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.)

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.]

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

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

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.

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.

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.

On The Media
In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, “sanctuary� – as in sanctuary city – has become a bad word.

…

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather to cities that said, look, we just don’t think it’s our business to have our local officials helping the INS.

We don’t want to discourage witnesses from coming forth in criminal cases. We don’t want to discourage parents from bringing their children to emergency rooms. We don’t want to discourage children from coming to school.

So using sanctuary to describe these cities would be sort of like saying that the military, because of its don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy, has become a sanctuary for homosexuals [BOB LAUGHS]because you’re not supposed to be there but we’re not going to ask whether that’s what you’re doing or not.

BOB GARFIELD: Mitt Romney has seized on this word “sanctuary.” Do you think sanctuary is the word that he’s actually trying to communicate or is he trying to use it as a kind of a code for something even more offensive to conservatives?

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, I think sanctuary is very closely related to amnesty. It evokes that word “illegal,” which is used as a noun only to describe people’s immigration status. You don’t say that Jack Abramoff was an illegal because he lobbied illegally, for example.

And, in fact, the word “illegal” has always been used in just that way. It was first introduced in the English language by the British in the 1930s and early ’40s to describe Jews who illegally emigrated to Palestine.

There are some questions here we may want to ask of Nunberg. On the one hand this sort of lexical reframing is perfectly common and  there is nothing strange about it (as much as  we may disagree with its politics).  Why do we then need a linguist to explain it to us? Nunberg’s intervention is problematic in two senses. First, his description of the process is more of a description of a folk theory of the appropriateness of mappings than a real linguistic theory. And second, the all too common assumption of an expert mantle provides legitimacy to statements that are politically engaged. I’m not trying to criticize a fellow linguist (a much more successful one, to boot) for getting engaged in politics. I’m all for that and I agree with his criticism. But this engagement is not linguistics in the sense of disengaged inquiry into the workings of language and communication. It is just engagement in frame negotiation where certain features of the process of language change are hypostasized and exposed to explicit negotiation. This, just like the subject under investigation, is extremely common.

In fact, the last paragraph is engaging in exactly the same “smear campaign” by connotation that the Romney’s of the world like so much. But reminding us that something was first used against Jews is certainly not a neutral context setter.

Again, I disagree with neither Nunberg’s linguistics nor his politics but there’s more to the story than that (as there so often is).

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).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a suggested formulation for the manual:

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