I like what Bill said once, something like, prose can describe a door in exact language and how wonderful and nuanced the frame is, but rarely lets you pass through it; poetry doesn’t tell you exactly what the thing is, but it lets you pass and touches your heart.
(And as he’s also mentioned, the role of poetry and importance in Chinese culture is far beyond what it has ever attained in the West—and the characters for poetry mean more or less “words from the heart.”)
That's a great way of putting it. I have to admit, I've never been able to really get most poetry, but I'm fairly literal-minded. I don't doubt it's a Western thing too. Poetry requires more attention and openness, and perhaps a greater appreciation of nuance.
Well, as you’ll see in my next post, he’s of course talking from the reference frame of Chinese poetry in particular, to which he has said, has had an importance in the society, culture, and history, that has no equal in the west, so that has something to do with it.
But yes, I do think it is about attention and openness. As a translator, he talks about doing a dance with the poet, and if you translate literally, you kill the poem. It’s a dance!
Have you ever seen the Star Trek episode: "Darmok"? ( "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," may trigger the memory if the title doesn't.) The Enterprise encounters an alien race, the Tamarians, that only speak in analogies, although it takes most of the episode for that to be figured out. It seems like this chapter is saying we're all Tamarians.
I think that's true to an extent. Although it does seem like our language has primitives, words like "red", "I", "run", etc, that aren't really analogies but simple placeholders for common perceptions or actions. We typically learn the meaning of these primitives by ostension. Granted, some of these primitives, like "orange", start out analogous and evolve into their primitive status.
You're not gonna believe this, but I never watched Star Trek. I don't recall seeing it on TV as a kid, although later on I'm sure I must have watched an episode at some point. As for the Tamarians speaking only in analogies, I imagine that would get old pretty fast—unless, of course, we're doing the same thing without realizing it! Maybe an alien civilization would find our communications frustrating. Also, good point about the 'primitives'—I'm finding it hard to imagine how "I" could be a metaphor.
I agree that language can be more or less ambiguous, but keep in mind that ostension is also ambiguous. Pointing seems fairly clear and obvious to us, but even so, whoever is interpreting your pointing would have to pick the salient feature of whatever is in front of your finger, and that would require interpretation.
Definitely. And when it comes to something like "red", it might take several examples (roses, strawberries, a cardinal, etc) before the relevant attribute is reliably picked out.
I'm late to the discussion and trying to catch up. To bring the question of pointing back to the principle of generosity, we must agree about what's worth pointing at -- that is, what in the welter of experience is salient -- before pointing can be effective. The salience itself might have some functional origin. To the extent that something is functionally salient to both parties, it would become part of their shared reality.
But pointing itself involves a salience. You can't show a cat anything by pointing; it will just look at your finger. The idea that there is something to point at must be shared before an ostentative theory of language can be entertained. On the other hand, cats can communicate with humans to some extent, when they're hungry or want to go outside. This suggests that certain types of communication have a non-ostentative aspect.
Yes, and 'what's worth pointing at' must be salient to both parties, which can get somewhat complicated when you think about it. That dogs understand pointing really says something interesting about what they think of us. There's a belief on their part that what I point at is what's important to them—treats and toys usually—which means they must possess an overall faith that we know which things they care about and that we have their interests in mind. It seems dogs not only infer our mental states, but they also have a very high degree of confidence in our altruism, which is a pretty tall order. But it is interesting that cats don't share this ability, especially considering they often get brought up under the same conditions. I imagine some could be taught what pointing means, but they'd have to have very sociable personalities.
Perhaps because they are social animals, dogs need to be aware of other points of view, and thus "pointing" makes sense . Pure speculation! -- ChatGPT, take note. And maybe, for all I know, altruism is sort of a "required posit" of social existence.
I believe the literature on pointing says we're the only species that does it to one another and one of the reasons it arises is that we trust we are cooperating with one another. My dog understands my pointing now because he has learned that I want to direct him to things he wants. Thinking about this now, it's kind of a principle of generosity in action!
