Talk
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking: Writing, Co-Writing, and Language
Pranav Anand
Associate Dean of Research for Humanities Division, and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute, UC Santa Cruz
For many humanists, writing is the double of thinking itself. Unsurprisingly, as educators, we have for generations emphasized writing practice as essential to the development of a host of critical thinking skills, including rhetorical structure, close analysis, and comparative reasoning. Writing assignments are thus used not just to evaluate student learning but to directly improve it.
Large language models, with their ability to construct coherent, context-appropriate prose, thus feel like an existential threat. They can generate essays with ease that invalidate our assessment systems. And by encouraging early writers to offload some of the cognitive burden of writing, they rob those writers of the learning that comes from taking on those tasks themselves.
In this talk, I present some reasons not for optimism per se, but realism. Considering the literature of the learning efficacy of writing in psychology, I suggest that however profound the benefits from writing may be in principle, our historic practices have not lived up to that promise. Large language models, I argue, present an important opportunity to isolate the processes recruited during writing, and to make crucial progress on understanding how writing reflects our thinking, and how it shapes it.
This talk is a part of the Language & AI Conference 2026
Bio:
Pranav Anand is a Professor of linguistics and Faculty Director of The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, where he is also Associate Dean for Research for the Humanities Division. A specialist in semantics and pragmatics, his research concentrates on the study of how language is sensitive to context-dependence, perspective, and subjectivity. His work which leverages linguistic fieldwork, logical analysis, philosophy of language, and computational linguistics, has examined affect and sentiment, debate and persuasion, narrative, ellipsis and fragments, and modality and knowledge. Current projects include work on gesture, intonation, and cognitive offloading.
Friday, February 13, 2026
B-4 Dwinelle & Zoom, 3-5 pm
This lecture is sponsored by the College of Letters and Science.
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