Hermeneutic Heretic

Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com
That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell’s boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of Bush is not only broad but deep; 52 percent of Americans “strongly” disapprove of his performance and 28 percent describe themselves as “angry.”

“A lot of the commentary that comes out of the Internet world is very harsh,” said Frank J. Donatelli, White House political director for Ronald Reagan. “That has a tendency to reinforce people’s opinions and harden people’s opinions.”

This sounds like a plausible explanation of the difference between Bush and Carter or Bush and Truman. But it makes a lot less sense when confronted with the following description of Truman’s reelection. If the above story were accurate, then Truman wouldn’t have stood a chance without some sort of an internet.

Wikipedia’s entry on Truman: There followed a remarkable 21,928-mile^[69] presidential odyssey, an unprecedented personal appeal to the nation. Truman and his staff crisscrossed the United States in the presidential train; his “whistlestop” tactic of giving brief speeches from the rear platform of the observation car Ferdinand Magellan became iconic of the entire campaign.^[70] His combative appearances, such as those at the town square of Harrisburg, Illinois, captured the popular imagination and drew huge crowds. (Six stops in Michigan drew a combined total of half a million people;^[71] a full million turned out for a New York City appearance.^[72]).

The massive, mostly spontaneous gatherings at Truman’s depot events were an important sign of a critical change in momentum in the campaign — but this shift went virtually unnoticed by the national press corps, which simply continued reporting Republican Thomas Dewey’s (supposedly) impending victory as a certainty. One reason for the press’s inaccurate projection was polls conducted primarily by telephone during a time when many people, including much of Truman’s populist base, did not own a telephone.^[73] This skewed the data to indicate a stronger support base for Dewey than existed, which contributed to the media’s perception of Truman’s bleak chances.

Yet, how come Howard Dean and George McGovern lost? Quite obviously the processes of opinion formation and decision making are more complex.

So what we’re dealing with here is some sort of public sense making through idealized narrative (or schematic scenarios) that I would be willing to include under the umbrella of frame negotiation.

New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary?
she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action.

But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as being prepared to nuke Iran if necessary. There is no blueprint, after all, for how a woman should pursue the US presidency. Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher: all managed to suspend their sexuality while exercising political power, as does Angela Merkel, but in their cases nothing like the might of the American presidency was at stake.

In countless ways, every day, Clinton has to navigate her way through potentially cataclys mic storms stemming from these dilemmas that male candidates simply never have to confront. Her husband, for example, is prone to “tearing up” when confronted by human suffering - but woe betide her if she does the same, thus showing what, in a woman, would be widely derided as weakness. The contrast is a paradox: Bill possesses the kind of enormously folksy media charm that his wife lacks, but she has much the more disciplined and focused intellect.

…

At meetings, she feels obliged to crack jokes about trying to lose weight. Her main Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, provides photo opportunities of himself indulging in the “quintessentially American” recreation of shooting hoops on a basketball court; for her, there is no sporting equivalent open to a woman that would not carry the risk of being perceived as butch.

This is a revealing statement in a number of ways. It contains within it one of the central dilemmas of social science. The dilemma is this: if we are in thrall of our cognition (slaves to image, willing sheep falling into frame) how can we display any autonomy of it at all, such as this meta-statement. The traditional answer that this is only possible for the educated and determined has been proved to be at least partially incorrect but the susceptibility of humans to conceptual manipulation is an intuitively appealing solution. Because, obviously, in order for our cognition to be as powerful as it is at processing the complex imagery of our social environment, it must be very difficult for an individual to stop its flow of entailments and see the world from a cognitively autonomous perspective. Yet, at least partially, people do this all the time. How come that Andrew Stephen, the author of this piece, is able to recognize the pitfalls of social imagery of appropriate public behavior for women and the rest of the world isn’t? However, on the other hand, this autonomy is not something that can be readily observed over large population, although any one individual seems capable of it to a certain degree. I invite anyone reading this (women included) to imagine Hilary Clinton in an overtly feminine role or playing basketball. No matter what prejudices one holds propositionally, the imagistic ones require a certain amount of retuning. Of course, part of the problem is the image of Hillary Clinton herself (a change in a friend’s haircut takes a while to get used to as well) which is more prominently available to us and the public negotiation that necessarily accompanies it. Witness the following from the Washington Post:

Hillary Clinton’s Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory - washingtonpost.com
There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2. It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton.

