Hermeneutic Heretic

When Languages Die: Science and Sentiment :
In his book When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge K. David Harrison illustrates the individual face of language loss, as well as its global scale. He shows that the disappearance of a language is a loss not only for the community of speakers itself but also for our common human knowledge of mathematics, biology, philosophy etc… (from OUPblog)

This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison’s book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language’s structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? (from Amazon description)

There is an interesting evolutionary scenario often proposed by linguists studying the decline of languages. Language preserves cultural knowledge, it is kind of like a cultural DNA. And just like with our crop species we need to preserve as much diversity as possible and should therefore try to keep smaller languages from disappearing. And similar arguments are posed by proponents of multiculturalism. We need as many perspectives of the world as possible to help us survive. And, frequently, the metaphor holds up. Jarred Diamond makes a very convincing case in ‘Collapse’ for the diversity of perspective as being vital to the survival of social groups under changing environmental (and other conditions). A local categorization can easily be used to uncover something about the flora and fauna. However, a disappearing tense system (while a tragic loss for linguists) or a morphological complexity is unlikely to make much of a difference (no matter what Whorf’s misinterpreters try to claim).

And there is an even deeper paradox hidden in this claim. One part of a ny language is a system of prejudice and discrimination. Should we try to preserve that as well. How about the disappearance of ‘diachronic dialects’? Should we try to preserve the teenage language of the 1980s? Or should we try to preserve the old language of racism and sexism that has been slowly transforming into a new language of racism and sexism more palatable to current mores? Is keeping Huckleberry Finn in the libraries enough? Should we try to support enclaves of racist and homophobic speech? This becomes even more invidious when applied to culture? Should we keep some cultures that subjugate women and practice female genital mutilation just on the off chance that their practices might come in handy one day when the climate changes and we need a new social order?

The problem is that this mourning of the death of languages (and as a linguist I say keep as many as possible) is based on an imperialistically romantic notion of the noble savage and finding “beauty” and “wonderment” in forgotten places. But from a purely investigative perspective there’s no huge need for that. Here’s an idea for a project: “English as an exotic language and Anglos as an exotic peoples” - somebody get on with it.

“Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill.” Lt. Col. Nagel summarizing a new US Army counterinsurgency manual (on the Daily Show)

This quote reminds of the critique of universalist pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka and others (e.g. Goddard) points out that concepts like politeness (let alone professionalism) are extremely culture and language specific. Politeness is different in culture not only in its overt expressions but also in its cultural context (who to be polite to when) and social consequence. So as a result, soldiers trying to be “polite and professional” are more likely to have to kill people. And killing is of course the most universal of these three concepts (although, even there, interesting and profound differences can be found). The Army supposedly consulted ethnographers and it would be interesting to see what advice they gave, how it was conveyed in the manual and how its meaning is negotiated by soldiers on the ground.

Here’s a suggested formulation for the manual:

Deep down all people are the same and not just in that they bleed when you cut them. But their sameness is hidden under so many intersecting layers of surprising and unsystematic differences (kind of like a mutant cancerous onion) that it may take a life time of interacting with lots of people to find out what it is that they have in common with you. That’s why you should try to kill as few of them as possible. In some cultures own death is not avoided at all costs if there is a common good to be had. Warriors have starved themselves to death to preserve resources for others or let themselves to be killed rather than kill someone (even in self-defence) who is important to the bigger picture or just to be polite and professional. Think about that!

 

Its All Semantics - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
A similarly obtuse but less jargon-laden example of unintentially comedic writing is the title of IRS form 5213, which I am convinced was penned by Terry Gilliam a la Crimson Permanent Assurance:
“Election to postpone determination as to whether the presumption applies that an activity is engaged in for profit�.

This is an excerpt from a lengthy discussion of a critique of alleged ‘obtuse’ and ‘jargon-laden’ language used by a professional linguist. The comments basically divide between proponents of a ‘folk theory’ of language use and ‘expert theory’ of language use.

