Hermeneutic Heretic

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com
“That is an awesome metaphor,� I said. Because it is. It’s funny without the use of burning children. But it isn’t accurate. John isn’t on some emotional island where he can’t understand what he’s doing. And he isn’t trying to fight, really. He doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. He doesn’t want to step up. He is, basically, an inadequate father. And I haven’t found a metaphor, war or otherwise, that says it any better. [my emphasis]

This is a rather interesting self-reflective observation (apart from the rather compulsively good writing) for a writer whose stock in trade is the creative analogy (generative metaphor). And reflective of something most metaphor theorists tend to neglect. What happens if there is no good metaphor? Metaphors are frequently presented as omni-present and unlocking this or the other of our mind. But just as often people turn away from outward metaphor or try to eliminate the metaphoricity of one and come up with a “literal” description. Of course, by conceptual metaphor standards, the statement in bold is frought with metaphors of all kind but the explicit desire of the author is to reject metaphor for something identified (through a folk theory of literal meaning and the ornamental nature of figurative language) as a ‘down-to-earth’ description of life ‘as it is’. That doesn’t invalidate the ubiquity of metaphor theory (which is really a ‘centrality of conceptual integration’ theory) just shows that there are different levels of magnification that we need to operate on. The writer rejects the generative (educational) metaphor and simply settles for integrating scenarios of fatherhood with her narrative depiction of events and describing the results in the normal attributive manner. What is interesting, is that the standards of fatherhood are implied in the preceding narrative (not cited here) in interesting ways that would bear further investigation. Clearly, something cognitive is happening at the level of discourse rather than the smaller chunks of perception cognitive psychology of text generally operates on.

OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = “Wasted” lives
I could go on, but it would be a waste of breath trying to get Sen. Obama to acknowledge the existence of countless soldiers and their families who reject his patronizing, infantilizing, and insulting view of all American troops as dupes/victims who have squandered their lives.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Video: Obama says lives of troops killed in Iraq were “wasted�
Of course he thinks their lives were wasted. Everyone on the anti-war side does; that’s one of the reasons they want to end the war. But they can’t say that because it dishonors the dead so they’re forced into rhetorical pretzels like the one Pelosi tied herself into a few weeks ago with Diane Sawyer. Army Lawyer summed up her position at the time thusly: “They didn’t die for nothing, they died for something stupid.�

Semantic prosody is a great concept introduced to provide a new perspective on what is otherwise known as connotation of words. All semantic prosody does is color the surrounding text with whatever affective charge the word carries. (Stubbs writes about this extensively.) However, what does that charge look like and how does it behave in actual discourse (that may be a bit difficult to find in a corpus). Framing and conceptual integration to the rescue. One of the strengths of the concept of ‘prosody’ (itself a case of blending) is that it carries with it notion of suprasegmentality, i.e. not applying to any particular segment of the text (words, endings, sentences). Conceptual integration, however, has an interesting ambivalence on segmentality. On the one hand, it is usually looked at in segmental ways but on the other hand it has many of these suprasegmental (neuralnet-like) features that are talked about in the context of semantic prosody.

What does that have to do with poor misunderstood Obama? Well, semantic prosody basically makes it impossible to say what he wants to say. The Hot Air blog was describing the underlying propositional structure: the Iraq war is a misguided venture, investing any resources into it is waste, money is resources so it is wasted, people can also be thought of as resources so their lives can be wasted. However, using the word wasted anywhere near the word soldier is ill-advised in the American political context. Michelle Malking shows that by (mis)paraphrasing Obama as meaning that the dead soldiers are “dupes/victims who have squandered their lives”.

Now, it is possible to say that any person with an spoonful of brain cells in their head can see that that’s not what Obama meant. That, however, brings the problem of further prosodies. Because accusing conservatives of weak mindedness is a trope frequently employed by liberals, so that defense would only dig Obama deeper. (The strangely unaware condescension behind this Top Gear clip is an example of that)
But there is even the more legitimate question. Is it really that wrong-minded or even illogical to refuse to accept the interpretation of Obama’s sentence stripped of its prosody or at least where the propositional (logical) content is profiled (brought to the fore) in a such a way that the effect of prosody is dissipated? And furthermore, is there a difference between an individual speaker’s ability to make this distinction and the possibility of maintaining this distinction across a large body of texts that constitutes the related discourse.

