This was another essay written for the optional Philosophy of Mind module I choose to take at school, and it started with something embarrassingly mundane: four years of failing to learn German and Japanese despite textbooks, Duolingo, and YouTube tutorials.
At some point the failure became philosophically interesting. What exactly am I trying to do when I learn a word? The standard picture, that words are labels mapping onto concepts and learning is just memorising the mapping, felt obviously incomplete. This essay chases down that intuition through Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world, Dreyfus's critique of classical AI, and Wittgenstein's later work on meaning as use. I concluded that drilling vocabulary is a category error. Words are tools, not labels, and tools only have their grip inside the workshop. One-way tickets to Germany and Japan begin to look philosophically justified. The essay resurfaced some of the subconscious assumptions I had previously made in neuroscience, and certainly these subconscious biases also apply to academia and neurotech research (and how it's marketed).