp the number and nature of the intervals of sound, from high to low, and the boundaries of those intervals, and how many scales arise from them, - Anthropologie – Nouvel article.