1. Folk theory: Language should be used clearly so that it is understood by most people.  Effort should be made by speakers/writers to use common expressions where they are available. There are some exceptions such as mathematics and physics.
2. Expert theory: In some cases, jargon is acceptable because there are ‘technical meanings’ that are different from ‘common usage’. Otherwise, clarity of expression is valued and obfuscation is to be avoided.

This debate is interesting because we can see the intermingling of the two theories in one place. This suggests that the boundary between expert and folk theory is more like an arbitrary (socially determined) point on a continuum. This is one point where social sciences/humanities may be markedly different from some natural sciences like physics and chemistry.

Film examines Daily Mail ‘diet’ | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited
In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail.

For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources except for the middle market tabloid.

…

Mr Angel said: “It’s important to know what the Mail thinks, because it’s a lightning rod (or so it claims) to ‘Middle England’ - that ill-defined and slightly scary mass of people whose various incarnations include the ‘Moral Majority’ and ‘All Right Thinking People’.

I don’t know if Nick Angel realizes it, but he’s in good academic company. An entire field of inquiry called Critical Discourse Analysis (previously Critical Linguistics) is devoted to investigating the overt and covert vision of the media and other forms of public discourse. And like him, they face a potential pitfall, in some of the assumptions of conceptual inevitability as opposed to conceptual autonomy. The title and inspiration of Mr. Angel’s work (I haven’t seen it yet so I can only speculate on the details; but I doubt I’m far off in guessing) is very telling. It starts with an interesting conceptual blend (metaphor) of food and news. Food provides nutrition and nourishment to the body but the wrong composition can have adverse effects on the body. We (our body) have no control over the effects of what we ingest. We can only make choices about what we eat. If news (and information in general) is like that, than we are completely powerless against propaganda. That is quite obviously not true and neither CDA nor Nick Angel would claim that. These people read the Daily Mail professionally and it doesn’t “poison” their minds. If it did, they would stop doing what they are doing and start writing for The Daily Mail. But the implication of this metaphor (blend) is strongly in the direction of strong influences (particularly over ‘casual’, ‘non-critical’ readers) that hold their audience in a kind of a thrall.

Another Guardian correspondent, Peter Cole, a professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield, (who otherwise does a good job of looking at the vision of the Daily Mail) summarizes the picture in this way:

Why middle England gets the Mail | Media | MediaGuardian.co.uk
most of their readers restrict themselves to one paper a day, and find references there to what other papers are saying of little relevance. These readers tend to regard their chosen paper as objective and unbiased and have prejudices against other papers based frequently on never having read them.

Here are two quotes from Teun van Dijk’s 1991 Racism in the Press:

“the manufacture of consent, also through the Dutch Press, is such that the people have the illusion of freedom of opinion, but they do not realize how strongly ideological constraints set the latitude of attitude formation and the terms of the public debate.” (p. 243)

“media as a whole define the internal structures, the points of relevance, and especially the ideological boundaries of social representations. They provide the ready-made [DL] models, that is, the facts and opinions, that people use partly in what to think, but more important which they also used in devising how to think about ethnic affairs.” (p. 244)

However, even van Dijk would admit (and his research shows) that there is a lot of variety of opinion and a significant level of autonomy readers are able to exhibit. The problem is that this autonomy often takes forms that are not very palatable to the liberal elites (of which I am one) or other arbiters of thought and action. Students who don’t take assignments seriously, prisoners who run their institution, patients who seek alternative remedies, job or asylum seekers making the most (gaming) the system, etc. All of these are instances of autonomy that find disfavor with one holder of collective prestige or another.