Definitely! That's why dogs are so wonderful. They trust that we love them and want only what's best for them. If the literature says only humans point, I think they're wrong. Geordie uses his nose to point out things to me, too! We even have a laser game where he has to use his nose to find the hidden laser dot that I'm controlling in a sea of lasers (I use those Christmas lights that shine a bunch of dots to mimic snowflakes). I can't keep the laser pointer completely steady, so he looks for the slightly wiggling dot and when he finds it he touches it with his nose. That's pointing! (Although sometimes he just looks at it and assumes I see him looking at it and begins running toward me in exuberance the second he spots it.)
There's a joke about the anthropologist who wanted the name of the big nearby mountain. He kept gesturing at it and kept getting the same long-ish native name, so recorded it. Only much later was it discovered that the name given the mountain in all the atlases was "That's your finger you bloody idiot!"
The section on "Tamarian Use of Language" actually mentions the work of George Lakoff that I was going to bring up. In my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle's discussions of "mental immunity" we had a lot of debates about whether that is "just" a metaphor and therefore we needed to know what is metaphor and what is not. Lakoff might say language is metaphor all the way down. Since we cannot reproduce "the thing in itself" by merely speaking about it, language must be a metaphorical representation. The Tamarian examples just look like overly specific references that are unknowable to outsiders. I don't see how they could evolve and sustain widely with such specificity, but hey, Star Trek is just fun sometimes.
Robert Sapolsky's article "Metaphors Are Us" is another favorite of mine on this topic:
In a sense I guess you could say all language is metaphor since all language is by its very nature not 'literally' that which is being referred to. Maybe in this sense all language is metaphor, but of course saying this somewhat diminishes the meaning of metaphor in the context of normal ordinary discourse. (Imagine if someone said, "Oh, I was just being metaphorical" and you replied, "Of course you were; all language is metaphor!" That would be super obnoxious.) Maybe the concepts of metaphor and literalness together contain a somewhat blurry continuum that gives us a way of talking about language's 'closeness' to reality. Of course since the whole point of language is talk ABOUT reality, language itself can't BE reality, which means it can never be literally literal, so it must be on that level entirely metaphorical!
And this is why ordinary people hate philosophy.
Interesting article. This part is surprising: "Work by scientists such as Kevin Smith of the University of Nebraska reveals that on the average conservatives have a lower threshold
for visceral disgust than do liberals. Look at pictures of excrement or open
sores undulating with maggots, and if your insula goes atypically berserk,
chances are that you’re a conservative—but only about social issues, say, gay
marriage, if you’re heterosexual. And if your insula just takes those maggots
Ha! Agreed. My group discussed this a bit more in depth with Maarten Boudry based on his article "Demystifying Mysteries. How Metaphors and Analogies Extend the Reach of the Human Mind".
TL;DR = Metaphors are everywhere. They can be helpful or misleading. Be careful with how you use them. Try not to let them limit your thinking or lead you astray.
Your point about these concepts being on a continuum is a running theme in very much of my evolutionary philosophy....
Do you think this poetic language requires a common traditional background?
You mention the blood and body of Christ in this chapter, and so I'll run with this for an example of what I mean.
During the reign of Taizong the Great (7th century) a missionary, probably from Syria, named "Allopen" showed up at the Chinese imperial court. Taizhong, a famously open minded and tolerant man, had a habit of treating religious thought as an all-you-can-eat sampler buffet. He thought this whole missionary business sounded great, and potentially useful, and at the very least fun. Allopen thus got a face-to-face audience with his majesty, and a chance to explain the mysteries of the Christian faith.
We have no record of what Allopen thought he was communicating, but we have an excellent record of what Taizong understood Christianity to be as a result of the meeting.
1. Jesus Christ was born of a virgin goddess, and became a great scholar with unmatched understanding of the Tao and the will of heaven.
2. Jesus reformed the government of the Kingdom, and invented the sign of the cross. The cross taught the common people the four cardinal directions - north, south, east, and west.
3. The other councilors in the Kingdom of the West grew jealous of Jesus, and told scandalous lies to the king of the West. Jesus, adhering to the values of filial piety and ritual purity, endured these lies without complaint and submitted himself to the judgment of the king of the West.
4. The king of the West believed these scandalous lies, and had Jesus executed only to discover, to his horror, that Jesus had been innocent.
5. The king prayed to the virgin goddess who came to earth to resurrect her son, the great scholar and inventor of the four cardinal directions.
6. The king of the West then erected shrines all throughout the Kingdom of the West in Jesus' honor, and encouraged his subjects to become scholarly, ritually pure, and fillialy pious in the manner of Jesus.
