Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“In that case, every utterance, or every sample, is both marking and repaying the debt, and in learning language we are learning the “weights and measures” of a complex system of debt. So I am here continuing my “Tokenizing Deferentiality” discussion (and “All You Need is Language” and earlier discussions), aiming at treating all human activity as linguistic use and all linguistic use as a marking and paying of debt (debt paid through its marking, which prices in degrees of enforcement and forgiveness). I refuse any numerical marking or mathematical method here (even if I wouldn’t and couldn’t prevent others from trying) because such methods merely beg the question of what you determine to be a “unit” to be measured, and such measuring already presupposes an answer to the question of the relation between what you will take to be “units”—their respective weights and measures. We have many ways within language of tokenizing deferral—indeed, if we didn’t, math would be impossible—and measuring its various increments, at various scales and within various frames of reference. We have, above all, “like,” positioned somewhere in between “same” and “other.” When you ask how much one thing is “like” another consider how many other assumptions the question and answer entail—everything is like something else in some way, and you could equally say that nothing is like anything else in other ways. You could right away introduce a scale (“1 to 10”) of “likeness,” but you will quickly find any measure along this line to be arbitrary, not least because in performing the measurement you are putting your finger on the scale in a way that would require another scale to measure, and so on.”

— Adam Katz, Deferral, Debt and the Idiom · May 28, 2025 · Bouvard Substack