This is a fascinating theoretical question that, as far as I know, had not been addressed. Mostly, the assumption is that these things happen unconsciously (outside our volition) [Lakoff] and that individual utterances have a cumulative effect [van Dijk - explicitly, Fauconnier on entrenchment implicitly]. While this is probably broadly correct (or at least it is intuitively very appealing) it glosses over the complex interplay between automatic and negotiated frame integration and what role it plays in the cumulative effects of entrenchment.

PS: Here’s an example of how intelligence is invoked in the context of negotiating irony:

YouTube comment on Randy Newman - A Few Words in Defense of Our Country
“Great stuff. Only a dummy wouldn’t get this song.”

iTWire - A new ‘iBook’ from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid
Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? … The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard to bemoan the fact that: “We are, it seems, about to lose physical contact with books, the primary experience and foundation of civilisation for the last 500 years.”

Civilizations (or rather discourse participants negotiating the conceptual frames that define them) put great stock by the dual story of innovation and continuity. And few things are as central to the foundations of our civilization as construed by elites than books. The topos that there is something special to books that stimulates all the senses (haptic, kinesthetic, visual and olfactory stimuli all play a role) is ubiquitous and this is held to give books the edge over eBooks. It is assumed (and often stated) that there is something primeval about turning a page, sniffing the old book mustiness or the new book glue and becoming engrossed in the book’s world. Of course, in the past, as now, most people engaged with books by having them read to them, often in public places. So the ‘racial’ memory of bookworms is likely a constructed image.

But so is its opposite of ebooks revolutionizing the world of information as we know it. While there is nothing natural about printed books, there is a lot of power in constructed images. So books will have a lot of staying power. But even if they don’t, which I hope is likely, the impact on the world is likely to be fairly minimal. As Cory Doctorow pointed out somewhere, for quite a few of the new elites (although as an elite he said everyone), the majority of the text they interact with every day is already on the screen. And as a lot of the ‘new literacy’ people correctly remind us, even in the literate population, literacy is not always (and maybe not even most of the time) used to interact with large chunks of cohesive text.

And finally, there is a limit to the capacity of consumption of information. The elites, who really matter when it comes to information dissemination, already have almost all they can handle. So the information can be made available to larger population. Which is great because that will mean infusion of new blood into the elites and formation of informed localized elites (not democratization). But hardly a revolution.

So while I be the first in line to buy an eBook reader, once someone makes one I can a) afford, b) search text, c) underline and excerpt text. I doubt it will have an impact on our civilization beyond the realignment of some of its foundational imagery. It will take a while to renegotiate the frames, but that’s just how it goes.

PS: It turns out that having written the above, there are two more pages to the article that also take issue with Appleyard’s bellyaching very much on similar ground:

So what? We have also lost contact with the primary experience of hunting killing, dismembering and cooking large beasts in order to eat, and that of being hunted, killed and dismembered by other wild beasts in the process: to name but one unpleasant experience that civilisation has deprived us of.

But rather than annoyed at having wasted my time, I’m gratified that one of my predictions, viz the impending renegotiating of frames, is upon us already. Lot of ‘frame negotiation’ is happening through subtle unconscious processes but much of it comes through trenchant analysis and metaphor hypostasis. Like this:

“An index is the work of a mind with knowledge, search engine results are the product of an algorithm with information. …”

… I would suggest that the indexes of most reference books today are complied largely by algorithms, not human indexers.

And it’s not just the renegotiation of the present but also of the past:

Come off it, This might be true if the population were comprised largely of ‘wisdom seeking’ individuals who collectively advance knowledge and civilisation. This is not the case, and never has been. Not of academic wisdom at any rate. For generations primitive peoples without any written languages thrived and prospered through intimate knowledge, and wisdom of their natural environment. The wisdom that has advanced civilisation to what it is today has always been the province of select minority of gifted individuals who have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge and our ability to exploit the natural world.

I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times
The problem that the Young America’s Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn’t simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that’s a serious issue. At Occidental, for instance, it seems nearly impossible to study any field, save for the hard sciences, that doesn’t include “race, class and gender” among its topics. Even the Shakespeare course at Occidental this semester focuses on “cultural anxieties over authority, race, colonialism and religion” during the age of the Bard.

The bigger problem is that too much of American higher education has lost any notion of what its students ought to know about the ideas and people and movements that created the civilization in which they live: Who Plato was or what happened at Appomattox.