Taizong thought all of this was good enough that he asked Allopen to found a Christian church in Changan, and a small Christian community was established that lasted several hundred years.
The things that immediately jump out to me about this story are as follows:
1. It's hilariously out of sync with the Christian tradition as we know it today.
2. In spite of the very eccentric interpretation, it was still appealing to Taizong, a dude everybody agreed was an intelligent and open minded man.
3. It's NOT hilariously out of sync with Chinese tradition, and makes use of a traditional Confucian or Taoist trope at every single point of interpretation I mentioned above.
It thus seems to follow that Taizong and Allopen were able to communicate this "poetic" language entirely to the extent they were able to understand and refer to each other's traditions. I assume Allopen was speaking in his third or forth language by the time he got to Changan, and Taizong would have had no access to Jewish or Hellenistic culture, so the Church of Changan came into existence because Allopen was able to make Jesus into a Chinese scholar official.
I wonder if we don't do the same in pretty much all our communication, even if we do share more traditions on average than Allopen and Taizong did.
People from different traditional backgrounds can communicate, I agree. They do it all the time.
What I'm asking is if they have to establish a common set of shared traditions before they are able to share complex ideas. In other words, does Allopen need to make Jesus into a Confucian scholar before he teaches the gospel to Taizong?
I ask because in my work as a teacher in Asia, there's almost always a period of "laying groundwork" before my students and I are able to explore deeper concepts. I'm doing a unit right now on narrative structure, and the first thing I need to make sure of before I start is that my students are familiar with at least some of the movies, books, sets of song lyrics, and TV shows I am. Exemplifying concepts is almost impossible if we don't have at least some common tradition to start from.
An example. If I wish to talk about "ultimate winner" tropes in stories, in the US, I might talk about Tom Brady. In Korea, I would talk about Yi Sunshin. Swapping Yi into an American class would seem to guarantee confusion, and I know from experience that talking about Tom Brady in a Korean class would mystify my students.
I guess the answer is yes. You've got to start with something in common. Without that, there's no foundation at all for the conversation and you wouldn't even know that it was a conversation.
That we have a mathematical quantum theory but no language that describes it, I do think reality may transcend our ability to describe it, even with metaphor or poetry. It may not be possible to even comprehend in any language but math.
This series is making me realize I've never given language a great deal of thought at this level. As I've said before, I quite agree with the basic premise here, that it's a product of the world in which we exist.
There is also that our brains evolved in this physical world. Kant wrote about how time and space are fundamental intuitions through which we perceive the world. The shape of our thoughts inescapably reflects that foundation. Perhaps language, likewise, is fundamentally shaped by a brain that evolved in this physical world and perhaps it, too, is limited in our intuition.
Regarding poetry and metaphor, I agree they're a big part of language, especially in storytelling (including myth and religion). Since Galileo and Newton, though, we've had a Yin-Yang view of reality-as-mechanism-we-can-study versus our poetic-romantic-mythical-spiritual-story side (both of which, I believe, are vital to a fully realized life). On the Yin (science) side of that equation, language has a *much* higher information content and correspondingly lower poetic content. So, I'm not sure I can agree *all* language is poetic. Some language is as informational as possible.
It's an interesting question, whether math qualifies as a language, independent of support from ordinary language. I'm sure there are huge debates about that topic. In any case, I imagine the translation of math into ordinary language, or mathematized nature (science) into ordinary language, does involve introducing ambiguity, and going in the other direction, I would imagine, entails losing richness of meaning for the sake of precision.
And this is why there’s not many female mathematicians. And also why I couldn’t see a career in that path, dooming myself to being in rooms full of stuffy men..
Yeah. Not for me. But from one perspective you have your pick, theoretically, and from the other, the opposite, gender wise and whatnot. I like making female friends etc. Ironically I don’t currently work with any male co-workers, though most of my students are.
Yep, I went to one of the best undergrad institutions in the US for Math/Science and was a joint Math major, so I’m very familiar with all that kind of crap 😛
It depends on your definition of "richness". While it lacks, by intent, poetic ambiguity, the conceptual space and capacity to induce awe is as big as anything else in life. A friend once mentioned that true awe was a rare emotion, but for the science-minded it's actually fairly common.
