"Wait...What?"

Over the past 20 years, there have been a series of debates in the field of linguistics concerning the Amazonian language Pirahã. For the most part, those debates have revolved around a claim by the linguist Daniel Everett, that Pirahã lacks a formal property called “recursion” and that this poses problems for a research program advanced by Noam Chomsky. Discussion surrounding that single issue made the rounds in general academia, surfacing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and then in the mainstream media, notably in a 2009 article in The New Yorker and a book (The Kingdom of Speech) by Tom Wolfe. From there, the debate metastasized into the broader popular culture. The third of an occasional series by analytic philosopher Peter Ludlow , Wait...What? is an analytic philosopher's unfiltered quarterly take on all sorts of random topics, including the nature of bullshit, assholery, meme coins, and metaphilosophy.

On April 19, 2024, my former dissertation advisor, Charles Parsons passed away at the age of 91. He passed away on the same day as the philosopher Daniel Dennett, which meant that his death was largely lost amid the sea of tributes to Dennett in social media. I suspect, however, that there are many philosophers that consider Parsons to have been the greater philosopher by some margin, though neither Dennett nor Parsons were much concerned with such metrics. The second of an occasional series by analytic philosopher Peter Ludlow , Wait...What? is an analytic philosopher's unfiltered quarterly take on all sorts of random topics, including the nature of bullshit, assholery, meme coins, and metaphilosophy.

In a recent podcast entitled “A Golden Age for Assholes,” Sam Harris argued that there has been a rising tide of assholery in the United States and this can be attributed, in part, to figures like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate, who are not merely assholes, but are assholes that have kicked in the Overton Window of assholery and brought about A Golden Age for Assholes. How did they accomplish this? By making it acceptable for everyone to be assholes! Thus, we are led to conclude, because of mega-assholes like Trump and Tate, we now live in an age of epic assholery. Later I will get into the issue of whether Trump and Tate are really to blame for a plague of assholery, but first I want to get into more basic questions. Such as, what is an asshole anyway? The first of an occasional series by analytic philosopher Peter Ludlow , Wait...What? is an analytic philosopher's unfiltered quarterly take on all sorts of random topics, including the nature of bullshit, assholery, meme coins, and metaphilosophy.