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Articles by Lisa Siraganian
Tool or Colleague? The Case against Personhood for AI
On February 16, 2017, the European Parliament passed a resolution, “Civil Law Rules on Robotics,” declaring that “the autonomy of robots raises the question of their nature in the light of the existing legal categories or whether a new category should be created, with its own specific features and implications.” In other words, perhaps robots (now apparently possessing “autonomy”—more on that dubious claim below) should be placed in some new kind of legal category that specially regards their...
Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot
This past spring, I received an email announcing Johns Hopkins’s new comprehensive partnership with a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute.
Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity
Among the various eye-popping demands the Trump administration made of Harvard University in its infamous April 11, 2025, letterwas the bullet point on “Viewpoint Diversity in Admissions and Hiring.” By August 2025, the letter stated, Harvard had to commission an outside party “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” The term viewpoint diversity was not...
Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity
This article is part of a preview of the fall 2025 issue of Academe. The full issue will be published in October.
On Accidental and Parasitic Language
“Can Computers Create Meanings?” The point of the wave poem in Knapp and Michaels’s “Against Theory” was neither to ask that question, nor to ask if oceans can intend to write messages in the sand. The point was to show why the kinds of responses you come up with to account for the wave poem event only fall into two categories. Either you assume some entity intending to mean, or you assume an account of natural accidents producing marks resembling words.
Against Theory, now with bots! On the Persistent Fallacy of Intentionless Speech
If Siri responded to your questions with QAnon conspiracy theories, would you want her answers to be legally protected?
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