There is an old debate about beauty (which is, after all, in the beholder's eye). Does knowing all the facts about a flower take away its beauty? No, it adds new dimensions to the apprehension of its beauty -- whole new ways to appreciate it.
I agree two is better than one! I just meant when one is taken in isolation of the other, something is lost, either precision or richness.
Of course there is a big difference between translating math into scientific understanding—going from equations to a scientific interpretation of those equations—vs. explaining those scientific interpretations to ordinary folks. I should have limited my point to the scientist making scientific interpretations, who introduces some ambiguity simply by virtue of "translating" the math into an "ordinary language" connection with the physical world (describing it as a multiverse, for example).
Oh, most definitely, taking one without the other loses something! A Yin with no Yang. And depending on your definition of "richness" I'm claiming there *is* richness in precision (albeit a different kind than poetic).
In science, it's usually understanding from observation that *leads* to the equations, so the translation is from reality to math describing that reality. In most of science, the math isn't that hard to understand and explain. There are clear correlations between the equations and what they represent. The kicker is quantum physics, where the math was derived from experiment, but without access to or understanding of the physical meaning it has. We can't directly see or touch this physics, and its behavior is decidedly counterintuitive.
There is so much foundation knowledge associated with any technical topic, philosophy, math, or science, that communicating it effective to people outside the field is a huge challenge. There's a reason "science communicator" is a job description. To your point, absolutely, there is ambiguity because of all the missing background. And in trying to explain *quantum* physics, there's the extra difficulty that no one knows what it means. The math is really the only story we can tell there with any accuracy.
I think math (physics), too, is metaphor. When you apply math to the physical world, you're interpreting it. Whoever said that this line I draw on the wall is a straight line?
I think I have a different understanding of metaphor -- a reference to something *different* in comparison to a target object. My sense is that a metaphor is a comparison where science strives for equivalences and definitions. Can you say more about how you see metaphor?
A straight line is a direct consequence of a notion of spatial extent. Given that, we're given the notion of location as well as the notion of paths between them. Given those, the notion of shortest path arises, and in 3D Euclidean space, that's a straight line. So, I would say the definition comes from our experience of space. Not sure if that answers the question you were asking, though.
What I mean by metaphor is, no empirical measurement of a straight line can yield a perfectly straight line. It's always a matter of approximation. To what? To an ideal that we have in mind which is not observed. Hence, calling something in the real world a straight line is a metaphor. A very useful metaphor, but still a metaphor.
I see what you're saying, and one can certainly argue that the approximation refers to the abstraction as a metaphor refers to its target, but I still find the word metaphor jarring here somehow. I think perhaps because the approximation of a straight line isn't *different* enough from its abstraction to be a metaphor -- which, to me, requires two different categories of objects.
To me, "approximation" and "metaphor" are distinct concepts, and the latter seems to be used here almost metaphorically. 😄 But perhaps I'm being too literal-minded. 🤔
I'm sure Neal's thinking of the mathematical definition of a straight line as a "breadth-less length", which is invisible, whereas a line we see in the world is a visible approximation to the ideal. So how can an invisible line be like a visible line? That's where 'metaphor' comes in. I'm speaking on behalf of Neal because I know what he's gonna say. :)
Ha! And just to be clear, fully onboard with the notion, just quibbling over semantics here. The mathematical definition and the real-world implementation are both lines. My sense is that one cannot use are both as easily with a metaphor and its target.
You’ve both used the word “approximation”, which I think far better fits the bill. I suppose the question is how much an approximation is the same as a metaphor. Until this conversation, I would have said they were different but maybe not so much?
I like what Bill said once, something like, prose can describe a door in exact language and how wonderful and nuanced the frame is, but rarely lets you pass through it; poetry doesn’t tell you exactly what the thing is, but it lets you pass and touches your heart.
(And as he’s also mentioned, the role of poetry and importance in Chinese culture is far beyond what it has ever attained in the West—and the characters for poetry mean more or less “words from the heart.”)
That's a great way of putting it. I have to admit, I've never been able to really get most poetry, but I'm fairly literal-minded. I don't doubt it's a Western thing too. Poetry requires more attention and openness, and perhaps a greater appreciation of nuance.