…

With Clinton, there was the sense that you were catching a surreptitious glimpse at something private. You were intruding — being a voyeur. Showing cleavage is a request to be engaged in a particular way. It doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman is asking to be objectified, but it does suggest a certain confidence and physical ease. It means that a woman is content being perceived as a sexual person in addition to being seen as someone who is intelligent, authoritative, witty and whatever else might define her personality. It also means that she feels that all those other characteristics are so apparent and undeniable, that they will not be overshadowed.

To display cleavage in a setting that does not involve cocktails and hors d’oeuvres is a provocation. It requires that a woman be utterly at ease in her skin, coolly confident about her appearance, unflinching about her sense of style. Any hint of ambivalence makes everyone uncomfortable. And in matters of style, Clinton is as noncommittal as ever.

While it can be argued that other prominent candidates’ wardrobes receive similar scrutiny (as well as other opportunistic or parasitic blends such as Obama’s name’s similarity to Osama), it makes the navigation of this conceptual field no less confusing.

Women Supportive but Skeptical of Clinton, Poll Says - New York Times
Mrs. Clinton’s choices as a woman and a political figure have been intensely scrutinized during her 15 years on the national stage, and as she runs for president, the debate about her remains polarizing, politically and culturally.

The complex combination of negotiation and the unconscious constraints on blending that arise ‘naturally’ is something that will be a very difficult nut to crack for any social theory that wants to remain cognitively realistic and vice versa.

(A perhaps dim) Awareness of this is adumbrated in this conclusion to a Politico’s piece finding parallels between Clinton’s image with that of fictional female presidents and Katie Couric’s persona as a news anchor.

TV provides poor signal for Hillary - David Paul Kuhn - Politico.com UCLA’s Suber predicts that Clinton’s success or failure, like that of Couric and Davis, will ultimately hinge less on gender identity than other factors, tangible and more ephemeral, that influence whether voters believe Clinton fits the part. “It’s not that different from the discussion producers have when they are talking about casting actors,� Suber says. “Who is believable in a role? ‘Well, what have they done?’ is always the first question. Everybody typecasts.�

BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking

“Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous.”Only when it comes to more difficult things - such as a change of terrain - that’s when the brain steps in and says ‘now we are moving from ice to sand and I have to change something’.

“This is a good model because you are easing the load of control - if your brain had to think all the time about walking, it’s doubtful you could have a conversation at the same time.”

This approach to robotics is not new (as far as I know it was pioneered by Brooks at MIT, and sure enough, the academic paper references Brooks). Neither is an equivalent view of language. But I like the simple way it is expressed in this quote. First, it is important to keep in mind that this is only an analogical rather than directly descriptive view of language. Much confusion has sprung up from taking Krashen’s notion of grammar as an ‘affective filter’ on language production too literally. However, there are many phenomena in language where such local effects are in evidence. They should not be confused with the notion of linguistic modularity, though. Many of these local phenomena overlap with other local phenomena and from certain perspectives disappear altogether.

One class of these are my favorite local grammars. We don’t need to know that much about English to be able to find ‘definitions’ in a large corpus. Another type are activities associated with parsing. In fact (recalling Krashen again), we could rephrase the above into “one could not process language (or the rules of language) and have a conversation at the same time.” Parsing a sentence is a local phenomenon handled away from regular speech (this does not necessarily require that there be a neural locus for any of this). First and second language learning bring forth another class of local language effects, as does text editing or writing poetry. None of these activities require the activation of a complex central neural process. They can happen locally (again, I have no idea what locally would really mean, it is the analogy that I’m trying to use to elucidate something puzzling).

OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan
President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response.

That’s the deal. It’s the real “grand bargain.” If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives in New Jersey, this is what you do: You hire a president and tell him to take care of everything you can’t take care of–the security of the nation, its well-being, its long-term interests. And you in turn do your part. You meet your part of the bargain. You work, pay your taxes, which are your financial contribution to making it all work, you become involved in local things–the boy’s ball team, the library, the homeless shelter. You handle what you can handle within your ken, and give the big things to the president.

And if he can’t do it, or if he can’t do it as well as you pay the mortgage and help the kid next door, you get mad. And you fire him.

