Hermeneutic Heretic

Google Reader (1000+) “Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.” (Clement Atlee)

There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To describe this in a language I understand, they help the group negotiate important framings through the cognitive process of blending. They play a social role (witness the proliferation of books of quotes and RSS feeds or mailing lists with quote a day), socio psychological role (people’s email signatures with quotes) and a personal psychological role (the pure enjoyment experienced upon reading a particularly well-crafted quote, or even a personal transformation if the mappings are properly generalised).

The one by Atlee above is an example of a particularly interesting class of aphorism, one that involves paradox. Quite obviously discussion is impossible without talking, but also an effective government must at some point stop talking and act. Now, I think part of the power of the quote lies in the fact that it doesn’t have a cognitive resolution (just like many other quotes relying on a paradox) but it points to two competing models we have of governance. 1. government needs to discuss things, 2. government needs to act. From a policy standpoint, this is a real dilemma. Each of these models are backed up by socially negotiated stories that have both practical and cognitive resolutions. But our Aristotelian instinct of the excluded middle tells us that they cannot be both true at the same time (or that they simply cannot be both true at all). This usually triggers the next step: folk reductionism (I say ‘folk’ but ’scientific’ reductionism often has similar cognitive and social features). What happens is that we conceptualise one models in terms of the other. That’s where Schonian generative metaphors come into play. We could say something like ‘action is really a kind of discussion’ or ‘discussion is really a kind of action’ and simply describe excessive discussion is bad action (professional English has lots of phrases and other cultural artefacts to support this ‘paralysis by analysis’, ‘design by committee’, Dilbert cartoons, ‘just do it’, etc.) or rash action was the wrong kind of discussion (again the phrases supporting deliberation are there: ‘jump before you leap’, ‘measure twice, cut once’, etc.)

There’s even a whole branch of psychology dealing with learning styles and personality types that maps these differences on different kinds of people. Like with a lot of science, this plays the dual role. On the one hand it reinforces the cultural framings (see multiple intelligences, ‘different folks different strokes’, etc.) but it also contributes to our knowledge of the human condition (what I’d like to call ‘anthropology’). There’s a good chance that different people actually process these models very differently at a very basic socio-cognitive level - rather than just having different opinions. Also, not everyone seems to respond to aphorisms and generative metaphors in the same way. Sure different people arrive at different mappings but there are many people who simply do not derive the same pleasure or benefit from this kind of reasoning as others. Clearly, more research is needed, as always. (BTW: Saying this is another thing in the inventory of constructions availble to us in a discussion like this.)

Lakoff in ‘Moral Politics’ talks about how competing models of family influence policy and politics debates in the US. This model duality is not only present in a variety of contexts but I would claim is the very foundation of all policy discourse (argument). In other words, whereever you look at a policy controversy you see a conflict of framings and foregrounding. Here’s a good example I culled from two recent podcasts.

Matt Miller has a radical but simple proposal to improve the nation’s public schools: federalize funding to eliminate disparities in per-pupil funding between poor and affluent communities. He also proposes a single set of federal standards for math, science and reading, instead of letting each state set its own standards. Scott Simon speaks with Miller, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
NPR: Plan Would Nationalize Schools to End Disparities

How can government create policies that interact with – rather than police - human behaviour? DAVID WILLETTS, Shadow Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, argues that politicians could learn something from the recent surge in the study of human behaviour by game theorists, evolutionary biologists and neurologists. David Willetts will be delivering the Michael Oakeshott memorial lecture on The Ideas that are Changing Politics on Wednesday 20 February at the London School of Economics.
BBC - Radio 4 - Start the Week

Quite independently, the progressive Matt Miller and conservative David Willetts have provided a great example of retrenchment of two basic models of governance. 1. Local people know best and don’t need interference from removed centrals of power. 2. Local people are ignorant and need central control to make sure they don’t make a mess of things.

These two models are negotiated in a variety of contexts all over the place. They are given ’scholarly’ support and ‘narrative’ support (the two being often just two sides of the same coin) on almost daily basis. We can also think of stories (real or fictional) where one or the other will apply. For instance, teachers talk about the National Curriculum in the UK today or Voter registration drives in the 1960s in the US south. Plus we could probably list several film and TV storylines that playout one or the other scenario with great conviction.