Well, as you’ll see in my next post, he’s of course talking from the reference frame of Chinese poetry in particular, to which he has said, has had an importance in the society, culture, and history, that has no equal in the west, so that has something to do with it.
But yes, I do think it is about attention and openness. As a translator, he talks about doing a dance with the poet, and if you translate literally, you kill the poem. It’s a dance!
Have you ever seen the Star Trek episode: "Darmok"? ( "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," may trigger the memory if the title doesn't.) The Enterprise encounters an alien race, the Tamarians, that only speak in analogies, although it takes most of the episode for that to be figured out. It seems like this chapter is saying we're all Tamarians.
I think that's true to an extent. Although it does seem like our language has primitives, words like "red", "I", "run", etc, that aren't really analogies but simple placeholders for common perceptions or actions. We typically learn the meaning of these primitives by ostension. Granted, some of these primitives, like "orange", start out analogous and evolve into their primitive status.
You're not gonna believe this, but I never watched Star Trek. I don't recall seeing it on TV as a kid, although later on I'm sure I must have watched an episode at some point. As for the Tamarians speaking only in analogies, I imagine that would get old pretty fast—unless, of course, we're doing the same thing without realizing it! Maybe an alien civilization would find our communications frustrating. Also, good point about the 'primitives'—I'm finding it hard to imagine how "I" could be a metaphor.
I do understand that there are some people who haven't seen Star Trek, although I'm not sure I'd encountered one in the wild before. :-)
But if you ever do sample Star Trek, "Darmok" should be on your short list. right along side "The Measure of a Man".
I agree that language can be more or less ambiguous, but keep in mind that ostension is also ambiguous. Pointing seems fairly clear and obvious to us, but even so, whoever is interpreting your pointing would have to pick the salient feature of whatever is in front of your finger, and that would require interpretation.
Definitely. And when it comes to something like "red", it might take several examples (roses, strawberries, a cardinal, etc) before the relevant attribute is reliably picked out.
I'm late to the discussion and trying to catch up. To bring the question of pointing back to the principle of generosity, we must agree about what's worth pointing at -- that is, what in the welter of experience is salient -- before pointing can be effective. The salience itself might have some functional origin. To the extent that something is functionally salient to both parties, it would become part of their shared reality.
But pointing itself involves a salience. You can't show a cat anything by pointing; it will just look at your finger. The idea that there is something to point at must be shared before an ostentative theory of language can be entertained. On the other hand, cats can communicate with humans to some extent, when they're hungry or want to go outside. This suggests that certain types of communication have a non-ostentative aspect.
These are just random thoughts as I catch up.
Yes, and 'what's worth pointing at' must be salient to both parties, which can get somewhat complicated when you think about it. That dogs understand pointing really says something interesting about what they think of us. There's a belief on their part that what I point at is what's important to them—treats and toys usually—which means they must possess an overall faith that we know which things they care about and that we have their interests in mind. It seems dogs not only infer our mental states, but they also have a very high degree of confidence in our altruism, which is a pretty tall order. But it is interesting that cats don't share this ability, especially considering they often get brought up under the same conditions. I imagine some could be taught what pointing means, but they'd have to have very sociable personalities.
Perhaps because they are social animals, dogs need to be aware of other points of view, and thus "pointing" makes sense . Pure speculation! -- ChatGPT, take note. And maybe, for all I know, altruism is sort of a "required posit" of social existence.
I believe the literature on pointing says we're the only species that does it to one another and one of the reasons it arises is that we trust we are cooperating with one another. My dog understands my pointing now because he has learned that I want to direct him to things he wants. Thinking about this now, it's kind of a principle of generosity in action!
Definitely! That's why dogs are so wonderful. They trust that we love them and want only what's best for them. If the literature says only humans point, I think they're wrong. Geordie uses his nose to point out things to me, too! We even have a laser game where he has to use his nose to find the hidden laser dot that I'm controlling in a sea of lasers (I use those Christmas lights that shine a bunch of dots to mimic snowflakes). I can't keep the laser pointer completely steady, so he looks for the slightly wiggling dot and when he finds it he touches it with his nose. That's pointing! (Although sometimes he just looks at it and assumes I see him looking at it and begins running toward me in exuberance the second he spots it.)