Indeed, there is a case to be made that some of the less appealing forms of political expression (like the British National Party in the UK) are actually instances of conceptual and intellectual autonomy. The Daily Mail (as well as whatever party publication and the ‘boys down the pub’) notwithstanding, all these people have been exposed since an early age to a concerted inclusionist, secular humanist message. How come they are not the good middle-class liberals we would like everyone to be? Why hasn’t this taken hold? The assumption is that there must be something wrong with them: either they are not smart enough to understand or they were seduced by ‘racist’ propaganda. (This was wonderfully satirized by Woody Allen’s ‘Everybody says I love you’ where a Republican son of a liberal NY family turned out to have a brain tumor, after the removal of which he went back to being a good left-wind Democrat.) But we could also look at them as people who were able to withstand the barrage of liberal propaganda and form their own opinion more suitable to their situation. This is certainly how the right wing in America thinks of themselves (sometimes paradoxically - such as Rush Limbaugh’s supporters calling themselves ‘dittoheads’).

This is how Howard Becker and his collaborators described the student culture in 1961:

“Student culture consists of collective responses to problems posed for students by the environment.” …

“the students collectively set the level and direction of their efforts to learn. […] these levels and directions are not the result of some conscious cabal, but […] they are the working-out in practice of the perspectives from which the students view their day-to-day problems in relation to their long-term goals. The perspectives, themselves collectively developed, are organizations of ideas and actions. The actions derive their rationale from the ideas; the ideas are sustained by success in action. The whole becomes a complex of mutual expectations.” (p. 435)

I suspect that we should look for something similar behind the formation of political opinion and the source of political action. In a way, the above quoted Peter Cole summarizes The Daily Mail in a way that is almost celebratory of its ‘autonomy’:

The Mail is ruthlessly edited and always quick off the mark. Its topical features are always on the day rather than tomorrow, and it commissions much more than it uses, an expensive strategy. It has never followed the youth obsession that has so often preoccupied rivals. It regularly serialises books by or about film or pop stars of another age. It seems not to care that the 60s generation is now in its 60s. Is this because more than 40% of its readers are over 55, and 60% over 45?

The story of the ‘idea diet’ is very compelling but clearly insufficient unless we tell some other stories to help us determine its limits. That is not to say that some aspects of the metaphor of ‘consuming’ are not useful as a way of viewing the media (van Dijk’s results and ‘common experience’ indicate that it is consonant with some parts of our social reality). However, if we shouldn’t loose sight of the limits of this metaphor and most importantly we should actively seek to investigate its limits (and with that the limits of our prejudices) rather than remain within the comfort zone of its prototypical validity (both in research and casual conversation).

[A quick note on research as casual conversation. Its purpose is more often than not that of confirming identity and belonging (not unlike two modems making noises at each other). So the challenging of stereotypes there might not be all that feasible (ie. the minute we start doing it, the conversation ceases to be casual). But it is interesting how much academic research and general discussion is also of this nature.]

The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com
It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and sweet and kind, a little kid who cried when I accidentally squashed a ladybug. I can’t imagine her hurting someone on purpose, or someone wanting to hurt her.

First and foremost, this is, hands down the best-written blog on the web (and I know these things, having, as I do, exquisite taste for language and narrative structure). This single post can be used as a pretext for asking a whole lot of interesting (to me with my exquisite tastes) questions.