Instead of the carefully crafted core programs that once guided students through the basics of literature, philosophy, history and the social sciences, most colleges now offer smorgasbords of unrelated classes for their students to sample in order to fulfill requirements. And the professors stock the smorgasbords with whatever the theorists they idolize tells them is the new new thing.

Why not take a course in “The Phallus”?

You can get the same credit for it as for a course in Greek tragedy.

This is as much about education as about the very definition of knowledge and social cohesion. It underscores one of the issues that progressive educators often neglect, viz the images of education, the schooling process, and educatedness, prevalent in a given culture. The assumption that the result of education is knowledge (and skill and attitude and acceptable behavior and all that) is missing one important element. What education provides is above all primary socialization. That, however, is thought to be rather limited in scope because it refers to only basic communities. However, students need to be ‘primarily’ socialized into a number of groupings (secondary socialization would just be primary socialization into a non-immediate group - the process is similar). It could be described as learning to acquire ways of signaling membership. And one of the ways of signaling membership in a group/category of college graduates is knowing a little about Shakespeare. By little, I mean enough to have a mundane conversation. This may seem like a trivial matter but this signaling is absolutely crucial in the academic world (and at its intersection with the real world). The problem is that we need to affirm credibility of our sources of information. We basically have no way of verifying more than a tiny fraction of information that we need to base many decisions on. These signals our pretty much our only way of doing that (along with social connectivity). These new college courses (while often based on solid scholarship - no more woollyheaded than most tripe spouted about Shakespeare) neglect this aspect of education and run into trouble. The requirements for this social acceptability are fairly modest, though, as the highlighted section about shows. The author’s own knowledge of Plate would probably be shown woefully inadequate by any closer examination but a few mentions of the Republic of the cave in a conversation will establish her credentials as an educated person and therefore her credibility in certain kinds of social exchanges. (That is not to say that the same processes don’t operate within these ‘new’ kinds of courses, only they socialize their graduates into smaller more ‘exclusive’ groups.) The convener of Phalus 101 need not worry, though. Should the subject prove viable it will become part of the academic establishment. Many worthy disciplines (probably most) from mathematics to psychology have at some point or other been subjected to similar abuse and many are still fighting to gain acceptance.

The other questions, namely, what about the more general cognitive and affective outcomes of education. I suspect that they will be on average the same no matter what subject matter is the focus. The only thing that curricula and materials have any lasting effect on is encyclopedic (factual) knowledge. So if we start telling students that Pluto is not a planet and the capital of Kazakhstan is Astana, that’s what most of them will know (percentages of retention depending on how salient the need for the piece of information is and social and psychologically relevant it is). However, if we start telling them that drugs are bad, they will know that that’s what they were told but may or may not believe it or may or may not act on their knowledge and/or belief. Equally many students will remember that Plato had something to say about a cave with shadows in it but in relatively few will it lead to an ability to integrate it into their view of the world beyond the most trite late night musings. So, in short, despite being in favor of a lot of radical curriculum reform, I tend not to get too excited about these things any more.

Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech
[Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They’ve got one all-purpose word — “awesome” — to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they’re indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés — including a few tired four-letter words.
…
Today, teens aren’t the only ones who have lost the ability to speak and write with vigor and eloquence. Folks of all ages are reading less — especially the classics, whose authors wielded our language most powerfully. As a result, our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.
…
“Today, our common cultural reference points come from the visual culture: Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez,” [Diane] Ravitch [who just compiled a collection of important English texts] told me last week. … Our schools could help remedy the problem, but often don’t, she says. That’s because “‘relevance” is now the watchword in education.

In textbooks, teens tend to find countless stories about young people much like themselves, according to Ravitch.
…
Norman Fruman, an emeritus English professor at the University of Minnesota, agrees. “Good literature deals with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior,” he says. “It records our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations.”

Aside from being more or less predictable nonsense this article and views reported in it raise several reasonably interesting questions.