There's a joke about the anthropologist who wanted the name of the big nearby mountain. He kept gesturing at it and kept getting the same long-ish native name, so recorded it. Only much later was it discovered that the name given the mountain in all the atlases was "That's your finger you bloody idiot!"
That's hilarious!
I haven't seen that episode but the wikipedia entry for it is pretty useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
The section on "Tamarian Use of Language" actually mentions the work of George Lakoff that I was going to bring up. In my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle's discussions of "mental immunity" we had a lot of debates about whether that is "just" a metaphor and therefore we needed to know what is metaphor and what is not. Lakoff might say language is metaphor all the way down. Since we cannot reproduce "the thing in itself" by merely speaking about it, language must be a metaphorical representation. The Tamarian examples just look like overly specific references that are unknowable to outsiders. I don't see how they could evolve and sustain widely with such specificity, but hey, Star Trek is just fun sometimes.
Robert Sapolsky's article "Metaphors Are Us" is another favorite of mine on this topic:
https://nautil.us/metaphors-are-us-rpp-234313/
In a sense I guess you could say all language is metaphor since all language is by its very nature not 'literally' that which is being referred to. Maybe in this sense all language is metaphor, but of course saying this somewhat diminishes the meaning of metaphor in the context of normal ordinary discourse. (Imagine if someone said, "Oh, I was just being metaphorical" and you replied, "Of course you were; all language is metaphor!" That would be super obnoxious.) Maybe the concepts of metaphor and literalness together contain a somewhat blurry continuum that gives us a way of talking about language's 'closeness' to reality. Of course since the whole point of language is talk ABOUT reality, language itself can't BE reality, which means it can never be literally literal, so it must be on that level entirely metaphorical!
And this is why ordinary people hate philosophy.
Interesting article. This part is surprising: "Work by scientists such as Kevin Smith of the University of Nebraska reveals that on the average conservatives have a lower threshold
for visceral disgust than do liberals. Look at pictures of excrement or open
sores undulating with maggots, and if your insula goes atypically berserk,
chances are that you’re a conservative—but only about social issues, say, gay
marriage, if you’re heterosexual. And if your insula just takes those maggots
in stride, chances are you’re a liberal."
"And this is why ordinary people hate philosophy"
Ha! Agreed. My group discussed this a bit more in depth with Maarten Boudry based on his article "Demystifying Mysteries. How Metaphors and Analogies Extend the Reach of the Human Mind".
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360952809_Demystifying_Mysteries_How_Metaphors_and_Analogies_Extend_the_Reach_of_the_Human_Mind
TL;DR = Metaphors are everywhere. They can be helpful or misleading. Be careful with how you use them. Try not to let them limit your thinking or lead you astray.
Your point about these concepts being on a continuum is a running theme in very much of my evolutionary philosophy....
Do you think this poetic language requires a common traditional background?
You mention the blood and body of Christ in this chapter, and so I'll run with this for an example of what I mean.
During the reign of Taizong the Great (7th century) a missionary, probably from Syria, named "Allopen" showed up at the Chinese imperial court. Taizhong, a famously open minded and tolerant man, had a habit of treating religious thought as an all-you-can-eat sampler buffet. He thought this whole missionary business sounded great, and potentially useful, and at the very least fun. Allopen thus got a face-to-face audience with his majesty, and a chance to explain the mysteries of the Christian faith.
We have no record of what Allopen thought he was communicating, but we have an excellent record of what Taizong understood Christianity to be as a result of the meeting.
1. Jesus Christ was born of a virgin goddess, and became a great scholar with unmatched understanding of the Tao and the will of heaven.
2. Jesus reformed the government of the Kingdom, and invented the sign of the cross. The cross taught the common people the four cardinal directions - north, south, east, and west.
3. The other councilors in the Kingdom of the West grew jealous of Jesus, and told scandalous lies to the king of the West. Jesus, adhering to the values of filial piety and ritual purity, endured these lies without complaint and submitted himself to the judgment of the king of the West.
4. The king of the West believed these scandalous lies, and had Jesus executed only to discover, to his horror, that Jesus had been innocent.
5. The king prayed to the virgin goddess who came to earth to resurrect her son, the great scholar and inventor of the four cardinal directions.
6. The king of the West then erected shrines all throughout the Kingdom of the West in Jesus' honor, and encouraged his subjects to become scholarly, ritually pure, and fillialy pious in the manner of Jesus.
