But upon closer reading I now think it's actually the reverse. The author apparently tried very hard to obfuscate the fact that he does have something meaningful to say by using utterly nonsensical sounding language.
Effectiveness of communication is relative, of course, and what is appropriate for an audience may not be appropriate for another. A parallel with programming languages can be drawn here: mainstream language programmers often have a knee-jerk reaction to being told "look, in Haskell, this program that took you 80 lines in your favorite OOP language is just 4 lines of almost only special characters that look like I banged my head on the keyboard!" but it's just a matter of easing into a different language and different concepts.
I also know from my own field that some people like to write for effect rather than effectiveness.
At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, perhaps Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" [0] is relevant here?
[0] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
EDIT2: i think the author is actually talking about cogsci "mental propositions". (see my other comment)
The author's point in part 1 is that type systems are intrinsically incapable of formalizing propositions so as to achieve the holy grail of making software systems effective, safe, or whatever other property is sought after, in the real world. The author then goes on to explain this idea and to suggest a different approach.
As for the Curry-Howard isomorphism, the author does say it is perfectly valid from a mathematical point of view, but that is not the subject of the text.
could you expand on this?
For example, this:
This observation which they refer to as the “hard problem of content” or the “covariance-is-not-content principle” is that systems acting on covariance information, while acting on information, do not constitute content-bearing systems, because to bear content is to embody claims about how things stand, when in fact they merely embody capacities to affect the world.
is just complete nonsense, and to extract the charitable reading I put in quotes above, you have to read closely for paragraph after paragrah to see that what's going on is the word "content" is reserved to mean "things brain-like things do in a brain-like way to other brain-like things in a context built for brain-like things."
Again, okay! But: it's wildly misleading to frame this as being about mathematical logic or the metaphysics of symbols, syntax and semantics.
"The proposition is a concept borrowed by cognitive psychologists from linguists and logicians. The propostion is the most basic unit of meaning in a [mental] representation." [1]
the article seems to mostly be talking about AI and the problems of making it "actually refer to the real world". so i think title could be paraphrased as sth like "Information about the world ([mental] propositions) is hard to represent with symbolic, digital things (types)".
[1](http://www.bcp.psych.ualberta.ca/~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictiona...)
