Hermeneutic Heretic

Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com

This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian."

I am a big supporter (including in print) of political correctness as a means of challenging embedded frames of action but at the same time I’m aware of the processes of entrenchment that will lead to the creation of new frames that will determine much of the public discourse in the future. In other words, political correctness works only for a period of time before it needs a ‘refresh’. The history of the appellations of African Americans is one such great example. Going from African to Negro to Black to African American it is now on its second cycle of such a refresh.

An Barack Obama and Rev Wright seem to be victims of one such particular entrenchment.

I’ve been reading much of the commentary on Obama’s speech and collecting quotes in preparation for a conference paper and I was struck by the incessant claims of Wright’s racism based on remarks that were so obviously taken out of context. This becomes even more obvious when you listen to the whole sermon. How could anyone think of him as anything else but a courageous leader of his community (who may make the occasional questionable but hardly incendiary remark) is almost inconceivable. Yet, commentator after commentator calls him racist or at least considers his remarks racially inflammatory. The quote above suggests a possible explanation. He uses the word ‘black’ in a positive affirmative sense. But political correctness has made a positive identification of someone as black a precarious proposition. There are many contexts in which this is acceptable but many in which it is not.

I’ve worked for an agency that asked its applicants to mark their ethnicity with the option of ‘choose not to disclose’. With few exceptions, the majority of the people making that choice were white upper middle class people with an agenda. Most people of color took it in the spirit in which it was intended: ‘If we are aware of the diversity of our constituency, we can work harder to try to support it.’ If I had a choice I would have asked for sexual and political orientation, too. Sure, in most contexts, none of this should matter, but in others, knowing the make up of one’s constituency, is essential. But when some of my Czech students saw a similar diversity questionnaire in the UK, they thought it was racist.

Another illustration was an example given by a black researcher in education of a white parent who was proud of his daughter for taking the more complicated route of choosing the color of a sweater over the color of the skin in pointing out her friend to him at a distance. But such color blindness is an act (brilliantly satirised by Stephen Colbert) and not a reality. But is this public act of color blindness that is the only way to signal belonging to a certain community of values that is available to the white middle-classes. To them, this leads to a puzzling and discomfiting asymmetry of reference. Calling a Church: ‘Upper East Side White Congregation’ is racist and ‘Harlem Black Church’ is not! Linguistically, this is nothing strange or unusual. Language is full of such asymmetries (see Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s Place for examples about the descriptions of women) some working for the benefit of one group or another and some neutral. But the folk theories and the inventory of reactions available in American public discourse simply does not allow for an easy discussion of this issue.

Nicholas Kristof is puzzled and pleased that the US electorate is keeping two individuals as front runners who are willing to express unpopular opinions:

The World’s Worst Panderer - New York Times All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself off from alternative points of view, but the American public has the same management flaw: it normally fires politicians who tell them bad news.

But that is not particularly surprising. What is intriguing is the level of sophistication that a closer analysis of individuals reveals (regardless of education). This was found by van Dijk in the Netherlands and by Gamson in the US with groups under onslaught from an agenda-pushing media. However, this ability of individuals and small groups to discern the details of manipulative discourse does not always translate into collective behaviour at elections or other decision-making moments that would reveal a great independence of views. Until, one rare day it does but it then goes away. By and large political operatives’ wisdom hold true for crowds even if it misrepresents the individuals comprising the crowds. This points to several avenues of inquiry. First, can we think of groups as independent agents? And if so, how can we also represent the individuals’ legitimate interests and views? And second, what are the principles that constitute collective action as described by Becker and how do they form individuals’ behaviours?

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.

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.

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.

Media Blog on National Review Online
What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross]

Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today.

It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is.

When I saw this intro I expected this to be another hawkish rant but was surprised that it wasn’t that far off. While I’m all for presenting the al-Qaeda point of view alongside others, the BBC did it without making it clear whose views it was presenting. Now, this is more interesting from an educational and cognitive than political point of view. I can see the editorial policy of the site is to present things simply without too many counterfactuals. While children may have problems processing some complex counterfactual sentences, they are not incapable of processing perspectives from about the age 6-8 (and writing about 9/11 for children younger than that is a waste of time). And the language of the text is convoluted anyway so a typical child would have trouble making any sense out of it.

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.

Who on Earth would think this is child-friendly language? It requires rather a lot of attention and focus and navigation of mental spaces. How about: “Many people are angry because America often tries to influence what their countries do.” But even better, how about:

“It is often difficult to say why people do things. It is also difficult to say why some people hate other people. One explanation is … . The people who did 9/11 say they did it because … . The American president says it was because … . Some social scientists say it was because … . You will have to make a difficult decision about whose view you support.”

I’m sure this could be cleaned up further but miles better than a sentence with a complicated mental space structure, like the BBC’s:

When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

I particularly like the “country called Saudi Arabia” as a nod to a text that is suitable for children in a sentence that clearly isn’t. Plus the comma before ’said’? Have they no shame? Children are good at processing stories, so tell them a story but this is a story summary for adults who already know what happened in a way that tries to look simple and isn’t.

Just Say No “Nonetheless I took the tomatoes away.”

This is only partially a hermeneutic post.

It’s so rare to see poetry in blogs (unless they’re poets’ blogs which I don’t read) but this last line in a post, turned it into a poem. It reminded me of my favorite poem by Vladimír Holan about a Russian soldier and him walking by the lake killing fish with handgranades.

