Dr. David Balcarras joins ULethbridge with new perspectives on language and thought

Dr. David Balcarras recently joined the University of Lethbridge's Department of Philosophy, drawn by a shared commitment to liberal education and a curiosity about the nature of language and thought. With experience from some of the world’s leading institutions, he now turns his attention to questions that have puzzled philosophers for centuries: How do words connect to the world? How do we make sense of things we’ve never seen or experienced?

In this Q&A, Dr. Balcarras shares what brought him to Southern Alberta, his vision for new courses, and the challenges that fuel his philosophical inquiry.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to ULethbridge? 

I started at the University of Toronto for my BA (Honours) and MA in Philosophy. Next was MIT for my PhD where I then taught as an Instructor. While in the United States, I sought an academic appointment back in Canada. ULethbridge first caught my eye in 2021; I shared its values and commitment to liberal education (and by extension to philosophy and the humanities), and I’d always felt home in Southern Alberta while visiting family here. Three years later, by fate or luck, the Department of Philosophy had an opening in my research areas. I leapt at the opportunity, and the rest is history.

What are you most excited about in your new role here?

I’m hoping to design new courses on the philosophy of mind and language, particularly on the foundational philosophical assumptions of the language and mind sciences. I hope these will appeal not just to philosophy majors, but also to students in neuroscience, psychology, and modern languages and linguistics.

A course on the philosophy of artificial intelligence is one example. There’s been an explosion of new research on generative A.I. that raises all kinds of hard philosophical questions: Can Large Language Models like OpenAI’s GPT actually think? Are they conscious? By studying how they work, can we learn anything about the human mind or human language? And what are the social or political consequences of how we answer these questions?

What are your research interests or areas of expertise, and why are they important to you?

I work mostly on the philosophy of language, on something we often take for granted: that words are about things. How is this possible? Imagine I emit the sound ‘Aristotle’. Somehow, this sound is about a person who lived 2,400 years ago. How? What tethers my utterance to someone I’ve never met and who doesn’t now exist? What differentiates, fundamentally, the meaningful name ‘Aristotle’ from the meaningless string ‘dqlwxufks’? This is the problem of meaning. Philosophers have always worked on it. Some — those I most relate to — have obsessed over it and failed gloriously trying to solve it. And more recently linguists and cognitive scientists have tackled the question too. But nobody has the answer.

I say the answer lies with our capacity for linguistic communication. The word ‘Aristotle’ refers to the person Aristotle because of how we use that word to communicate thoughts about that person. This isn’t an original idea, and it might sound banal. But this view faces hard problems. Here’s one: most meaningful expressions are unused. Take this complex noun: ‘bears flying over Lethbridge’. Probably, no one’s ever used this to communicate about bears flying over Lethbridge. But it’s meaningful. So this looks like a case of meaning without communicative use. But maybe not; maybe the meaning of this unused expression is somehow fixed by our use of its parts (‘bears’, ‘flying’, …). If so, it’d be great if we could spell out that ‘somehow’, which is something I’m working on.

How do you approach your teaching philosophy, and what methods do you use to engage students?

My teaching philosophy grew out of my undergrad experience as a philosophy major at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus. They had a small philosophy department like ULethbridge. Over four years, I took over two dozen philosophy classes. Most were small seminars of professor-led discussions. I was shown how philosophers think and work and was empowered to do likewise. My professors Jessica Wilson and Benj Hellie deserve special mention here. Now, I want my students to have the same experience I was gifted.

To entice students to philosophize, I try to have fun in class. Humour, exaggeration, and a bit of improvisation help elevate philosophy off the page. When I have fun, I think students see that doing philosophy is worth the effort despite the subject matter’s being often dry, abstract, impractical, or difficult. There’s this concern — which I think is spurious — that students find philosophy dull because it’s hard, draining, or detached from real life. But this is all part of what makes philosophy fun, just like a sport or game. Chess, for example, has recently exploded in popularity despite the fact that mastering chess is impossibly hard; and could anything be more detached from our practical affairs? Plus, unlike in chess, in philosophy we’re not just having fun — we’re also probing at the fundamental nature of reality!

What are some interesting facts or hobbies about yourself that you’d like to share?

Philosophy is my main hobby as well as my field of research and teaching. And so I’m fortunate to be able to do what I love most for work. But I’m also into retrocomputing, retrogaming, digital archiving, sci-fi and fantasy media, and all things coffee-related.