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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two]
However, thanks to a commenter at my place, I see by common definition “trophy wife” is indeed considered to be an insult.

All I can say is that I didn’t mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where the wife is 20 years or more younger than the husband, with no other implications, no matter what circumstances led to the pairing. To the extent that I insulted the women in these marriages, I apologize, but frankly I think it’s silly not to take it as a compliment and rather dishonest not to admit it’s true. No matter what led to the marriage, or how well suited you are despite your age difference, or how happily married, a young wife is still a prize catch for an older man; one that he is rightly proud of and when you walk into a room together, you are a visual symbol of his success. I would take that as a compliment myself, but that’s just me.

This is an example of a very common phenomenon that, to my knowledge, has received no attention from linguists and cognitive scientists. Viz. persistent (long-term) personal misunderstanding of a word or phrase that has a particular codified restrictions set on integration or is  completely entrenched. The ‘trophy’ in ‘trophy wife’ can be interpreted with respect to the husband (she’s his trophy) or the wife (she’s a valuable trophy). The former is the entrenched integration (and a collocate with a specific semantic prosody) but here’s at least one prominent, literate (and female) person who has persistently interpreted the phrase using the latter integration (if we choose to believe the self-report, which I don’t see a problem with doing). Now, everyone I’ve talked to about it, has had the experience of a phrase or word that they have found out years later meant something other than what they’d thought. Very often, this is in funny contexts (something misheard as a child) but there are many more unspectacular instances of the same thing. What is interesting, is that if we assume (as I do following Langacker, Croft, Lakoff and others), that lexical items and phrases are constructions of essentially the same sort as what is traditionally known as syntactical rules (and morphonological rules, as well), then we would expect the same level of misunderstanding of general schematic constructions such as subject-verb agreement or object marking. Yet, these examples are rarely if ever reported. Do they not exist? The answer is that we simply do not know but I suspect that they do occur. They are unlikely to happen to constructions as generalized and commonly used as object marking but they certainly happen on the periphery of the system. For example, very few speakers distinguish between “*He came with Jane and I.” from He’s taller than Jane and I.” as instances of different generalized complement constructions. I would also imagine that most English speakers do not properly interpret the subjunctive in “She recommends that he do it.” This would be more pronounced in highly inflected languages (such as Slavonic languages) where object marking or subject-verb agreement are typically marked beyond doubt but it does happen when it is associated with certain lexical items. Clearly, more (or rather, at least, some) research is need.

Nancy Pelosi, Respectfully Maintaining Her Own Image - washingtonpost.com
There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host’s traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent, teacher, minister or other authority figure. Wearing something unfamiliar or inappropriate in a public forum has a way of deflating even the most pompous figures. Their body language communicates their uneasiness. Our eyes register the sight as jarring.

Two prominent features of framing intersect in this segment (and the whole article). One is a valuable description of the process of conceptual integration of frames - where individual elements of conceptual frames need to blend into one image (completion). The other is evidence of frames themselves. Phrases like “uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent” provide an excellent evidence of a culturally prominent scenario (referring to comedy routines, films, and other discussions).

And then there is the third aspect. Negotiation. The author is not simply writing a piece, they are helping us establish (entrench) certain frames and establish boundaries for their blending.

Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News
Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn’t so “angry.” Bluntly put, I find it hard to believe that many men would end up being denounced on TV for using words like “fuck” or “cunt” on their blog and expect to receive piles of e-mail offering an opportunity to suck the sender’s dick.

A Hard Right Punch - washingtonpost.com
“They’ve attacked my husband relentlessly. There’s a strong sexist strain among my liberal critics, who think it isn’t possible I could have gotten anywhere without my Svengali husband, or some white man, embedding ideas in my head.”
…

“Particularly when you’re a minority conservative,” she says, “you get a lot of ugly, hysterical, unhinged attacks, because you’re challenging so many liberal myths about what people of color should think.” [quoting Michelle Malkin]

It may not be too outlandish to say that I’m I’m obsessed with the idea of the ’surface of discourse’ (title of a book by Michael Hoey). But encountering these two exchanges my obsession seems justified. Both women describe a situation that is very common. Because of their controversial public stances on contentious issues, they receive not just criticism but also abuse that references their gender. This is fairly common (people from any group with a marked feature are exposed to similar reactions) as is the next step.They both reflect that this kind abuse stems from their attacker’s broader stance and point of view that is opposed to theirs. But this can hardly be the case (as much as my liberal self would like to believe the opposite) - or at least on the case to the extent claimed. Obviously, abusive communications come from both camps even from the one that is, at least in part, explicitly opposed to gender- or race-based slurs.
Linguistically or psychologically, this is not particularly puzzling. An angry person is likely to reach for the most derogatory linguistic device possible and for representatives of disenfranchised groups usually stem from negative stereotypes. The speaker is merely using the strongest possible terms for emphasis. Emphasis in language can sometimes take very surprising turns. My favorite example is the English tense system. The present simple, despite its name, is used to express repeated actions (”He often reads books.”) and the primary function of the present continuous (progressive) is to describe actions happening at the moment of speech (The water’s boiling over.) However, to express repeated action with a negative emphasis, the continuous present is your best choice (”He’s always coming round here and asking stupid questions.”) as is the present simple to emphasize ongoing action (for instance in sports commentary: “He passes, he shoots, he scooooores.”)

Is it possible that racial and gender-based epithet are used the same way for emphasis? Perhaps, it is the rules of ‘civilized’ conversation that stops them from coming out rather than a natural instinct of the ‘civilized’ person not to use them. Women, for instance, often use derogatory language about other women that draws on male-constructed stereotypes. The ‘Uncle Tom’ insult in the African community is not dissimilar.