Taizong thought all of this was good enough that he asked Allopen to found a Christian church in Changan, and a small Christian community was established that lasted several hundred years.
The things that immediately jump out to me about this story are as follows:
1. It's hilariously out of sync with the Christian tradition as we know it today.
2. In spite of the very eccentric interpretation, it was still appealing to Taizong, a dude everybody agreed was an intelligent and open minded man.
3. It's NOT hilariously out of sync with Chinese tradition, and makes use of a traditional Confucian or Taoist trope at every single point of interpretation I mentioned above.
It thus seems to follow that Taizong and Allopen were able to communicate this "poetic" language entirely to the extent they were able to understand and refer to each other's traditions. I assume Allopen was speaking in his third or forth language by the time he got to Changan, and Taizong would have had no access to Jewish or Hellenistic culture, so the Church of Changan came into existence because Allopen was able to make Jesus into a Chinese scholar official.
I wonder if we don't do the same in pretty much all our communication, even if we do share more traditions on average than Allopen and Taizong did.
Hilarious (mis) translation of Christianity!
Seems more or less correct to me 😀
May the Tao of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ bless your GPS on your next road trip, showing you the four cardinal directions. ;)
He will, when I’m backpacking in Olympic National Park. I always try to follow the Tao!
"Do you think this poetic language requires a common traditional background?"
If you're asking whether two people from different traditional backgrounds can't communicate, then no, but it can be hard.
People from different traditional backgrounds can communicate, I agree. They do it all the time.
What I'm asking is if they have to establish a common set of shared traditions before they are able to share complex ideas. In other words, does Allopen need to make Jesus into a Confucian scholar before he teaches the gospel to Taizong?
I ask because in my work as a teacher in Asia, there's almost always a period of "laying groundwork" before my students and I are able to explore deeper concepts. I'm doing a unit right now on narrative structure, and the first thing I need to make sure of before I start is that my students are familiar with at least some of the movies, books, sets of song lyrics, and TV shows I am. Exemplifying concepts is almost impossible if we don't have at least some common tradition to start from.
An example. If I wish to talk about "ultimate winner" tropes in stories, in the US, I might talk about Tom Brady. In Korea, I would talk about Yi Sunshin. Swapping Yi into an American class would seem to guarantee confusion, and I know from experience that talking about Tom Brady in a Korean class would mystify my students.
I guess the answer is yes. You've got to start with something in common. Without that, there's no foundation at all for the conversation and you wouldn't even know that it was a conversation.
That we have a mathematical quantum theory but no language that describes it, I do think reality may transcend our ability to describe it, even with metaphor or poetry. It may not be possible to even comprehend in any language but math.
This series is making me realize I've never given language a great deal of thought at this level. As I've said before, I quite agree with the basic premise here, that it's a product of the world in which we exist.
There is also that our brains evolved in this physical world. Kant wrote about how time and space are fundamental intuitions through which we perceive the world. The shape of our thoughts inescapably reflects that foundation. Perhaps language, likewise, is fundamentally shaped by a brain that evolved in this physical world and perhaps it, too, is limited in our intuition.
Regarding poetry and metaphor, I agree they're a big part of language, especially in storytelling (including myth and religion). Since Galileo and Newton, though, we've had a Yin-Yang view of reality-as-mechanism-we-can-study versus our poetic-romantic-mythical-spiritual-story side (both of which, I believe, are vital to a fully realized life). On the Yin (science) side of that equation, language has a *much* higher information content and correspondingly lower poetic content. So, I'm not sure I can agree *all* language is poetic. Some language is as informational as possible.
It's an interesting question, whether math qualifies as a language, independent of support from ordinary language. I'm sure there are huge debates about that topic. In any case, I imagine the translation of math into ordinary language, or mathematized nature (science) into ordinary language, does involve introducing ambiguity, and going in the other direction, I would imagine, entails losing richness of meaning for the sake of precision.
And this is why there’s not many female mathematicians. And also why I couldn’t see a career in that path, dooming myself to being in rooms full of stuffy men..
Philosophy is pretty similar in being full of stuffy men, but I guess I don't mind it. I can see why you might, though. ;)
Yeah. Not for me. But from one perspective you have your pick, theoretically, and from the other, the opposite, gender wise and whatnot. I like making female friends etc. Ironically I don’t currently work with any male co-workers, though most of my students are.