But what I found introspectively interesting how reading that last line completely changed the rhythm (and meaning) of the entire post spanning 427 words. What about the post (and texts in general) persists in the mind that can be profiled and made generally salient? I can’t quite even imagine how we would go about studying this but we’ll need to.

Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar
The core behavior has existed for some time; “Image macro” is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.

Two things are happening here. First, the very thing Anil Dash is describing. A “grammar” of LOLCats is emerging. However, this is a cognitive construction grammar rather than a traditional grammar in that it doesn’t provide generative (in the broad sense) but rather an inventory of conventionalized units have both highly schematic form and meaning (actually the distance between the semantic and formal poles is very narrow). Anil Dash’s descriptions of the grammar of LOL are actually very close to what a construction grammar would look like. Actually, construction grammar could probably take some lessons from him:

• I’M IN UR X Ying your Z.
• Invisible Item.
• Kitty Pidgin

These are three descriptions of rules a reader might recognize a lolcat utterance. (And it is possible, as Anil Dash notes, to get them wrong.) The interesting thing about it is that he uses a different format for each of the lolcat grammar constructions. And always the one that is most appropriate for recognition and storage. So, wonder I, should construction grammarians adopt the same approach (and run the risk of being accused of not being scientific enough) or should we even consider the fact that these rules may be “stored” in our brains differently? Some as paradigmatic constructions, some imagistic or scriptic, and yet others as schematic formulae such as those applied to the recognition or application of a genre or even a foreign tongue. Another thing, we could probably study how these rules are acquired, spread and developed.

Which brings us to the second point. The act of Mr Dash himself.

I was having a conversation with Ben and Ben a few weeks ago where I suggested this consistent grammar for lolcats could be a “cweeole”. Knowing a bit more about such things now, I realize this isn’t a creole but more likely a pidgin language, used to help cats talk to humans. And since “pidgin” is already a cutesy spelling of a mispronunciation, there doesn’t seem to be any really cute way to rename it to reflect its uniqueness. “Kitty pidgin” might be the closest thing we have to a name for this new language.

There’s a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain’t Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain’t lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.

Anil Dash is engaging in frame negotiation and acting as an agent similar to those described by Labov (and Asch) who is a significant vector in the spread  of a symbolic system. He is doing the same job linguists do but unlike many linguists, his work is intended to interact with the system itself (and it no doubt does). I’ve described something similar in the arena of fanfiction where along some incredible creative writing there also emerged a considerable body of critical opinion which contributed to the solidification of subgenres and offered a feedback loop to the spontaneously emerging classifications (Uberfic, Slash, etc.). Construction linguists need to investigate what role this kind of behavior plays in the functioning of “natural” languages where the tendency has generally been to neglect the human agency and imply an agency of the “system”. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does ignore something I’m finding more and more evidence for. Next, I’d like to determine how frequent that evidence is and what persistence and salience it has (since frequency isn’t necessarily the only determining factor).

YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question
Miss Teen USA 2007 - Ms. South Carolina answers a question

It is all too easy to make fun of speakers like this. But most commenters on YouTube (and elsewhere) got it wrong.

ChrisKangaroo It is obviuos that she has no idea what a map is and therefore, she is unable to answer

Or rather, like the speaker above applied the less apt folk theory of linguistic coherence. I.e. things have to make sense. This folk theory got a lot of play around the internets including http://mapsforus.org, the Tube map, and BoingB oing’s transcription of it into verse.

A much more balanced view including a transcript (reformatted here from the original verse) was provided by an anonymous commenter on BoingBoing:

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some… People out there in our nation don’t have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and the Iraq … everywhere like “such as”… and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us.”

…

My translation/explanation:

I believe when she started to answer the question, she knew what the question was asking, but probably second-guessed herself into thinking it was more likely that it stated that people from other nations couldn’t locate the U.S. on a map. Thus, she switched her answer around to match that train of thought, concluding that those people couldn’t locate the U.S. on a map primarily because they simply lack maps, and secondarily because they lack proper education, which the U.S. should assist with.

I suspect that Anonymous got it just about right. However, there’s more of the story to be told. Her speech is marked by a constant search for coherence and the possible cohesive links just come too fast for her to process them in a very stressful situation. She is basically trying to integrate a question with several publicly available frames. But these frames come with linguistic structures attached to them and these structures can be reminiscent of other structures that then evoke other (possibly different) framings. (I’m just now playing with the notion of frames as constructions - just gave a talk at NDCL 2 on this topic).

The speaker is using stock phrases (more than likely as a result of explicit training) such as “I personally believe” and more open ended constructions such as “should help” and “out education” that can be integrated with very many constructional clichés of the public political discourse. That is what set her off on the path of the US helping others even though she started with the frame of the US needing help. But every intonation unit of her speech is rife with the quest for coherence. She uses all the right devices to establish it both internally and externally but ultimately fails.

Of course, discursively and intellectually the situation is completely corrupt. The questioner doesn’t give her any space to negotiate the conceptual and linguistic space. The problem with the ridicule isn’t just the picking on the helpless (others can probably do better) but the linguistic and cognitive naivety of the taunters. This speech says nothing about the intelligence of the woman nor her ability to address this issue. It was simply the best she could do in that situation. This should remind us of the fragility of language and cognition.

But having said that, this Quiet Library video is very funny (or at least the first part):

“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!