On language (and its variability): Language here is presented as reflecting complexity of thought and emotion. However, the language discussed is written or formal spoken language and contrasted with informal spoken language. This is a very typical feature of mavenry (I use the term language maven from Pinker’s Language Instinct) and it shows that these people really know very little about language if a bit more (though not a lot) about grammar. However, there are some underlying issues here that should be discussed, however. Is there such a thing as complexity of language? It is already accepted by linguists that individual languages all have the same level of grammatical complexity This is an issue that may need revisiting as the lines between grammar and vocabulary blur, but it is clear that all languages (from creoles up) can roughly express what is expressed in all other languages (connotations and misaligned categories being the most difficult to make into an equivalent). But what about the ’systems’ contained in individuals’ brains? There is certainly a great deal of variation in how well individuals deal with the subtlety of linguistic expression. What is the nature of this difference? None knows or is even, as far as I know, researching this. Let’s accept for now that there is such a thing as a lower complexity language speaker (I suspect that there will be - and it will have something to do with ability to do certain kinds of conceptual blends). What would happen (the author of this screed implies) if all the individuals in a group had this hypothetical lower complexity (such as a pigin)? Would the language of the entire group deteriorate and cease to be a language? Most possibly but this would have to be a result of an evolutionary biological process rather than poor educational standards. Not knowing what Shakespeare said does not mean not being able to express oneself. Of course, the new language will have different means of expression and variability that may be erased in one place will appear elsewhere. This is amply demonstrated in the relatively well-understood process of creolization. Of course, there is also the issue of language decay and language death but those are always associate with a decrease of prestige of a language as a whole and a reduction of the number of native speakers (leading to reverse creolization - e.g. decrease in number of categories, etc.). English or no other language with a million or more of native speakers is in any immediate danger. Unless we mean English as spoken in 2007. That of course is in imminent danger and there is a good chance that English as spoken in 2207 will be significantly different to the degree that mutual intelligibility will be impaired or a refragmentation will occur (of course, like with Latin, academic English may prove to have remarkable staying power and its prevalence may still be in its ascendancy).
On historical perspectives and anachronism: Part of this problem is the tendency of all historians to ignore the level of magnification they are dealing with when making these comparisons. The author contrasts giants from the history of verbal expression with randomly (and anecdotally) chosen subjects speaking in an informal context. Had she done such random eavesdropping two hundred years ago should would have heard exactly the same issues (I’m sure that there are a number of texts out there bemoaning the decreasing standards of education and expression). Conversely, if she looked today’s world of English expression from far enough she would see about the same (if not greater) proportion of luminaries read by about the same number (proportionately) of people. This goes for almost all ‘it used to be better’ rants.

On modality of perception and social cognition: The author makes another assumption that might bear investigating. Namely, that there is a fundamental difference in the modes in which we perceive language (and that written is the superior one). Of necessity, there are important differences in how we process written and spoken word cognitively at the moment of perception. However, are there also enough differences in the cumulative learning of language and improving the ability of self-expression? Homeric and Vedic poetry would beg to differ (the ahistoricism again). Reading in general is a relatively new thing and silent reading by the population at large is barely a century old. So we can hardly expect the educational system to have much to do with the complexity of language otherwise there would never have been any. Furthermore, the supposedly ‘visual’ symbols of culture such as Britney Spears come with a significant linguistic baggage much of which is written (just look at fan sites and fan fiction).

Then, there is the fact that reading and language are not merely matters of encoding and decoding emotions or information. They have a significant social component to them so we can hardly expect a group of socializing teens to be articulate beyond the standards of their community. Simply because it would be disruptive to that community.

On literature: Connected to that is the assumption that there is only one thing called literature and that there is a standard for good literature, particularly for the purposes of public edification. For some reason, the author chose to forget that Shakespeare wrote plays and those were put on in extremely visual ways including lewdness frowned upon by the makers of American Pie. I already pointed out that much of the great classics were not in fact written or transmitted in written form (or not in the form we know them today - e.g. serializations of Dostoyevsky or Dickens). So having problematized the notion of literature, we need to cast our net a little wider. And what do we find: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, Sopranos, Veronica Mars, West Wing or even Friends or My Name is Earl. All of these are exhibit the highest levels of narrative and linguistic sophistication that easily measure up to the best in Shakespeare (we must not forget that while good, Shakespeare’s reputation as the greatest is mostly due to nationalistic propaganda of the 1700s). And if somebody thinks they don’t deal “with ideas, as well as emotions and the psychology of human behavior” or don’t record “our greatest tragedies and our highest aspirations” they just plain don’t know what they are talking about.