Now, both Willetts and Miller seem to make good points. How do we decide? Negotiation of framing and generative as well as constitutive metaphors.

On The Media I’m not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do not believe, can be healthy.

…

Argentina lived under terror. When societies emerge from these states, any society emerging has to balance truth with justice.

And then he had to say this:

Lost Children, Lost Truths - New York Times

But they had the truth, or something closer to it than a peaceful Paraguayan yard reeking of repressed crime. We journalists are intruders who move on. Was this intrusion worth it? For the dead, and for Argentina, I say yes. For the twins, I don’t know.

Truth or justice? Every society emerging from terror must choose. But truth is messier, and justice less adequate than we acknowledge. Life resides in half-tones newspapers render with difficulty, rather than in absolutes.

This folk magical assumption about the elemental and deep-rooted nature of the truth that is so essential that it seeps into our very existence no matter how much we are trying to paint a veneer of ignorance over it.

Cohen is right. He’s no psychologist, but then neither are a lot of psychologists. Truth is like language. When you grow up in the context of a lie, you will speak the lie fluently and the truth will be just as disruptive as the introduction of a new language.

But this is not just a random quirk of an American journalist brought up on cultural reflections of the psychoanalytic therapeutic tradition. This is a demonstration of one folk theory of truth and it is the same one that underlies our myths about science that is most often represented through something called ‘reductionism’.

And as fractals seem to indicate, this will also be part of science’s undoing. Wilson’s failure in Conscillience to understand science (despite his grasp of the humanities) is a great example of this. Another one is Skinner’s reductionism and re-labelling of old problems with new words in Verbal Behavior which was so deftly analysed by Chomsky. And, of course, Chomsky’s own insistence on limiting language description to that which is subject to reduction. And it also pertains to things like the Sokal hoax and the science wars. And it drives the search for the Unified Theory.

The problem is that the folk assumption about the fundamental nature of scientific truth forces scientists into seeking further and further underlying principles in order for it to be scientific. For instance, genes driving all morphological development of an organism. This is a bad model for science and an even worse model for social science.

An insight from fractals and chaos might help us find a better way. (The following is simply a fractal-inspired metaphor). ‘Truths’ exist on levels of magnification. They exist as tendencies that are exact at certain moments but sensitive to initial conditions.

This might allows us to admit that there are certain things social scientists know with just as much certainty as natural philosophers know the laws of physics. Only the numerical outcomes and predictive powers are plotted on attractors rather than linear curves. For instance, we know that depriving a group of people of resources will result in social unrest, and that not all individuals will participate in that unrest. We don’t know what the breaking point is nor do we know what forms the unrest will take but that’s not insignificant knowledge.

Moreover, it’s knowledge similar to the knowledge of scientists. Scientists know a lot about the chemistry and physics of metals but all that knowledge is idealised (as in ideal gasses). To actually build a bridge engineers need lots and lots of manuals with translation tables that provide constants that can be plugged into equations. These constants are empirically established and can change with changing conditions.

Social engineers have history to do the same job but the translation tables have to be publicly negotiated analogy (as I’ve show in many other posts).

The job of the natural and social philosophers, then, should be to seek the right levels of magnification for their knowledge and proceed with extreme caution when finding causal links between layers.

[This is all very sketchy, at the moment, I suspect I will have a more to say about this later.]

BBC - Radio 4 Woman’s Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley.

BBC - Radio 4 Woman’s Hour -Primogeniture: Should the law be changed? Thirty years since the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act, the law that governs Succession to the Crown in Britain is also based on primogeniture: a male-preference law that dictates the throne should go to a male heir over a female. Why does the law continues to exist and is there a case for changing the law sooner than later?