Would it then be possible to say that a person can seriously use racist or sexist language and not ‘really’ be sexist or racist? Michael Richards or Jade Goody would certainly like to think so. That may indeed be one of the problems with racism. Its really pernicious forms (assymetric perception, incremental and cumulative discrimination, race-based frames) can and do exist independent of the racial slurs often associated with them. So it is conceivable that the degree of a person’s political inclination cannot be reliably measured by the language they use in emphatic contexts.

However, when these expressions are publicly negotiated (hypostesized) their underlying frames are profiled and linked directly to a supposed deeper level of a person’s psyche (one for which there are ample folk but few good expert theories).
To return to Michael Hoey. We can reconstruct much of a text’s cohesion and even coherence based purely on surface features (he looked simply at repetition) but what does this newly-discovered unity tell us about the intellectual and conceptual unity that we suppose is what the surface was generated from?

Two more concepts might be helpful here: 1. logistics and transactional costs: to get your text/discourse from A to B certain things have to happen (such as time has to pass and energy has to be expended). And the creation of cohesive harmony is one of them. And often the conceptual devolves from the logistical. 2. Construction/cognitive grammar’s destruction of levels (and dynamic hypostasis): Instead of language being generated from underlying meanings, both meanings and form are simply two sides of the coin of constructions of different degrees of complexity and schematicity. In some constructions (or more accurately in the process of integration/blending), conceptual meaning is the primary integrator and others it is the formal meaning. (And usually it is some combination of the two.) So, in the case of an insult being uttered, it is possible to view the formal meaning as primary and propositional meaning as secondary. However, in the process of the insult being reported, the propositional meaning becomes much more prominent and it is impossible not to conclude that the given speaker was expressing a racist/sexist/etc. sentiment.

To conclude, discourse analysis (whether done by experts or naturally during the process of frame negotiation [or psychoanalysis]) is a wonderful tool for discovering trends in populations of texts but extremely unreliable for determining the conceptual underpinning of an individual text, particularly if it is intended for use as a tool for the discovery of ‘hidden meanings’.

The Politico But it wasn’t revealing because she was suggesting her husband is “evil and bad.”

It was revealing because — asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden — her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It’s absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth Starr? Rick Santorum? Her joke suggests that she buys into the notion that American and Middle Eastern “zealots” are cut from the same cloth, an idea that dovetails with her belief that there was (and is) a right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Clintons.

This is what she said: “What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men? [pause][laughter by audience, speaker joins in]”. Later when quizzed by journalists, she did what she was told by her media coach and repeated her talking points. Sadly in that she didn’t have another option.

But this is what she should have said. “You know. Metaphors and analogies are funny beasts. They seem to lead you down paths opening new vistas and all of a sudden, like in a bad dreams, you’re falling off a precipice. This is because we’re used to metaphors [have a folk theory] only when they fully spell out how something is like something else. But more often than not, they leave most of the potential similarities unexpressed or even unimagined. And sometimes the similarity is even coincidental - based on similar sounding words, alliteration, rhyme or spelling. What happened here, is that I paused at the wrong moment and all these coincidental similarities started rushing into the vacuum of my brief silence. And all the men that I have been associated with in my life from college boyfriends to my husband and his prosecutors were suddenly rushing to everybody’s mind including the audience and myself. But the incongruity of the comparison became immediately apparent and that is why everybody started laughing. What is fascinating about that moment is that none of the analogies were fleshed out, they were simply sketches of what might be and that’s what made them more powerful than the mundane and stressful reality.”

And she would have told the absolute truth! But she couldn’t because the folk theory that all analogies are always complete is simply too powerful and bloggers such as The Politico, the Fox reporter, or this NY Post headline writer would have jumped to even stronger conclusions. This negotiation of analogy boundaries is very common in public discourse and these limits are very fluid. The problem for the public discourse is that its participants are operating under the folk theory that analogies are complete and an accurate representation of likeness or somebody’s belief about likeness. What this folk theory (along with many expert theories) fails to take into account is the indeterminacy or underspecification of all metaphor-like conceptualization. Not only are the mappings from one domain to the other partial, they are also of different levels of schematicity. And that means that sometimes they are going to lead into situations such as these where everybody in the room knows what is happening but it is impossible to talk about it later because in the process of metaphor hypostasis most of the underspecification disappears and is replaced by explicit mappings.

PS: The NY Post has an interesting quote from the ‘common man’:

“She was talking about Bill being a bad man. There was no doubt whatsoever,” said Tyrone Williams, 55, an engineer from nearby Bettendorf, Iowa.

Amazon Online Reader : Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage p. 82
The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition: “If a relationship between a mistress and a male slave is disgraceful, then one between it master and a female slave is disgraceful.” This statement sounds reasonable to contemporary ears, along the line of what’s sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. But to Quintilian the parallel was ridiculous, and he had no doubt his audience would agree.

This is a great example of how powerful conceptual frames can be in forming the workings of even seemingly fairly straightforward logic. This is a perfectly acceptable syllogism only if we accept that men and women belong in the same category. It would have been interesting to question Quintilian on this subject but he probably would have said yes in general only not in this particular case. The frame in question determines the selection of appropriate categories and their blending.

Perhaps most important, however, is the possibility (illustrated by this example) that all (or at least most) paradoxes of social cognition are matter of frame conflict rather than limits or transgression or enlightened rationality.