On cognition again; and literacy: However, there is a potentially valid point hidden in here. While it is impossible that humans would lose the complexity of language as we know it. It is not inconceivable that they would give up writing and reading, particularly, as technologies such as speech recognition and AI develop beyond what presently seems possible. It is impossible to live without some system of graphical representation of language but the complex and powerful alphabetic systems may fall into disuse if certain conditions are fulfilled (I vaguely recall a sci-fi story that suggested it). I am not suggesting that it is likely or that it would happen due to a poor educational system but it may certainly happen over many generations. One possible way I can imagine is if technological solutions designed to deal with illiteracy or ‘analphabetacy’ in most of the world today became so successful and the developing world became socially prestigious enough to make this ‘getting information without reading’ a popular thing. There undoubted advantages the written text has over spoken text as a transmissive device but I can envision these to ignored once the key need for textual representation has been met by other means.

On learning, the effects of education (and a bit of cognition again): It is interesting to see the assumption that the effects of education are so straightforwardly causal. When the author claims that less reading of classics results in that “our ability to express ourselves is diminishing, because we can’t draw on their example for inspiration.” She assumes that language is learned purely by mimesis (or some other principle such as Chomsky’s LAD). This brings us back to the question of how different individuals process text. Some may benefit from extensive reading to increase their own expressivity and others won’t. What principle is involved here is anybody’s guess but it most certainly doesn’t bode well for the assumption that schools “could help remedy the problem” (assuming, of course, that there is a problem). And furthermore, that the cumulative effect of thus helpful schools would be the changing of levels of expressivity in the population at large. As it stands, we don’t have anything exceeding a folk theory about how this would happen. (We do have a lot of data suggesting that it almost never does, though.)

On relevance and motivation in education: Finally, not to simply disagree, Diane Ravitch makes a point which is very important for contemporary debates about education. It has been a trend for some time (or at least an aspiration that goes back to Comenius and further) to try to make learning materials “relevant” to the students to engage them in and motivate them for better learning. The problem with this is twofold. First, it assumes that cumulative effect of and within education I mentioned above. More importantly, though, it rests on our confidence that curriculum developers and textbook authors can determine what is relevant to students and preserve that relevance. Instrumental relevance, in particular, is of little use. Two diggers of holes or two trains going in opposite directions make the solution of mathematical equations no more appealing and probably not much easier. They are certainly of no relevance to most learners. It is also not certain that instrumental relevance will lead to the kind of motivation that enhances learning (even if we knew what learning really was and how to tell if it is enhanced). We know a little more about motivation that improves results of test taking (much easier to measure and much less necessary to motivate for). So Ravitch is broadly right to imply that the attempts to make everything be exactly the same to what the students already know, it is more likely to impoverish rather than enrich their learning (although, I suspect that the overall effect is less pronounced than she seems to assume). She also relies on the probably incorrect assumption, as we established earlier, that all students use these texts in the same way. But she is right to raise the question of relevance as a basically blind alley in the pursuit of motivation.
The problem with motivation is that we know that it is probably the most reliable predictor of success in learning (baring mental disabilities and differences in learning styles, and lots of other things). However, we have know idea how to produce it (certainly not uniformly across populations) and we don’t even know what kind of motivation works when. Ultimately, all we can say with any confidence about motivation in learning is the tautology that the kind of motivation that produces successful learning is the motivation that has produced successful learning. (It’s usually even hard to describe the complex interplay of different kinds of motivations and dismotivations.) We don’t have much in the way of predictive tools to look at somebody who appears motivated and say how well they will learn but we can usually say that someone who was a successful learner was motivated in one way or another.

End. (Who would have thought that such innocuous article can encapsulate all that there is about language, cognition and education.)

On The Media: Transcript of “God No!” (December 15, 2006)
In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. “The New Atheists”, as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in Wired magazine, condemn, quote, “not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong, it’s evil.”

Let’s be clear on one thing! There is no chance that there is a god of the sort any of the world’s major or minor religions envision. There is not even a universal spirit or anthropic principle that the uncertain or pathologically polite like to claim. There is no need to be agnostic about this, no ‘wait-and-see’ approach is necessary! There is no God! Might as well be atheist. However, there is also no evolution, individual potential or basic humanism (see Rousseau to Arendt) that secular humanists profess a faith (rational certainty) in. All of these are social constructs, that is, they don’t exist like cars and trees exist (well, even cars and trees are social constructs in a way but they are more closely tied to tangible objects as you discover when one falls on you).