Aside from the rather uninteresting fact that Republicans are turning on Bush now, this opinion column shows a very common part of framing: the retelling of schematized stories that form the dynamic image schemas that are one of the key components of conceptual frames. Noonan’s story is less schematic on the surface due to ‘human interest’ restrictions of her genre but even her chosen real life anchors serve to underline the basic schematicity of her narrative: “midlevel Verizon exexutive who lives in Jersey” despite its apparent specificity produces a much more generalized image describing an underdetermined but readily identifiable class of people.

But it is the intent and context of this “story” that are of real importance. Not only does it serve to evoke a culturally relevant image but also produces an account of a narrative folk theory of social order (democracy). It sets out the general schema of exchange instantiated through the analogy of employment. The president is employed to do a job just like a Verizon executive is employed to do a job. However, the job is not just mercenary exchange of services for money, it involves duty to community and the moral good: involvement in local affairs, caring for family. Just like the president is expected to do more than just do a job. He is expected to maintain the moral order. Although this part of the job does not map perfectly onto the domain of employment, the job of the voters is to vote the president out. Noonan alludes to another discrepancy in the concluding paragraph:

Americans can’t fire the president right now, so they’re waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.

This is the process by which understanding of the social world is negotiated. Not all of this process is conscious and volitional but much of it is at least partially deliberate and the role of the columnist is socially sanctioned for this very purpose.

Michael Gerson - What Atheists Can’t Answer - washingtonpost.com
So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: “Obey your evolutionary instincts” because those instincts are conflicted. “Respect your brain chemistry” or “follow your mental wiring” don’t seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: “To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I’m going to do whatever I please.”
… Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

In a way, this is a very good way of limiting the sense in which atheism is like religion. It needs to deal with the essentially amoral stance that the moral good is simply epiphenomenal to the material existence. That is the only rational description of the human condition: because of whatever configurational properties of our body/mind, we tend to agree on certain principles of good (with enough variation to confound assumptions of grand design). An amoral or immoral actor in a system of moral actor is equivalent to the ‘freeloader’ individuals against whom evolutionary forces tend ward off the ‘moral majority’ across most species. They exist as individuals but are not evolutionarily successful enough to take over (the species where they did presumably did not breed to tell the tale). How can an atheist call a thief or even a murderer immoral, if all this person has transgressed is a temporally agreed consensus against such action? The answer, of course, is correctly that he or she cannot. But instead of arguing that morality and good do should be a deliberate act of the individual most atheists refer to a version of secular humanism which refers to the authority of common humanity (and all the values associated with it; cf. e.g. Arendt invoking the concept of animal pity in connection with the Eichman trial). There is nothing wrong with that only it is no different than referring to God as the authority (particularly since while theists rely on interpretation of the good word by human rather than divine mediators). With secular humanism, God is not necessary. There are many religious cultures where the moral good is not exclusively sanctioned by a deity. But there is no good reason to assume that secular humanism is common to all humanity any more than religious belief is. It is simply an easy substitute for divine sanction. Morality as choice and non-judgmental attitude to ‘freeloader-behavior are simply too scary (although they in no way preclude an allegiance to legal order sanctioning against freeloader-behavior). Giving a human actor freedom to choose badly (even at the expense of others) is not something that’s easy to advocate. But, at least, as the atheists argue, we do not need fear as the basis of moral behavior. And how else can we describe rationalistic religious conviction as described in the concluding paragraph of the column?

None of this amounts to proof of God’s existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement — which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

The concluding analogy is noteworthy in the context with the current preoccupation with the ‘culture of life’ where death and suffering are to be avoided at all cost (a conviction shared by secularists and theists alike).

An parallel (and much more passionate) argument was made by  Scarecrow that:

it strikes me as odd to claim as a moral advantage the inability to see that what his President has done (and Gerson has justified) in his God’s name is, on moral grounds, only barely distinguishable from the acts of the crazed religious zealots who, in Allah’s name, flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, except for the fact that the Christian had enough firepower to kill 100 times more people than the Islamists.

Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia : OUPblog
Original      New
sleight of hand: 85%         15%: slight of hand
fazed by:          71%         29%: phased by

Ben Zimmer lists the increasing changes (by ‘false’ analogy) in the spelling of some common English idioms. I saw his table and wondered what would happen in a Google Fight. Not only was the new usage prominent, it trounced the original with some vigor (first, second). Of course, in both of these examples the new spellings are homonyms, ie. somebody can be ’slight of hand’ (as in have thin fingers) and lots of things electrical can be ‘phased by’ other things electrical but when searching for those phrases the at least, the first handful of results was the new spelling.