Let’s start with the really puzzling question of literary quality. There are an enormous number of talented writers on the web (Offsprung features quite a few of them). Why does Terrible Mother stand head and shoulders above so many of them? I’d be the first to admit the subjectivity of narrative aesthetic experience but there are some writers whose quality cannot be disputed regardless of enjoyment. TM is one of them. I (and many good critics) can generally recognize them but if we were to apply an arsenal of recognized techniques of literary analysis would the ‘good ones’ be enmeshed in the web or slip through the cracks (to mix me a metaphor or two)? I suspect conceptual and formal blending has something to do with it. Just the right amount of description to trigger the right images, set up and confound expectations, follow through with the emotions. In other words, the really powerful writer, reconfigures the constraints on conceptual integration that usually apply in our world of speech and thought and substitutes those applying in a world over which she has full control. Given that blending is not a discrete serial algorithmic process but rather a massively parallel fuzzy process, in which underspecification of reference is as important as the profiling and backgrounding of conceptual elements, it is unlikely that the identification of quality can be completely universal or subject to traditional ‘academic’ analysis. No wonder, then, that so much literary criticism (all of it, in fact) is mostly poetry about poetry. And, on reflection, despite the formalists, structuralists’ and others’ efforts to the contrary, may be a good thing.
Now for something completely different: Feminism and social psychology. First, both ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ can be cruel in the folk theoretical framings currently being negotiated in the Anglo culture. Some have expressed a surprise at Private Lyndie English and others have seen it as a confirmation of the untenability of the ‘women as the gentler sex’ hypothesis. Quite obviously, human beings, when put in certain configurations will display the kind of ‘banal evil’ that when given an institutional backing can devolve into repression or genocide (Arendt, Baumann). It’s been more than thirty years since the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s work and over half a century since Asch’s work on conformity. Jane Elliott replays many of these in her Class Divided and Blue Eyed work. (It is interesting on its own that these seminal results have not made more of an impact in education and social science.) All of these experiments play themselves out daily in ‘boy groups’ and ‘girl groups’ in the ‘innocent’ guise of BFFs and ‘frenemies’.

Now for the advice to educators and parents (just as an interested observer rather than an active participant). The one concern expressed in public debates and private moments of anguish by parents is whether their child will be bullied in school. But in fact, the question they should be really asking, will their child be a bully? This is in some respects much more likely. Not because their child is bad (it is likely that only a comparatively few children are truly evil) but because of the capacity of enforced group identities to produce ‘banal evil’. But it is also interesting how little effect the efforts of educators seem to have. ‘How do you think that feels’ is as useful in engendering desired behavior as ‘have you taken out the trash?’. They should really look at some of the answers Milgram and Zimbardo offer. Some people seem to have an intrinsic ability to overcome the pressures put upon them by the authority of the individual or the group but most need help. In the groups of tweenagers, this is difficult because the sources of authority and prestige are so fluid. Adults play a certain role but the peer group is beginning to assert itself more and more. Furthermore, it is difficult to identify how a single individual will be influenced by their context. So an individual parent is pretty much stuck.
Social psychology can explain and predict group behavior pretty well but is much less successful at the individual. Psychoanalysis does not as good but decent job of the individual at the start and the end of the process of group interaction but is useless at navigating throughout simply because it cannot account for all the variable the group configuration will present. Bottom line, parenting is difficult for all and agonizing for the secular humanist parents. But in the hands of a gifted writer like Terrible Mother, it makes a hell of good read.

Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed
…newspapers’ core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it’s expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn’t really matter. There’s plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true.

The problem with many of the assumptions about the democratizing power of the internets, has been exactly this. The fact that anybody can post something online still doesn’t obviate the social needs for establishing networks of trust. That goes for art, as well as music. Often, people are not sure whether it is appropriate to like something until an appropriate trusted sources has given it a seal of approval. The problem is that there is privilege and power associated with being in a center of a network of trust. So a lot of people will vie for that position thus disturbing the supposedly egalitarian nature of the environment. Social networking can replicate some of this by automating trust (such as Digg’s algorithms) but it can’t completely do away with it. That’s why it’s likely that something newspaper-like will persist long after the last printed copy of the New York Times has been sold. (Of course, hopefully, it will have been replaced by ereaders with proper eink.)

‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com
I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does.

…

As the casualty count rose, I kept thinking about all those disability payments we taxpayers would have to pick up.

Now, all of this is harmless nonsense to those of us who understand the hero and villain business, and realize the simplistic bias that permeates Hollywood. But to impressionable audiences, the anti-American theme could resonate.