Sidenote: Now, there are a few things that might be worth being agnostic about. For me the foundation of agnosticism about the transcendental rests on a quote from St Agustin about time: “God created the universe with time, not in time.” That, by analogy, defines the boundaries of agnosticism or that is how I would choose to interpret the anthropic principle. We are limited by our humanness in how we see the world. If something “exists” outside these limits (such as 4 dimensional beings - see sci fi) there is no way it can ever enter into our sphere of relevance in its essence. In fact, even the very concept of existence may only apply within our own conceptual world as do all notions of causality, so to assume that for instance this hypothetical 4-dimensional world will have any impact on or relevance to our own world with paltry 3 dimensions, is to say too much. This is my reading of Wittgensteins “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Although he probably meant something else by it. So I would replace the second part by ‘thereof one is inevitably silent’ and ’speak’ in the first part by ‘conceive’.) Also, where Parmedides sings of the totality of existence he probably means something similar. All that we can do about the truly transcendent is refer to it as something that is completely beyond our grasp. However, there is nothing mystical or wondrous about this as some postmodernist seem to be inclined to suggest. Neither does it mean that we should consciously avoid exploring certain areas that are presented to us by the inclinations that limit our world. However, when something gets within our grasp that previously appeared beyond it, we cannot conclude that we’re slowly ‘bit by byte’ eating away at the unknowable until there is nothing left. It just means that our own conceptual inclination isn’t very good at exploring its own boundaries and unequivocally point outside them.

The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof condemned the New Atheists as obnoxious and militant and in your face. And he wrote that this, quote, “charge of the atheist brigade” in its treatment of conservative Christians is, quote, “often just as intolerant and mean.”
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SAM HARRIS: If you think the creator of the universe is letting people fly planes into our buildings because we are tolerating gay marriage, or he’s whipping up hurricanes in the Gulf because we’re tolerating gay marriage, you have to try to legislate against gay marriage.
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PAT ROBERTSON: What we’ve got to recognize just there in this case is that the evolutionists worship atheism. I mean, that’s their religion. So this is an establishment of religion contrary to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

This is a debate that might be worth investigating in some detail (although it is not nearly as crucial as it might appear). Is atheism a form of religion? Equating religion and atheism may seem oxymoronic by definition (although in languages Czech it is also oxymoronic in vocabulary, náboženství - lit. ingoddiness) but the Latin-English etymology of binding suggests otherwise. In fact, religion has much less to do with God than with social and political consideration. Religion is a strong determinant of social identity and although some intellectual and faith baggage does come with it that might fall within the purview of clinical and/or cognitive psychology, it is much more profitable to study its social aspects at the group level. While there must have been many individuals who converted as a result of private revelation (cognitive dissonance or licking the wrong/right kind of mushroom) the majority of conversions of populations in history happened for political or economic reasons. On some level, belonging to a religion is not psychologically and socially that different from supporting a football club. The God thing really only muddles the waters. So once we dispense with the ecstatic bit of religion, atheism in the form presented below (and most of the expressions in faith of science) qualify as religious.

ELLEN JOHNSON: It’s demeaning to atheists. It’s saying that under very dire circumstances or frightening situations, atheists will stop being atheists. They will start believing. And this is really just a wish on the part of the religious, because it’s not based in fact.

JOHN BURNETT: I thought it was a good line for the tape.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: NPR’s John Burnett.

JOHN BURNETT: And I didn’t realize that it was so offensive to atheists. And I learned that in spades after this story came out. They spammed me for weeks with e-mail, saying, we’re outraged. So now I know.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And did you sort of see their point?

JOHN BURNETT: I do see their point. I literally hadn’t thought about it before. And, frankly, I will think twice about using the phrase again.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What’s an atheist to do? American Atheist President Ellen Johnson, says they have to organize.

ELLEN JOHNSON: Until the atheists start voting their atheism and be identified as a voting block in America, the politicians aren’t going to listen to us. We’re not going to have any influence in the public schools. We’re not going to have any influence in the media or anywhere else.