The really interesting (for this analysis, not for itself) argument in this discussion of male primogeniture was made by Charles Mosley. Several times he presented two ‘logical’ objections (invoking the term logic) 1) "if you’re interested in equality why not prefer the abolishment of monarchy which is even a more startling symbol of inequality?" 2) "if you [Lynne Featherstone] are also a spokesperson for the rights of the young, why not also include a change in the inheritance going to the firstborne?" [my paraphrases] His interlocutor responded by saying "ah, that’s the old chestnut that is often used to stop change".

That fact that they were both justified in their remarks tells us something startling about public debate: logic and rationality cannot be and are not what decides the argument. At least, not in the traditional sense. The traditional view of logic is that it is independent of the matter at hand as well as of the arbiter of correctness and can be therefore used as yardstick of the validity of the argument. That’s why Mr Mosley could sound a bit condescending (even though that could have been by dint of his being the ‘royal’ commentator) when he said something like ‘then it surely follows’ and ‘isn’t it logical’. Mr Featherstones justified objection that this was not a ‘legitimate’ argument did not have nearly as much weight purely because of the high regard we have for logic in these contexts.

Yet, it is ‘obvious’ that in this case the logic is gerrymandered and used as a rhetorical device. But is that always so? There are many times when the ‘logic’ applies.

Basically, the ‘logic’ of any argument needs to be negotiated. And any negotiation will bring with it all the factors that ‘real’ negotiations do. I.e. aspects of power, prestige, location, primacy and recency, ingroup/outgroup concerns, etc. In other words, it is not easy. But it is the only way it can go. This is not a suggestion as to how things should be, merely a description of how things are. There is an open question whether such debates would be more fruitful if both interlocutors were aware that they are engaged in a negotiation and subject to various influences. I’m a bit skeptical on this count but not convinced yet either way.

Let’s have a look at other similar examples.

The right wing’s argument that if you allow gay marriage what’s to stop you from allowing zoophilic unions? Of course, there is nothing that would do that. A perfectly valid modus ponens argument can be constructed to demonstrate this entailment. Yet, intuitively, we know that such a occurrence is very unlikely.

Similarly, an argument can be (and has been) made, that if we stop abortions and outlaw prophylaxis we should also force any young heterosexual couple in an encounter to procreate. For, are they not depriving a potential human life of coming into being by avoiding copulation? Again, logic fails completely. Only negotiation of categories, concepts, and their mappings can bring any results.

Of course, it also works the other way. An fairly undisputably legitimate logic can be overriden by negotiation. The claim against the legalization of marihuana is that it is a gateway drug. Yet, the numbers of people who have smoked marihuana (almost everybody - except, for some reason, me) are so great that if there was any underlying causality significant proportion of the population would be addicted to hard drugs. Yet, that is clearly not the case. Other factors prevailed in the negotiation.

Another example is the British argument against immigration for the reason that ‘Britain is a small island’. First, it is neither small nor comparatively densely populated but most significantly, its being an island doesn’t make its borders any more solid than, say Germany. If, Belgium needs more space to house migrants, surely, they can’t borrow a spare bit of France. Nevertheless, this is a very common argument.

And how about opponents of the smoking ban. It is quite true that smoking does not ’cause’ cancer in the way that a bat causes a person to have their skull smashed in. Nevertheless, it was possible to generate a consensus of causality that overrode the logic. (I’ve heard a similar argument made against evolution.)

And so on, and so on.

But wait! There’s more. Not only is not logic a good tool for independently judging the validity of an argument (although it is a good tool for putting an argument forth), it is not a good predictor of cognitive and social outcomes. And this applies to metaphoric implicature, as well. This is due, again, to the fact that these outcomes are negotiated. This doesn’t bode well for most social commentary and a good chunk of social science.  But that can be explored some other time.

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.

Evening News 24 - Refuse fire near City Hall  Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening.

The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street.

Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the flames.

This is an online newspaper article in its entirety. What caught my attention was the use of the word ’suspects’. By the rules of pragmatic implicature, this word is out of place in this context (we could even call it wrong or agrammatical). Suspects implies that the article is about people who have already been apprehended and it is not clear whether they had committed the crime (or legal restrictions require this unclarity). However, is we’re talking about the people who really committed the crime, even though they remain unknown, the word perpetrators or vandals or arsonists (as inthe introductory sentence) would be much more appropriate. In that case, there would be no confusion.

