From: Dan Fabulich (dfabulich@warpmail.net)
Date: Wed Sep 04 2002 - 15:40:39 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Dan writes
>
> > Certainly, abandoning the natural realistic language we've been using
> > for so long would be difficult at best, and dangerous at worst. But
> > realizing that we shouldn't abandon this language is a world of
> > difference from saying that we shouldn't check out the others.
>
> I'm not for an Inquisition, you know. I'm predicting that "checking out
> other languages" will come to nothing. I'll even offer reasons for this
> prediction if asked. (For what it's worth, I don't agree with the
> subject line of this thread: it's entirely possible that postmodernists
> have something to contribute to the study of literature. It's just that
> they foolishly wander from their domain too often.)
>
> > Maybe realism is your favorite language for science (though it's still
> > a difficult fit in QM), but non-realism teaches you the most about how
> > to look at morality, or at mathematics.
>
> I don't follow this. Do you have an example for each? I claim that
> anything with actual content is best spoken about with realistic
> language.
In quantum mechanics: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Subjectivists had been arguing for a world view in which we reify
uncertainty as part of our world, in which there are no deeper facts than
those about which *we* are certain. While this idea hasn't been a big
success across the board, it found a perfect match in the Uncertainty
Principle. It's still possible to be a realist about the exact
momentum/location of particles and accept Heisenberg, but it's not a very
intuitive way of looking at it; certainly the natural one [and the one
they teach at universities] is that, when the particle's momentum is known
within such-and-such a range, the precise location of the particle within
the corresponding error range is "not defined", not merely "unknown."
In mathematics, the answer is even easier. Are there *really* numbers
apart from the natural numbers? Is 0 real? How about the negative
numbers? How about the imaginary numbers? How about the "supernatural"
numbers Hofstadter suggested in GEB? In geometry, are we to be realists
about Euclid's axioms? What about non-Euclidean geometries? Here,
reinterpretations from different systems are obviously fruitful, and
obviously non-realist.
In morality, the "fruit" is vague, but insightful. Is there a meaning of
life? Or do you create meaning in your own life? People have gone a long
way with the latter proposition, and found/made their lives to be more
fulfilling than they might have otherwise. [Interestingly, others have
made the opposite move, with the same effect; evidence that checking out
other languages is a Good Idea (tm).] Indeed, in this case we actually
have an interesting spectrum, ranging from highly objectivist/realist
moralities grounded in religion, to realist anthropocentric moralities
like utilitarianism and libertarianism, to highly non-realist views like
subjectivism and relativism.
> > Eliminating the truth words (as awkward as that might be) might
> > help us get out of that rut; certainly Charles' point holds
> > that truth words hardly ever crop up in technical literature.
> > I agree with Charles that this is customary for a good and
> > useful reason.
>
> I explained my reason why "truth words" seldom show up:
> they're redundant. Saying X is true is often just like
> saying X. Don't you agree that this is the key reason?
[...]
> As long as you're editing the Newspeak Dictionary, why
> not drop "ought" from that sentence, so that it becomes
> "I wonder whether to believe X", and then you can get
> rid of "I", "wonder", and so on, until we are left with "X?".
Actually, we *can't* go that far without losing something important from
the language.
For example, consider this claim: "Dan's religious belief is correct."
If you know that my belief is "there is no God", then you can say "It is
correct that there is no God" by substituting "there is no God" for "Dan's
religious belief." But what if you don't know what my religious belief
is, or don't wish to say? In that case, you can't merely substitute it
for "Dan's religious belief". You CAN rephrase the question in such a way
that it doesn't invoke truth words. I proposed "You should agree with
Dan's religious belief," swapping "ought" words for "truth" words. But
you can't just drop them *all* and leave just X without stripping an
important capacity out of the language.