If things can be demeaning to atheists, if they can organize and vote in blocs, and all of this to opposition to religion, how different are they from religion? Not very. There are two arguments against atheism as religion position that might be worth taking into account. First, atheism is not an organized institution with a guide to personal behavior. In this it is more useful to look at it in opposition to monotheism or religiosity. Second, by blithely reducing religion to not much more than a tupperware party with the occasional crusade, we need to deal with the fact that now almost everything can be a religion. Why should we then even bother pointing out its religious aspects when we don’t do it for the Women’s institute?

The first argument is only valid in so far as we think of atheism as an independent position. However, atheism is strongly associated with scientific rationalism and secular humanism, which provide the religious part of its ideology (institutionalization, rituals and holy texts). That’s where we find liturgies and rituals (many overlapping with religious ones). Citizenship classes are a great example of a religious-like indoctrination and there are many rituals that many people perform to signify their ‘devotion’. They are mostly enacted through popular culture (any TV series - which is why the claims of a liberal bias in media are not so far-fetched although looking in the wrong place) and modern story-telling is full of them. There are even pilgrimages (eco-tourism), holy places (museum of natural history) and clergy (Richard Dawkins, TV personalities) of secular humanism and rational scientism. Art, universities and scholarship that once used to support religion (let’s not forget that origin of mathematics both in Greece and India were in service of religion) now fully support rational scientism and humanism. There are no places that are full equivalents of cathedrals but there are certainly many monuments build to science (Millenium dome in London). In short, an scientific atheist can lead as fully a devotional life as a religious person, in which no aspects of the religious experience are missing, although they are not concentrated in one place. Anti-religionists, or those who only go to church infrequently, often forget that the ‘religious’ - i.e. connected - life is and always has been much more varied and less monolithic than is often portrayed. And neither do they realize the varied and often surprising role science plays in social and devotional life of atheists (as well as religious people). A long time ago, I noted this short passage from Agatha Christi which I think described the state of modern rational scientism very accurately over half a century ago:

Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye, 1953 p. 102: Describing the room of a young servant girl: “There were cuttings about flying sauycers about secret weapons, about truth drugs used by Russians, and claims for fantastic drugs discovered by American doctors. All the witchcraft, so Neele thought, of our twentieth century.� p. 221: Miss Marple: “It’s interesting, you know, and very instructive–the things these girls cut out of papers and keep. It’s always been the same, you know, all through the ages. Recipes for beauty, for attracting the man you love. And witchcraft and charms and marvelous happenings. Nowadays, they’re mostly lumped under the heading of Science. Nobody believes in magicians anymore, nobody believes that anyone can come along and wave a wand and turn you into a frog. But if you read in a paper that by injecting certain glands, scientists can alter your vital tissues and you’ll develop frog-like characteristics, well, everybody would believe that.�

The second argument (i.e. one why not call a kitting club a religion) is fair in so far as we could associate other social group with religious-like nature on their surface. What sets atheism apart, however, is the fact that it deals with the very ‘foundational’ issues of human existence that religion has heretofore dealt with and it does so in explicit opposition to religion. So it not only invites a comparison with what it attacks, its attempts to supplant it and its proselytizing aspects only make it more similar to religion. If it is true, then, that religion is an inevitable condition of human existence (both personally and socially) atheism, if it wishes to do away with it, must become more like. Rather like the cult of the Virgin Mary and Catholic Saints was introduced to provide an equivalent to pagan spirit and the Goddess. (Islam, being distributed by sword rather than political alliance, was a little more fortunate and remained less influenced in its doctrine, although Sharia law is an example of its blending with local cultural patterns.)

No religion and an end to war: how thinkers see the future | Science | Guardian Unlimited People’s fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

This is a good example of religious zeal in the atheist community, although, not necessarily completely incorrect. There is apparently only one good faith and that faith will be revealed to the world and the true and righteous will know it and only the low and wicked will turn away from it. (Presumably they will then be saved by science when the big disaster strikes and taken to new science-built colonies on the moon in a rapture like event.)

Wired 14.11: The Church of the Non-Believers
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.

…Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them…Dawkins: “the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism.” … Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. Between 2004 and 2006, his book sold more than a quarter million copies.

…We discuss what it might look like, this world without God. “There would be a religion of reason,” Harris says. “We would have realized the rational means to maximize human happiness. We may all agree that we want to have a Sabbath that we take really seriously – a lot more seriously than most religious people take it. But it would be a rational decision, and it would not be just because it’s in the Bible. We would be able to invoke the power of poetry and ritual and silent contemplation and all the variables of happiness so that we could exploit them. Call it prayer, but we would have prayer without bullshit.”