Apart from the fact that Bill O’Reilly is a half-witted bully and quite probably insane, he resonates strangely with some people doing critical discourse analysis. At the very start of the movement, Hodge and Kress (1979) wrote the following about a mildly right-wind editorial:

“As readers of this editorial we should have to be alert and willing to engage in mental exercise to get beyond the seductive simplicity of the final form, with just three entities, and seemingly precise relations, where everything seems to be there on the surface.” … “few commuters on the 8.05 from Brighton would have the energy to perform the mentail gymnastics required. Especially as they would have to perform them not once, but just about a dozen times on every full line of newsprint that they scan. After all, the crossword is there for mental exercise.” (p. 22)

This brings up a crucial question of our individual and collective autonomy of our cognitive system. Only the initiated, one folk theory goes, can truly overcome propaganda (be it political or contained in advertising) while others are completely under the spell of whatever their social and psychological cognition serves up.  But this unwitting agreement of these two forces (mutually recognized as evil) should be enough for us to doubt the ease with which such a theory should be promulgated. There is enough evidence for both easy suggestibility (see Lakoff’s ‘don’t think of an elephant’) and remarkable independence (Becker, Gamson). Further investigation is clearly needed.

Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online
There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy.

This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC staff. Can you imagine a BBC staff member slanting a programme towards the case for a stricter penal policy?

There’s a more generic case for agreement or disagreement with the general point of Antony Jay’s argument about the nature of the BBC’s liberal bias but he also presents arguments that point to the dual nature of many of the schematic narrative frames applied to judgments about public policy and its administration.
First, his use of ‘reasonable case’ reveals an interesting duality behind the folk theory of rationality. On the one hand, ‘reasonable’ is that that conforms to strictures of Aristotelian logic (such, as the excluded middle). By this account, a ‘reasonable case’ can be made for only one of the penal policies. However, there is another use of reasonable, i.e. such that can be agreed upon in a polite society. ‘Reasonable people’ are those who do not go to extremes at the expense of local  collective harmony. What is important for the study of framing is that this polysemy is underdetermined.

There is another case of framing: imaging a BBC employee to support conservative penal policy. This, in many ways, is the nature of the liberal media bias in the UK and US. It is difficult to observe it in fact but on the other hand it is difficult to imagine a member of the media supporting a conservative position. (Stephen Colbert unwittingly if wittily summarized this with his “truth has a well-known liberal bias” jibe. He in many ways reflected the impossibility of the liberal media imagining themselves in the wrong.)

So how did we get from there to here? Unless we understand that, we shall never get inside the media liberal mind. And the starting point is the realisation that there have always been two principal ways of misunderstanding a society: by looking down on it from above and by looking up at it from below. In other words, by identifying with institutions or by identifying with individuals.

To look down on society from above, from the point of view of the ruling groups, the institutions, is to see the dangers of the organism splitting apart – the individual components shooting off in different directions until everything dissolves into anarchy.

To look up at society from below, from the point of view of the lowest group, the governed, is to see the dangers of the organism growing ever more rigid and oppressive until it fossilises into a monolithic tyranny.

… The reason for the popularity of these misunderstandings is that both views are correct as far as they go and both sets of dangers are real, but there is no “rightâ€? point of view.

The most you can ever say is that sometimes society is in danger from too much authority and uniformity and sometimes from too much freedom and variety.

Here’s another case of a discourse participant intuitively reflecting on the contrasting nature of two seemingly contradictory frames that are both available in the framing inventory to the speaker/conceptualizer. The last two paragraphs outline a view of public rationality that is strangely reminiscent of Lakoff’s in Moral Politics. Perhaps, neither places enough emphasis on the negotiated nature of these ‘framings’ but both describe the same conceptual phenomena that individuals have to deal with when they enter public (high-stakes) discourse (whether as observers - who rarely remain passive, anyway - or participants).

The second factor that shaped our media liberal attitudes was a sense of exclusion. We saw ourselves as part of the intellectual elite, full of ideas about how the country should be run. Being naive in the way institutions actually work, we were convinced that Britain’s problems were the result of the stupidity of the people in charge of the country.

What he says here has broader consequence for the understanding of the discourse nature of group identity. Quite obviously this example of exegetic framing (a rather common trope) is explicating some of the principles underlying the social psychology but also the social discursivity of group cohesion and group identity.

