Bob Tait

Just before Christmas, a good friend of mine died unexpectedly. I knew Bob slightly for quite a number of years, but from about 2011 we had been meeting regularly - weekly - to talk about some of the things I ponder in this blog, and about how they related to his interest in wider cultural structures which are captured by, and in which are embedded, all out linguistic behaviour.

Anyone with peculiar interests will know the joy and relief associated with discovering someone else similarly afflicted. I will miss Bob very much.

Bob and I both wondered, in different ways, whether the biggest threat facing humanity might be a kind of semantic catastrophe. He felt that we underestimate the confusion caused by our inclination to represent large scale cultural constructs as intelligibly intentional, and I could see our capacity for meaningful exchange being overwhelmed in a technological environment in which semantically moderated structures were less 'successful' than complex control mechanisms that depended only on signal propagation.

And, of course, he tried hard to make sense of cultural constructs, while I pursued semantic fundamentalism. So there.