What better way to conclude than with a quotation that proves the point. It seems almost too easy. And the author of the Wired article takes the bait (his bias evident from the title):

…People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists….The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically.

He is certainly right about the fundamentalism of certain atheists but political hopelessness is much more open to question. In many ways, the new religion of secular humanism and rationalistic scientism (with its dogmas of individuality, democratism, rationalism, scientism and Kantian ethics) has already supplanted the old in many areas (education, mainstream culture, historiography) and it may not be too long before it prevails completely. We can then expect it to develop some features of major religions such as organized ritual that are still partially missing.

To summarize: All arguments for the existence of God are idiotic but most arguments against the existence of God are not much better. The only worthwhile attitude towards the idea of God is indifference. However, given that religion (or something like it) governs all aspects of our life - personal and social (we need those bindings), it is difficult to reject it as something from all daily life. In other words, while God or Science are irrelevant, many of the rituals associated with our belief in them are structurally essential to our life and we would ignore them at our peril. Those are worth subscribing to or fighting against, and, in fact, we have no choice but to engage with them in one way or another if we want to remain recognizably human.

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts

A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren’t. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded–permanently. “We’re being very ruthless,” boasts library director Sam Clay.
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But this raises a fundamental question: What are libraries for? Are they cultural storehouses that contain the best that has been thought and said? Or are they more like actual stores, responding to whatever fickle taste or Mitch Albom tearjerker is all the rage at this very moment?

Libraries are one of the great symbols of freedom of speech and democracy by virtue of being seen as guarantors of an ‘educated electorate’. The public that has access to edifying reading will be more likely to vote ‘rationally’ and be well-informed. However, does the public have a say (vote) in what should be in the libraries for their edification? And if so, how is their say recorded? I would suggest that the public should have a say but that recording it by pure majority preference (a sort of implied vote) is insufficient.

The library officials are making the mistake of assuming that since readers mostly check out popular literature they would, if asked, not prefer that the library be the curator of some of the less popular but more ‘important’ titles. However, the author of the commentary makes a similarly problematic assumption, i.e. that Nelson DeMille has less to say on the subject of human existence than Dostoyevsky or Marlowe. That’s why it should not be left just to the elites to make the decision which is just as determined by social prestige of authors as the preference of the airport potboiler (only the social circle that determines the prestige is different).

Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win
Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind. People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession.

This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and ‘professional’ psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist junk science journalism (since it is the perex it is possible that it was not written by the authors). The second part is inaccurate but basically based on credible research.

The need to establish a deterministic connection between the ‘mind’ and human behavior is basically a religious ritual. It is part of the current belief system that we are beholden to our mind so any new “discovery” adds to the canon. (There is also the opposite belief that we have ‘free will’ which usually complements the former. Their interaction is a subject of posts in other contexts, though).

Another reason this thing has any traction at all is the fact that the liberals need to justify an otherwise unfathomable dominance of hawks in power (”they can’t help it, their minds told them so”).
[It is also interesting that the authors chose to pseudo-enumerate the biases although their claims are not based on any numerical surveys.]

As the hawks and doves thrust and parry, one hopes that the decision makers will hear their arguments on the merits and weigh them judiciously before choosing a course of action. Don’t count on it. Modern psychology suggests that policymakers come to the debate predisposed to believe their hawkish advisors more than the doves. There are numerous reasons for the burden of persuasion that doves carry, and some of them have nothing to do with politics or strategy. In fact, a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind.

Of course, the  emphasized text depends on the assumption that the biased decision-making is not what “judicious” weighing looks like.

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics.

It is interesting that the authors chose to equate biases with errors (which assume a possible non-erroneous or non-biased account) and at the same time position themselves as interpreters of abstruse needlessly jargon-laden science that has nothing to do with the real world.
What is even more interesting is that these are respectable authors. Yet the conclusions they draw a completely unfounded and not based on any serious research of actual political decision making. So by conflating good research data with anecdotal data they result with nothing more than a folk theory which is important in the overall system of public belief formation but does little to advance independent knowledge of human affairs.

Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate in economics and Eugene Higgins professor of psychology and professor of public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. & Jonathan Renshon is a doctoral student in the Department of Government at Harvard University and author of Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2006).