[A personal note: As an occasional journalist-commentator who has been asked to critique administrations and an educational-administrator who has perpetrated organizational structure upon others, I can definitely relate to this description of a situation. However, it doesn’t apply to exclusively to journalism but rather to any public discourse dealing with organizational configuration. Even those who ‘know’ how institutions work are only too keen to criticize other institutions on ‘rationalistic’ grounds.]

Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers

We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers,

Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t. A house built with bricks from one or two brickyards will be just fine. A bookstore that only carries stock from a few publishers will have a thin, poor selection to offer its customers.

Multiple suppliers—that is, a broad range of publishers and books to choose from—is a good thing, if a bookstore chain knows what it’s doing.

This is an excerpt from a commentator criticizing a letter sent to a book publisher by a bookselling chain asking for money for carrying their books. The first indent is a quote from the letter and the rest the commentator’s reaction. (I’m using this excerpt for my own purposes. The entire post deserves a read in its own right.)

Both the initial sentence and the commentator’s interpretation are examples of metaphorical inferencing (Lakoff 1993). The original one is unconscious and reveals a high level of inferencing that may have happened implicitly or explicitly in the background. The commentator’s note elaborates this and describes the “misapplication” of language and conceptualizations from one area of commerce to another.

This sort of exchange is extremely common in the market metaphor (and in others, I just have lots of examples in this area). On the one hand, we have an application of metaphor and its associated inferencing, e.g. ’school vouchers are moral because they offer the freedom of choice to individual consumers and the benefit of the market forces to the whole society’ and the subsequent unpicking of the metaphor by critics, e.g. ‘the market metaphor relies on failure often accompanied by a personal tragedy of unsuccessful interacting entities and success is based purely on contemporaneous preferences of consumers rather than external benefit’. (Henig, 1994). Similar thing is happening in the negotiation of the “Iraq is Vietnam” metaphor brilliantly summarized by Stephen Colbert in is oft-repeated “Vietnam dry - Iraq wet”.
This is particularly typical of “high-stakes” discourse where metaphor is often used strategically to provide an interpretative framework. Lakoff and Johnson claim (probably rightly) that this sort of inferencing is essential to all metaphorical reasoning (which - in one way or another - is almost all reasoning). However, lower-stakes usage of metaphor tends to be more local and perhaps not as essential to the interpretation of larger stretches of discourse. For instance, multiple metaphors can be used to interpret same instance (e.g. love is like food, love is like a journey, love is like a war). This, of course, is happening in ‘high-stakes’ discourse as well but there the privileged interpretive nature of certain metaphors is more likely to be negotiated and although a single metaphor is rarely cognitively dominant enough to displace all other, it is more likely to be used more centrally.

Media Matters - “Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser
“I believe in the usefulness and validity of the telling anecdote — the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject,” Carney wrote. And who can blame him? For the reader, an anecdote — a “short account of an interesting or humorous incident” — is often more accessible and enjoyable than a dry recitation of statistics and facts. Similarly, it isn’t hard to imagine that relating an anecdote is more enjoyable for the reporter, as well. So if a journalist stumbles upon an anecdote that “reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject,” who can blame him or her for using it?

But there is a danger or three in reporting by anecdote.

This interchange between two columnists prompted an insightful analysis of the dangers of anecdote in reporting by J. Foser. He points out that 1. people in the media are forced into creating or avoiding the creation of anecdotes; 2. the ‘anecdote’ reporting perpetuates the repeated recounting of metaphors that aren’t true; 3. many anecdotes that are true are “not telling” in the sense suggested by Carney above. He illustrates this by the following example:

Pretend for a moment that Naomi Wolf had told Al Gore he should wear earth tones. What would that have told us?

It could have told us, as countless journalists have claimed, that Gore wasn’t “comfortable in his own skin.” That he didn’t know who he was. That he was a big phony who would do anything to win.

But, just as plausibly, it could have told us that Al Gore — like the vast majority of Americans — occasionally asks for a second opinion when assembling an outfit.