This brings up an interesting question as to the relevance of a properly sampled corpus with regard to language usage consensus. Quite obviously common usage is reinforced on the internet in a variety of ways that are better accounted for by sociology than linguistics. I’m sure there’s research on this out there.

Language Log: Keeping “wrong grammar” off the air

A program will be assigned a “PG” rating if it shows “people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects).”

The article doesn’t say who gets to be the “grammar cop” — some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem to a clerk. There’s potential for a comic novel here. Usually it’s self-appointed language mavens who get to make up arbitrary prescriptions. Imagine, however, being a young company clerk in Bangkok, endowed with the power to decide (say) that dai “get, be able to” can’t be used with compound verbs, or that theung “although” should never be used to start a sentence. And given the general Southeast Asian areal interest in subtleword-play, you could even invent some politicially subversive grammatical prescriptions.

In a casual conversation, my linguistics teacher and friend ZdenÄ›k Starý, once remarked that it is important to see language purism (a historical phenomenon in the development of Czech) as part of linguistic competence, as indispensable to the functioning of language as the ability to produce syntactically well-formed sentences. Another Czech linguist, J. V. Neústupný has written about the importance of the language area as being in some ways greater the the genealogical relationships among languages. I’ve been trying to explore the consequences of this ever since and I’m always reminded of this when linguists criticize language mavens, such as the one above. Not that the mavens don’t talk a lot of nonsense about the “good” use of language. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine the functioning of language without linguistic conservatism of which the mavens are one of many instantiations. Of course, the progressives (among whom you will find most theoretical linguists) have the same right to enter into this discussion, because language innovation is as important as linguistic conservatism. In fact, the consensus that is linguistic usage emerges out of the conversation between conserving and innovating tendencies.

The broader question that applies to academics outside their ivory towers is what should the linguist who knows this do as a political actor. On the one hand, she is aware of the complexities of language as a social as well as cognitive and textual phenomenon, but on the other, she cannot escape being a member of the linguistic community. Should she suggest conservatism or innovation? What status should her familiarity with the ’science’ of language afford her in the political context? All this speaks to the tension between academic knowledge and political action. Sociologists, educators, policy analysts all have this problem. Enacted knowledge (and an act of publication is a kind of enactment) itself becomes subject to academic inquiry. Does it cease to be academic?

Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and American troops are caught in the middle.

This is as clear a statement of collective avoidance of causal responsibility. “We removed a vicious dictator, now the rest is up to the Iraqis” seems to be the theme of the Iraq war opposition in the US. What I have yet to see is an admission of responsibility for the current state and a clear statement of how the US proposes to clean up the mess. Keeping troops in Iraq probably won’t do that but long-term financial assistance with no strings attached might. But for some reason troop withdrawal seems to be an end in itself. This an interesting example of what symbolic interactionists called collective action. Group values and patterns of behavior are confirmed through every discursive act and an individual’s collective belonging is defined through replicating these acts - whether consciously or subconsciously. It is, of course, possible that taking actual responsibility for the chaos in Iraq is not an obvious thing and I’m not being realistic, but it seems to me that somebody would come up with it, at least as a “bad” option, and collective values negotiation is my only explanation for why that hasn’t happened.

Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics
All that the Court actually argues is that “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” contains a reference to drug use.

Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is not the only one, and dismissing the banner as meaningless ignores its undeniable reference to illegal drugs. [emphasis mine]

That is probably true, but a reference is not a proposition and does not support any inference as to the speaker’s attitude toward smoking marijuana. Even if the banner said “smoking marijuana” we could not say whether it meant “Smoking marijuana is hazardous.” or “Smoking marijuana is delightful.” or something else.

In sum, from the observation that the banner contains a reference to smoking marijuana, and the false assumption that the banner must express a proposition, the Court has invalidly inferred a particular proposition. The slogan is in fact meaningless in the sense that it expresses no proposition, and Frederick gave a perfectly plausible explanation for the use of a meaningless slogan. The Court was therefore wrong in finding that the banner advocates the use of marijuana.