But that wasn't really your point. Your point was that I shouldn't try to
cook up the "Newspeak Dictionary." I think you therefore misunderstand my
purpose here. If it were my project to try to cook up a new way of
speaking that everyone would then be forced to follow, I think you're
right, I ought to abandon my project and find some more honest line of
work. But that's not my goal. I'm just suggesting that the design of
cultures/interpretations/languages, aside from whatever aesthetic merit
they may have, [which is plenty,] can be insightful and interesting, and
leads to fruitful conclusions.
> Languages do change over time, of course, and a number of words, such as
> "fain" in English go out of fashion for the precise reason that there
> are other ways to say the same thing. Sorry, but the words "true" and
> "false" are necessary, and so are the phrases "X is true" and "X is
> false". I consider most notions to do away with certain words to be
> naive.
I'm not proposing that we "do away" with them, but that we consider that
using/living in a language like this can be interesting and fruitful.
> > You may be surprised just how much you can strip out of the English
> > language and still get something useful/interesting. Take this
> > example from our Extropian glossary.
> >
> > http://www.generalsemantics.org/Articles/E-Prime_intro.htm
> >
> > E-Prime would obviously ban statements like "X is true".
>
> Yeah, but has family or larger group ever adopted its strict use? Will
> any? No. But even more telling to me is that Korzybski and Whorf
> exaggerated the importance of language in thought. It doesn't follow
> IMO that thinking is improved. Yes, often the writing is sharper and
> clearer when you learn how to omit unnecessary and redundant words, but
> as someone very sympathetic to Korzybski and general semantics, I have
> to admit that if their stuff was half as good as they thought, it would
> have taken over the world by now.
In case you hadn't noticed, alternate language models have ALREADY taken
over the world. ;) We use different language models for different
situations all the time; I've already named a few. Studying any of the
seminal works here will give you dozens more.
> > think how much easier it'd be if the grammar of our language included
> > conjugation of degrees of certainty, where it'd be impossible to
> > merely say that X is true; you could only gauge the certainty with
> > which you believe it.
>
> Our language already does have such capabilities.
I'm not proposing a capability: I'm proposing an INCAPABILITY. Let me
give an example.
There's a group of metaphysics philosophers who are considering the
problem of whether the future exists now. This might seem to be an odd
problem. But the problem is "real" to them because they're considering
the question of the LOGICAL exists sign: whether it is correct to write a
backwards E about the events of next year. As you know, the backwards E
sign (which I'll write as \exists) has no tense; it does not specify a
time at all. This is fine when using it on eternal truths/objects, like
numbers, or when only one time period is being considered, but then you
get to ask the question of whether it is appropriate to say \exists a sun
tomorrow.
In English, this is a solved problem, because it's impossible to use the
word "exists" without specifying a tense. It's *grammatically incorrect*
to say that anything exists tomorrow: you must instead say "X will exist
tomorrow." What that means is that this particular metaphysical problem
has no corollary in English; for philosopher-logicians, this is a live
issue, but for ordinary speakers, it isn't. (It's an especially live
metaphysical problem if you're the sort of philosopher-logician who
believes that the formalism of Frege and Russell limns the true and
ultimate structure of reality: in that case, the question of whether the
future *really* \exists is a deep problem of what's really there.)
Of course, I can explain the problem to you in English, but only by
teaching you the language in which the problem occurs. In this case, I
can teach you how to use the logical symbol \exists.
It's worth asking: have these metaphysicians *found* a problem that cannot
be expressed in English? Or have they *created* a problem by allowing
themselves to have verbs without tenses? (I like to think that the latter
is true, FYI.) Can we *solve* this problem by just using English? Or do
we simply overlook it?
But allow me to connect this back to my earlier proposal. In English,
though it is impossible to make a claim without specifying a tense, it IS
possible to make a claim without specifying the certainty the speaker has
in it. Of course, the speaker has the capability of specifying this
information, just as the logicians may use time predicates with the
eternal \exists symbol, but the speaker is also free to omit this
information, in a way that the speaker cannot do with English tenses.