Quite obviously, there are many interpretations in a given story that is being used metaphorically to “understand” a point (i.e. blended with another story) that can be activated not only based upon the internal structure of the two frames but also given the formal context of social negotiation of narrative veracity. This can be done both subconsciously and consciously (although with a strong automatic element) and both locally and globally. Strangely enough, there usually seem to be roughly two opposing interpretations that play a role (but there can be many more).

Clearly, the negotiation of “truth” and “understanding” is a matter of situationally-embedded ethical action both on the part of the speaker and the recipient. It is not a question of transcendental epistemology providing heuristics for determining what’s true. Foser offers a useful guide for action for the negotiation of the metaphorical meaning:

When news consumers encounter “telling anecdotes,” they should think about what the anecdote really means:

1) Is the anecdote verifiably true?

2) Is the anecdote illustrative rather than anomalous?

3) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is verifiably true, or is it merely a convenient vehicle for suggesting something the reporter believes but cannot prove?

4) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is not only verifiably true, but is also important to understanding how the candidate would govern or how the issue would affect people? Or is it just pointless snark?

Funnily enough, I saw a similar list recently in a draft of a paper on philosophy of education. Foser implies two seemingly incompatible things (but not in a bad way): 1. that his list could be seen as somehow revealing of a new strategy that both journalist and readers should employ 2. his list is somehow a common sense approach that both readers and journalists fail (through lack of X) to employ regularly.

Both of these are both ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. 1. Reading this list just before reading/writing an anecdote-laden story (and what stories aren’t) could certainly make readers/writers more aware of its conceptual complexity and its blending mechanisms. But on the other hand, this is clearly something speakers and readers already do in many surprising and complex (but not systematic) ways. (Gamson’s work on working class politics discussions was particularly revealing.) 2. Even though (as pointed out above) Foser’s list described strategies language speakers commonly employ on text, their common sense value depends on a variety of folk theories of meaning and truth. One such is illustrated immediately following the list in a conclusion to his treatise:

Ideally, of course, journalists would think about these things before repeating the “telling anecdote” in the first place. Doing so shouldn’t be hard. It merely requires a commitment to telling the truth, to reporting rather than guessing.

Quite obviously we can’t quite have negotiated (illustrative) truth and transcendental objective truth at the same time. Of course, there is the situational configurational truth (Naomi Wolf said “X Y Z” to Al Gore on occasion “Q”) but that is relatively infrequent. And factual inaccuracy doesn’t necessarily disqualify the point (although it does undermine the credibility of the speaker). Also, there is no guarantee that a reader / writer following Foser’s algorithm will arrive at an interpretation that is acceptable to us or to an independent observer. Fulfilling point 1 often difficult and sometimes impossible (but by far the easiest to accomplish). 2-4 are entirely up for negotiation and are subject to the same misinterpretations Foser criticizes. That’s not to say they’re not useful reminders but they are not the panacea often sought in this context.

Now for the real kicker. The mother’s question to a littering child: “What would happen if everyone did that?”. What would happen if everyone followed Foser’s rules? My contention is almost nothing. Precisely because of the difficulties and the necessity to negotiate the metaphorical application of anecdotes. True, some egregious nonsense wouldn’t be promulgated by the media. But the larger truth negotiation “climate” would probably remain the same. Here’s a “configurationally largely true” (largely because of possible memory lapses on my part). A friend of mine who grew up in Austria was trying to convince me that the Austrian’s were better media consumers than Czechs because in secondary school they read speeches by Hitler and analyzed them for manipulation (among other things). Not too long after that (less than a year, I recall) Jörg Haider’s party posted a major success in the Austrian elections. Clearly, exposing everyone to these strictures did not “help”.

Participants in public discourse exhibit a strange mix of autonomy* of and enthrallment by the prevailing frames (narrative, image schematic, folk theoretical). This tug of war is what makes social science so difficult but also so important.

*Howard Becker et al.’s thoughts on autonomy in prisons, schools and other restrictive institutions needs to be mentioned in this context (and a lot of other contexts).