Hermeneutic Heretic

The statement from Ariana Huffington (in bold below) is one of the best examples of the folk theory upon which Critical Discourse Analysis is based - namely that words influence people in certain inevitable ways. It is also a good example of the sources of disaffection witht he mainstream debate experienced by US conservatives as described by Alan Brinkley. Brinkley suggests that the 50s and 60s brought a liberal mindset in which no alternative to post-Roosevelt era view of the world was possible to imagine. And this same sense of inevitability of conclusion from words still permeates the left/right divide; as a result each side views each other as either incompetent or corrupt (if not outright evil) because those are the only possible explanations of why they do not agree. Lakoff explained the source of the difference well in Moral Politics but seems not to have learned his own lesson in later work.

On The Media: Transcript of “HuffPo a Go Go” (June 6, 2008) ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: I really wrote the book not really to catalog what has happened but to understand why, because I think if we’re going to put an end to this dark chapter in American history, we need to understand why.

And you’re absolutely right. The 28 percent of Americans who still approve of George Bush are not going to be in any way influenced by my book. But there is another 20 percent that I do want to appeal to, and that’s the 20 percent of additional Americans who make the 48 percent that are considering voting for John McCain. If that 20 percent reads my book and at the end of it they are still thinking of voting for John McCain, they can have their money back.

BOB GARFIELD: So the answer to my question is that you wrote this book to make sure that John McCain is defeated?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Yes.

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.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama has the smarts, the plans and, yes, the charisma to capably lead and transform a nation that aches for a new direction.

Editorials & Opinion | Obama for the Democrats | Seattle Times Newspaper

My voice, particularly on this blog, with no readership is of no consequence. I have no vote in American elections although I’ve often felt that people around the world should have at least some delegates in the US nominating conventions. Nevertheless, I cannot but endorse Obama. I’ve reviewed Audacity of Hope (twice, once on the radio, once in Czech press) and I’ve watched quite a few of his speeches; and I cannot do a better job of summarizing my impressions than the Seattle Times above.

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.

Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

In these few paragraphs Gloria Steinem summarizes the findings of social psychology of the last forty years. Including earlier on in her column where she wonders why we consider Obama black when his mother was white so we could just as easily consider him white or mixed race.

There is little controversial both about the social psychology or politics of these statements. However, the question is what conclusions we’ll draw from them. There is the rationalist approach which Steinem seems to imply assuming that this condition of assymetric perception existing in that strange space between the individual and the group. The rationalist position places the problem squarely inside the individual’s cognition (brain) which of course is ultimately the only place where it can live. However, the question remains whether this is a reductionism that is descriptively and theoretically fruitful. On the political side it implies that this state of ‘irrationality’ is an ailment that can and should be cured. However, this discards the totality of the human condition.

An alternative position, for which there is not sufficient social scientific theory or descriptive framework, is to place the locus of this situation in the collective. This, of course, can only be a descriptive convenience, because ultimately these things exist or are reflected in the individual’s brain. But looking for these effects in the brain may be as foolhardy as trying to design a bridge using solely quantum mechanics or Einsteinian physics. The descriptive advantage is obvious. Not reducing collective phenomena to the individual would make it possible to take certain phenomena at their face value. The political advantage is less obvious. Taking the individualistic reductionist perspective makes it possible to appeal to individuals to change and to reflect on their inner biases. On the other hand, it does lead to the alienation of many who cannot identify with the individual position despite the collective consequence. Of course, many if not most of these biases are individual and can be brought to our attention to be challenged but is that always the case and/or is there a situation where the collective is primary and the straightforward causality from the individual to the group and from the group to the individual does not apply. Saying "male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own" simply describes a fact of logic but does "male voters are supporting their own" follow from "male voters are more likely to vote for a candidate that is also male". Perhaps it does but just because these two sentences are equivalent in terms of push-and-shove container logic they may not be the same from the perspective of social psychological description. Something that will need to be investigated more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virtual Economics: Why newspapers are not screwed
…newspapers’ core value is not their content but their validation. Sure it’s expensive to create content. In the long run this probably doesn’t really matter. There’s plenty of content. The value that newspapers add to the picture is verifying which of it is true.

The problem with many of the assumptions about the democratizing power of the internets, has been exactly this. The fact that anybody can post something online still doesn’t obviate the social needs for establishing networks of trust. That goes for art, as well as music. Often, people are not sure whether it is appropriate to like something until an appropriate trusted sources has given it a seal of approval. The problem is that there is privilege and power associated with being in a center of a network of trust. So a lot of people will vie for that position thus disturbing the supposedly egalitarian nature of the environment. Social networking can replicate some of this by automating trust (such as Digg’s algorithms) but it can’t completely do away with it. That’s why it’s likely that something newspaper-like will persist long after the last printed copy of the New York Times has been sold. (Of course, hopefully, it will have been replaced by ereaders with proper eink.)