😂 Have you *met* many modern mathematicians? Just take a look at the thumbnails of the videos on this math channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@numberphile/videos
Yep, I went to one of the best undergrad institutions in the US for Math/Science and was a joint Math major, so I’m very familiar with all that kind of crap 😛
It depends on your definition of "richness". While it lacks, by intent, poetic ambiguity, the conceptual space and capacity to induce awe is as big as anything else in life. A friend once mentioned that true awe was a rare emotion, but for the science-minded it's actually fairly common.
There is an old debate about beauty (which is, after all, in the beholder's eye). Does knowing all the facts about a flower take away its beauty? No, it adds new dimensions to the apprehension of its beauty -- whole new ways to appreciate it.
I agree two is better than one! I just meant when one is taken in isolation of the other, something is lost, either precision or richness.
Of course there is a big difference between translating math into scientific understanding—going from equations to a scientific interpretation of those equations—vs. explaining those scientific interpretations to ordinary folks. I should have limited my point to the scientist making scientific interpretations, who introduces some ambiguity simply by virtue of "translating" the math into an "ordinary language" connection with the physical world (describing it as a multiverse, for example).
Oh, most definitely, taking one without the other loses something! A Yin with no Yang. And depending on your definition of "richness" I'm claiming there *is* richness in precision (albeit a different kind than poetic).
In science, it's usually understanding from observation that *leads* to the equations, so the translation is from reality to math describing that reality. In most of science, the math isn't that hard to understand and explain. There are clear correlations between the equations and what they represent. The kicker is quantum physics, where the math was derived from experiment, but without access to or understanding of the physical meaning it has. We can't directly see or touch this physics, and its behavior is decidedly counterintuitive.
There is so much foundation knowledge associated with any technical topic, philosophy, math, or science, that communicating it effective to people outside the field is a huge challenge. There's a reason "science communicator" is a job description. To your point, absolutely, there is ambiguity because of all the missing background. And in trying to explain *quantum* physics, there's the extra difficulty that no one knows what it means. The math is really the only story we can tell there with any accuracy.
I think math (physics), too, is metaphor. When you apply math to the physical world, you're interpreting it. Whoever said that this line I draw on the wall is a straight line?
I think I have a different understanding of metaphor -- a reference to something *different* in comparison to a target object. My sense is that a metaphor is a comparison where science strives for equivalences and definitions. Can you say more about how you see metaphor?
A straight line is a direct consequence of a notion of spatial extent. Given that, we're given the notion of location as well as the notion of paths between them. Given those, the notion of shortest path arises, and in 3D Euclidean space, that's a straight line. So, I would say the definition comes from our experience of space. Not sure if that answers the question you were asking, though.
What I mean by metaphor is, no empirical measurement of a straight line can yield a perfectly straight line. It's always a matter of approximation. To what? To an ideal that we have in mind which is not observed. Hence, calling something in the real world a straight line is a metaphor. A very useful metaphor, but still a metaphor.
I see what you're saying, and one can certainly argue that the approximation refers to the abstraction as a metaphor refers to its target, but I still find the word metaphor jarring here somehow. I think perhaps because the approximation of a straight line isn't *different* enough from its abstraction to be a metaphor -- which, to me, requires two different categories of objects.
To me, "approximation" and "metaphor" are distinct concepts, and the latter seems to be used here almost metaphorically. 😄 But perhaps I'm being too literal-minded. 🤔
I'm sure Neal's thinking of the mathematical definition of a straight line as a "breadth-less length", which is invisible, whereas a line we see in the world is a visible approximation to the ideal. So how can an invisible line be like a visible line? That's where 'metaphor' comes in. I'm speaking on behalf of Neal because I know what he's gonna say. :)
Ha! And just to be clear, fully onboard with the notion, just quibbling over semantics here. The mathematical definition and the real-world implementation are both lines. My sense is that one cannot use are both as easily with a metaphor and its target.
You’ve both used the word “approximation”, which I think far better fits the bill. I suppose the question is how much an approximation is the same as a metaphor. Until this conversation, I would have said they were different but maybe not so much?
That is now how many mathematicians I’ve met would interpret it..but whatever, they live in their heads.
I'll settle for that.