What I asked you to imagine was a language in which the claim "no claim
has absolute certainty" is a fact of the *grammar* of the language, like
"all verbs have a tense".
What would epistemology be like in a language like this? Well, for one
thing, we wouldn't have to go on repeating that you can't use the "100%
certain" conjugation, because (heh) there wouldn't *be* one, just like how
we don't have to run about warning English speakers not to use the
non-tense.
> I certainly hope that African leaders seeing how backward their
> continent is don't start to think that if they just switched to English
> things would be suddenly marvelously better.
No, no. African and English are really quite similar in that regard.
But what if they switched to Western *culture*? That'd be a considerably
bigger leap; I think there's a plausible argument that they actually
*would* be better off, or at least that their situation would change
radically, for better or worse. Here's an example of that argument.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-04-02.html
The other key to this argument is using "language" as a loaded term: using
it to mean not merely the tongue, but also the culture in which the
language exists; overloading this term makes some sense because the
"correct" use of language is couched both by grammatical as well as
cultural rules. So saying that Africans would be better if they spoke our
"language" isn't to say they'd be better if they spoke English, but they'd
be better off if they found the same things plausible that we did, on the
same cultural grounds (e.g. the science of economics), and used some
natural language like English (or African) with them.
Note that, though it argues that the science of economics is a cultural
artifact, this argument isn't relativistic *at all*. It's arguing
explicitly that our (fully-loaded now) language would make Africans better
off than the one they've got presently. Really, what if they DID try to
justify their policies in explicitly economic terms?
> > And anyway, let's not forget that the realists have some rather
> > significant atrocities to account for, atrocities which, on their
> > face, seem as if they couldn't have happened if everyone was a
> > postmodernist. Take religious/ideological wars, for example.
>
> You can't be serious! Post-modern academics have just as
> ferocious battles with each other as anyone else, and struggle
> for turf in the universities with a ruthlessness that would
> impress New Guinean head-hunters.
Academic disputes are almost entirely non-violent. I believe that counts
for quite a lot!
> > (Now, if your theory of history suggests that putatively ideological
> > wars are not really ideological, you may not find this example so
> > convincing.
>
> Yes, the Protestants and Catholics really went at it, but standing back
> and looking it all over, there would have been other reasons at about
> the same time for the rivalry to occur.
Well, at least I planned ahead that you might say something this. ;)
This example isn't critical to my argument, so I'll let it drop for
brevity's sake. (This discussion is already getting quite long.)
> > > (Here is an example of the first way of speaking by Bruno Latour,
> > > notorious arch-post-modernist, while discussing the to him
> > > ridiculous contention of French scientists in 1976 that Ramses II
> > > died of tuberculosis, "How could Ramses II die in 1213 B.C. from a
> > > bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in 1882?". Post-modernism really
> > > can mess up some people's thinking. For other hilarious examples,
> > > see "Fashionable Nonsense" by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.)
> >
> > Yeah, well. It's a point of view. It's part of his job to find
> > interesting points of view.
>
> No, we should certainly criticize errors and stupidity and not accept
> them as "interesting points of view". You have to accept that the above
> question (purportedly by Latour) is brainless.
Well, the *question* is brainless, I suppose. ("How, indeed? By having a
language in which later changes in terminological usage retrocontradict
and trump earlier well-established usage.")
But, of course, Bruno Latour *argued* that we should instead say that
Ramses II could not have died of tuberculosis; he did not wonder how it
could be, but argued that we ought not say it like that. THAT's a point
of view, and no mere mistake, no mere error.
Indeed, if I were to guess at what kind of argument someone would bring to
bear in favor of Latour's view, I'd say something like: this manner of
speaking is the best way of doing cultural history; it's most in keeping
with the interpretive principles of charity, and allows you to more easily
empathize with what people of other cultures might be like.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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