Hermeneutic Heretic

Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted?  Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it?
The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with acceptance, being desired by and accepted into a family.
Sometimes it’s the fault of language, the lack of words yet invented to describe our lives, that makes it difficult to know and explain who and what we are.  Are you a mommy? A second mommy? An other mommy? Are you adopted? Are you biologically adopted?  What it all means to Betsy Ramirez will be up to Betsy herself to discover, to find the words for and to one day explain to her moms.

This is a perfect example of the negotiation of category boundaries. Lakoff in Women, fire and dangerous things spends a whole chapter analyzing the radial category of mother and this is an example of the same analysis happening in ‘nature’. Not much more to say.

Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions…Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share, at least amongst the tech community.

Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something. It can also refer to the development of consumer awareness about a specific product or brand in hopes that they will buy the product or brand. One of the main objectives of advertising and promotion is to establish what is called mind share, or share of mind.

There’s an misalignment of concepts here that illustrates nicely the problems of locating collective concepts such as language, culture in the minds of the individuals. On the one hand, there is no doubt that to speak a language or to behave as a recognizable member of a culture, something has to be happening inside the individual (mostly but not exclusively the brain). However, our access to these concepts is mostly through the collective. Even notions such as ‘private language’ whether possible or not (and the theoretical ‘private culture’), are secondary and defined in contrast to their default framings as collective concepts.

It isn’t just a question of access. Theoretically, we could study the individual’s body/brain/mind to get to the bottom of how the collective is represented there. The problem is that this kind of reductionism would deprive us of an important level of description. This is similar to the fractal notion (as I understand it, anyway). It is possible to reduce anything to something else, but an important part of that original something is lost. So basically, when we’re describing the collective by reducing it to the neural or mental, we’re describing something functionally and essentially different than when we’re describing it as a collective phenomenon.

The Starry Hope analysis is particularly interesting because it uses purely collective measures to infer both a collective notion (popularity) and an individual notion (mind share). There are interesting folk theories of mental causality at play here.

Now, there’s no doubt in my mind whatsoever that George Lakoff’s theory of mental imagery (usually referred to via the concept of Image Schemas) describes a phenomenon that is profoundly real. However, the question remains what kind of reality it has. It exists and we see it all the time. But is it something that exists at the level of the neuron, the language system or is it just an epiphenomenon? What happens when a phrase evokes an image? Is an image generated every time? And if not, what happens to it when it’s not created? Is it stored somewhere in memory or is it drawn every time to fit the new situation? What does that look like inside the mind? What are the different levels of schematicity an image can have? How schematic can it be to still count as an image and how can we distinguish it from a simple representation (on the other end of the scale)? Funnily enough, the phallic imagery often evoked by English-language comedy (it presumably exists in all languages - but is not necessarily as pervasive, there) can point us in the direction of potential answers to these questions.

First, this kind of imagery is as ubiquitous as it is powerful. This is its latest appearance on the BBC’s prestigious Today programme and its retelling in this mildly scandalized Guardian blog:

Sexing up at the BBC? | Lost in Showbiz | Guardian Unlimited  It was all Barry Cryer’s fault. He was talking about Groucho Marx and told a joke which involved a man with 13 children going to see Marx. Marx said: ‘Why do you have so many?’ And the man said: ‘Because I love my wife.’ Replied Marx: ‘I love my cigar but I take it out now and then’.

And the BBC broadcast a follow up story the following day discussing whether this story is apocryphal or not. And this example is far from unique. I was just watching the popular US show Two and a half men (which as far as I know is family friendly) and it contains an entire catalogue of penis jokes.

First, we need to consider what’s at stake here (no pun intended). There is a culturally sanctioned image of the penis (both erect and flaccid) and it’s insertion into the vagina. Sometimes parts of the penis or its ejaculate are emphasized and sometimes reference is made to intercourse or masturbation. Then we have the cultural construction of referring covertly to this image in certain kind of humorous discourse. All this alongside strict taboo restrictions on actually displaying an unobscured penis.

Second, we need to have a look at the kinds of mappings that are made between images. They can often be very inexact. There is no doubt that Groucho (or the author of the story) is referring to copulation and the act of his inserting a cigar into his mouth is equivalent to the insertion of the penis. However, there is a significant mismatch, as well. (A mixed metonymy, if you will). If the cigar is the penis and the mouth a vagina, how come Groucho loves the cigar? For the metonymic correspondence to be exact, he should be loving himself. But nobody, in these pedantic times (and are there any other times?) has, to my knowledge, raised that objection. The two dynamic images don’t match but they evoke extremely compatible situations and that is enough to produce unambiguous laughter. If somebody took the time and collected all the penis imagery in Two and half men, we would have a wonderful catalogue of image schemas of varying richness and their linguistic representations. What we would find there, I have no doubt, is many jokes similar to the one above and many much more subtle and ambiguous ones. But none of them would provide complete, detail-rich images of the penis. They would all focus on some part of the image, underscore this, deemphasize that. Then we should do a survey of the viewers and ask them to reflect on the kind of imagery they perceive.

So what kind of answer have we found here? Really, just a hint of one. Mental images are real, they are schematic and they can match without matching visually simply by evoking something else that matches. A proper inventory of image schemas in linguistic constructions is the next order of business.

WHNews: Pay Gap - No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap and assuming women and men have been paid the same up to now – from now on till the end of the year women are giving their services for free. Fawcett’s Director Katherine Rake, Harriet Harman, Theresa May and Duncan Fisher from Fathers Direct discuss.

The interesting thing isn’t in this description but in the rationale Katherine Rake gave in the interview. She said that they are using the analogy of women working for free for over two months of the year because it is more meaningful to people than simply the fact that on average women are paid 17% less than men. Two related questions arise.

1. Is it really more meaningful? How do we measure the meaningfulness and impact of a description? Who is it more meanigful for? And what is the meaning it is full of? I suspect that the answers would be very complex. But perhaps she is simply referring to decision makers who might pay somebody less for any given day but would never not pay somebody at all for entire two months. So in a purely functionalist (meaning is action) sense, the second analogy is not more meaningful, it has a different meaning, which carries in it a commitment to different action. (Although these commitments are never as straightforward as the usual rhetoric suggests).

2. If the first point is valid then a more interesting question arises. How are the two different meanings different? Or better still how do the two statements differ in the sense that they end up carrying different meaning. From a purely mathematical prejudice, nothing happened. We simply restated one mathematical fact into another like 1/2 = 2/4. But the problem is that the original statement is a statement about populations whereas the second is a statement about individuals. And we know that groups don’t have the same properties as individuals but sometimes they mimic them (in a fractal self-similarity kind of way). This is an entirely open question: to what extent do social scientific truths about populations (groups of large sizes) apply to individuals (or groups of small sizes)? Does the fact that women earn 17% less than men mean that a woman is not being paid for two months out of every year? I suspect that it does in the sense on which a policy can be based but it doesn’t in the sense of a statement that we would consider a valid observation about the social world. Pragmatically, they may be the same thing but whereas policy decisions are generally not the foundational blocks of other premises about the world and statements purporting to be true about the world often are, it may matter quite a bit if universal properties of social groups are what we are interested in.