This is as good a reason for finding some branches of modern linguistics to be at a dead end as any. Now, I’m all for legalizing marijuana (even though I’ve never tried it), and I’m not a big fan of the US Supreme Court’s recent right-wing turn, but this argument based on the Supreme Court’s assumed transgression against ’semantics’ is completely spurious. It relies on semantics being devoid of any context and understanding. True, ‘Bong hits 4 Jesus’ doesn’t say that people should do it but in the context, it is a clear anti-establishment message with its associated frames of freedom to choose and altered minds. For anybody to argue that that is not how the message would be read by a majority of readers and that the author (no matter what is true intentions) did not understand that that’s how the message would be read is simply to ignore how meaning making in natural language occurs.

What is interesting about this is that a complete syntactic and semantic  parsing of the message is not necessary. The meaning and structure of the sentence are underdetermined which contributes to its various speech act forces. All sorts of arguments can be made for not suppressing the message but one based on its being ambiguous, seems to me, to be the least fruitful.

Language Log: The Linguistic Abilities of the Presidential Candidates
For what it’s worth, if we count only confirmed languages spoken fluently or reasonably well, the average number of languages other than English spoken by the Democrats is 0.83, by the Republicans 0.33, or 0.53 overall. I can’t say that I’m impressed.

This is a useful example of the sorts of evidence one can find for conceptual frames and folk theories that go into their make up. The author, a professional linguist, propounds a common belief among language professionals: knowing other languages is good; it exposes us to other points of view and makes it easier to communicate across the world.

What is interesting about this hypothesis is that there is actually no evidence for it whatsoever. It is predicated entirely on schematized scenarios of what a multilingual person can do. The problem is that these scenarios are generalized from anecdotes and are handed down without much questioning. For instance, this frame relies on a largely unproblematic view of “knowing a language”. One can know a language at multiple levels from beginner to fluent. But not everybody is a beginner or a fluent speaker in the same way. This is particularly important in Subsaharan Africa (and elsewhere) where multilingualism seems to be the norm. But often (although not always) these people are speakers of related languages and their ability to speak them is different from what we think about when we say somebody knows English or French. (The literature on this is extensive but not focused to question the basic assumptions.)
But this could probably be overcome. What is more problematic is the assumption of personal benefit resulting in some greater understanding of the other and a more open outlook of the world. But bilingual people can be just as ethnocentric and resistant to other point of views and monolinguals. I’m aware of no study that would demonstrate that this is otherwise.
It is a common assumption that knowing one foreign language makes learning another easier. But this is only true of some kinds of knowing this foreign language. There are many bilinguals who find learning another language difficult. This can be for a variety of reasons: their motivation changes, the language is too different, there are other external issues that are in the way. Or learning that first second language was a fluke, a result of some special confluence of factors. It seemed easy but no ‘lessons’ were learned for learning another language. Second language acquisition is a bit of a mystery as is the use of the second language. It is certainly not a monolithic uniform experience that could be reduced to a number as in the quote above.
This leads us to questioning the final hidden assumption underneath this bit of text. Universal multilingualism will have societal benefits. It will make the whole group more knowledgeable of the world and open to communication. By these standards the above mentioned Africa should be a paradise on Earth. Not so. Neither is Belgium nor was the semi-bilingual Czechoslovakia. All Americans learning foreign languages is probably not as useful to world peace as everybody else learning English (although I’m making no claims either way).
One of the underlying errors here is the scenario of ‘accidental learning’ by ‘rubbing off’ or  ‘necessary learning’ as a consequence of some  other mental conditions and the cumulative effect of these individual changes on the group as a whole.  But is we  want to teach somebody to be open and understanding, that’s what we have to teach them. Not teach them something else and hope for the best. (The problem is that we don’t know how to teach that en masse - although it can be done in small groups.)
Now, I’m not against people learning many languages (I am bi-lingual, fluent in one more language and have a passing knowledge of another hald a dozen) but the way I know languages is different from the way most non-linguists know languages. I believe that it has made me more open and understanding and would not want to deny that experience to others. But I’m skeptical about imposing my way of knowing a language on others or assuming the same consequences for them. Being bilingual is a lot of fun but it is a long, drawn out process and someone like Rudi Gulliani could probably make himself more knowledgeable of the world in other ways than taking a few lessons in basic Spanish.