Matti Eklund, "Alien Structure: Language and Reality" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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What is the central thesis of Alien Structure and why does it matter?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Matty Eklund, professor of philosophy at Uppsala University. His new book, Alien Structure, Language and Reality, is just out from Oxford University Press. It's not uncommon to encounter people who think and talk about the world so differently from the way you do that it's not really possible to put yourself in their shoes.
But such systems of representing the world are not truly alien. They still involve terms that pick out objects, properties, relations, and other elements that are found in familiar natural languages, and in metaphysical theories. In alien structure, Eklund considers whether there are ways of representing the world that are completely alien in both their linguistic and metaphysical structure, and which may in fact capture reality better on an ontological realist view, or which might show the limits to anything goes on an ontological relativist view. Eklund defends the value of considering these possibilities, and he links his discussion to conceptual engineering, philosophy of quantum mechanics, and other contemporary philosophical debates.
Let's turn to the interview. Let's see. Hello, Maddie Erklund. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Hi.
Um, I'm really excited to be talking about your new book, Alien Structure. Um It's a really weird topic and um uh which makes it very fun, I think. Um, so let me let before we get into the the actual uh book itself, can you maybe tell us a bit about uh yourself, you know, how you became a philosopher and then how this book came about.
Yeah, thanks and thanks for thanks for having me. Um Those are two very different questions. Let me start with way way back when I got into philosophy. It's um I guess I got into philosophy in various ways and neither neither story about how I got into philosophy is very glorious, but here's one of them. Um I um um Um I took philosophy in high school and it was through my high school teacher partly that I got interested in philosophy. But it's not the standard, oh, this high school teacher was so fantastic, got me enthusiastic. And so it's exactly the opposite. Um I intensely disliked him. Um I thought it was pretentious and arrogant and full of himself. And essentially I wanted to put him in his place. And I started to read philosophy in my spare time, um, in order to do so.
And then I just got interested in it. So that's the that's how it started. Um Um a as for how I got interested in this weird topic in in the book, um I I guess I just don't don't really know. Um I can't I mean I've been I've been working on these issues in the book now for maybe five years or so, been giving talks on these things and but I don't remember any particular moment when I thought, ah, this is um um this is an interesting topic. Or I mean I I guess it just grew out of what I'd been interested in earlier somewhat sort of If organically.
Okay,
one f one funny thing that happened w after long after I'd started working on these things, um, was that I uh I sat down one day and did did research in the sense of well googling relevant phrases to see who had written about similar things. And as I did so I found something of my own that I'd written fifteen years earlier, where I where I had mentioned in passing this kind of thing. So I guess it's been sort of growing somehow um for quite some time.
Oh, okay. Um well that makes that makes sense. Um so so okay, so the title Alien Structure. I I guess the first thing to clarify is what that is. Like what is uh what what structure you're talking about, and then what is it to be alien?
Yeah. So the They give kind of a long-winded answer to that perhaps.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of Alien Structure and why does it matter?
0:01–7:49
2
How did Matti Eklund become a philosopher and what led him to write this book?
7:49–15:40
3
What does ‘alien’ mean for language and how can a language be truly alien?
15:40–23:17
4
What kinds of possible languages could exist beyond familiar human languages?
23:17–30:38
5
How might an alien language represent reality better than our ordinary languages?
30:38–39:39
6
What are concrete examples (or lack thereof) of alien languages and structures?
39:39–47:09
7
What critical reactions does the book anticipate and how does Eklund address them?
47:09–53:41
8
What is Matti Eklund working on next and how does it extend the ideas in Alien Structure?
53:41–1:01:18
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