This created an interesting garden path text (flow of inference). When I caught sight of ’suspects’ I had to go back to reread the article to make sure whether they had been caught or not. And I’m still not sure. This is a quick bit of online news rather than a published and copy-edited piece (although similar errors slip through anyway) so the source of the error could be in both directions: 1. the writer misspoke or 2. forgot to mention the arrests. The former is more likely but the latter is not impossible particularly if the arrests had already been mentioned elsewhere or are being kept out.

But what is the source of this slip? Quite obviously the implicature of the word ’suspect’ was overridden by the constructional conventions of journalistic prose where ’suspect’ is used to describe agents in crimes as a matter of course. To use the word ’suspect’ is always safer and largely understandable so the pragmatic concerns can be shelved. So what we have here is a clash in constructional conventions which both enter into the cognitive modeling of the situation as described. In this case, the convention of genre-specific language use won over the the use where the logic of implicature is preserved. This is important to keep in mind when looking at pragmatics as equivalent to the study of logic.

The importance of convention in these cases reminded of the principle of ‘convention over configuration’ introduced by the programming framework Ruby on Rails:

"Convention over Configuration" means a developer only needs to specify unconventional aspects of the application. For example, if there’s a class Sale in the model, the corresponding table in the database is called sales by default. It is only if one deviates from this convention, such as calling the table "products_sold", that one needs to write code regarding these names.

This is exactly what happened in this case. The use of ’suspect’ causes the reader (or rather some readers) to search for information about the implied arrest. When none is forthcoming other avenues of resolving the conflict need to be sought. However, even though the process can be described broadly algorithmically, it is really much fuzzier and parallel and could not be all that easily modeled through a conventional flowchart that would be appropriate for a computer language. But the analogy is striking nevertheless. Particularly, since we could see this RoR convention as an expression of a hypostasis of the underlying pragmatic principles of language.

On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There’s often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell’s painting called The Art Critic. That’s a painting of a young man, a young art student in a museum, who’s studying a painting on the wall of a kind of amply-endowed Rubenesque lady. And he’s peering at it closely through a magnifying glass, looking at a brooch on the woman’s breast. He doesn’t notice that he’s actually looking at her chest at the same time, but the woman in the painting does notice and leers back at him.

You have a young man, a kind of innocent, who doesn’t see what he’s looking at, but the painting does see. The painting isn’t innocent. And, in a way, that seems to me to spell out the relation between Rockwell’s viewers and the paintings themselves. The viewers may be innocent or may be in a state of denial or disavowal but the paintings themselves are very knowing and sophisticated. And they’re, they’re looking at us, in a way, more intently than we are at them.

There’s a strange certainty about most art and literary criticism. The discourse of the genre dictates that statements about artifacts are to be made in a particular manner that positions the audience into a place of inevitability of perspective. It is the object (painting, book, song…) that always tells of something and shows us something. Sometimes it’s the author, sometimes the audience ‘can’ see something. But it is rarely the critic who has any agency. S/he is always describing what is never what s/he perceives.

The above example of ‘activist’ criticism shows very clearly how the multiple mental spaces set up by the text interact. There is the space of people in the painting, there’s the space of the painting as painting, space of the viewers. Earlier the space of the painter was also established. However, it isn’t always clear which space is being referred to at any particular moment or rather what the boundaries of these spaces are. For instance, in the text in bold it isn’t clear whether the paintings stand metonymically for their author or speak directly of themselves. This indeterminacy of framing is not dissimilar to the indeterminacy that is the hallmark of art itself. Criticism is then a sort of meta-art (art here includes music, drama and literature) and similar standards can be applied to it.

Criticism is only one example of socially ritualized frame negotiation. It doesn’t stand apart from the work, artist, audience or the interaction the work, artist, audience has with the discursive space of the day. Criticism is an integral part of the artistic process at all levels. Creators and audiences take it into account (even if they ignore particular artifacts of criticism) and actively engage in it themselves (reminiscent of folk etymologies). The same applies to the political process, processes of language change. In all these instances, there is a ritualized parallel to the natural frame negotiation that goes on. The extent of how deep this frame negotiation can go is not quite clear yet but it may be guided to a large extent by the availability of given phenomena to introspection (as described well by Len Talmy).

BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It’s the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change?

One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow, made the following prediction:

“We will know whether there’s a transcendent bit to the human mind by 2050, we will know exactly what cognition is and how we think and probably be able to emulate it.”

Well, here’s an alternative prediction. No, we won’t! This prediction assumes a lot about both the nature of cognition and mind, e.g. that they are objective phenomena as described by the language of our daily speech and the language of experts, and about our ability to come to grips with it, e.g. that we can easily capture it through the same tools that we are used to capturing information about the accessible and the not so accessible world. But if we look at the last 50 years of computers and mind research, we should radically limit our expectations of the next 50 years. While computer power (or rather its transistor prerequisites as described by Moore’s law) as increased geometrically, our ability to emulate human cognition has increased almost not at all. Let’s look at expert systems. It has been over 40 years since ELIZA and we would be very hard put to find a system that can do much more than that, today. The same goes for machine translation. Speech recognition has not progressed almost at all in the last fifteen years. Sure, you can now dictate and have Word open at the same time but that’s just tweaking. Accuracy has increased by a guestimate of 20%, usability 10 times while computer power in the same time increased 256 times. The mind boggles why it took computers so long to even draw with humans at chess. Why couldn’t a regular calculator do it decades ago? Computer speed simply isn’t the answer. My speech recognition teacher said years ago that we need a change of paradigm rather than an increase in computer speed and he was right.

The complexity of human cognition is such that we don’t even know how complex it is, the factors of its social embeddedness are another unknown. My prediction is that we will be as far from being able to model cognition in 2050 as we are today unless we find a way of modelling it as it is rather than modelling it on the back of our incredibly reductionist description of it. Some of the work done on bottom-up robotics seems to point in the right way. Google’s stochastic processing of prestige is also pretty good. We can pretty much keep up wih the increase in the amount of information but I doubt that we will be able to achieve a corresponding increase of knowledge as defined by the speaker. He goes on to draw the following analogy:

If we look at the amount of knowledge that the human race produced and think of it as a nice simple analogy that you have a sheet of cloth about thousand stiches by a thousand stiches. Let’s call it a megabyte which is about a telephone directory’s worth of information. Everything humanity did in 1920 was a bedsheet to cover the Island of Mauritius, by 1940 it had got to Madagascar, by the 1950s it was the Congo, the whole of Africa by the 60s, all of the continents of the planet by the mid-1980s. By 1990 we had a duvet cover of information produced every year to cover the whole planet by 2020 we’ll have about 1800 planets’ worth of information.

The problem is that information and knowledge are very different. Information is a property of matter (inkblots on paper, magnetic charge of hard drive platters, etc.) while knowledge is a property of individual human beings embedded in the situational constraints of their social existence. Or possibly, it’s a property of the social group that can be shared and enacted by its individual human members. The maintenance of information requires relatively little effort (keep the books dusted and the CD-ROMs safe), the maintenance of knowledge requires tremendous cognitive (remembering, organizing, communicating) and social (putting into context, speaking to the right people, maintaining prestige, …) effort. Just like with the speed of computers not being commensurate with their ability to emulate cognition (let alone social cognition), the amount of information available (encoded in some storage devices) is not commensurate with the “amount” of knowledge, in least because it’s not even certain that knowledge can be measured or even that it can ‘increase’ rather than just being shifted around and refocused.

Let’s illustrate on this debate itself. The one thing we already do know about the mind and cognition, is that the mind is not at all like a computer: it doesn’t have memory that works as a storage or repository of information, and it does not apply serial algorithms to the information it works on. It is not independent of the body in which it exists and it is most certainly not something that can be easily transferred from one context to another. The problem with this ‘information’ is that it is the knowledge only of a limited group of people in the AI, NLP and general cognitive science community, and even the communities and individuals that do ‘possess’ this knowledge are not sure how to act on it. Kurt Vonnegut expressed it best: “Hi ho!”

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.]