I'd say we're all in the same reality. We're subject to the same increasingly hot summers, macro-economic conditions, and pandemic effects regardless of what we believe. On the other hand, we obviously believe very different things about that reality. Our worldviews are different, with different sources of information reinforcing those views. In a way, our group consciousness is split, or maybe more accurately, fractured.
Well put! The pandemic seems an especially poignant reminder that there can be serious consequences if our beliefs don't reflect reality. Of course reality doesn't always give us such clear and immediate feedback.
Do you think that believing in non-real things, or things made real by belief and belief alone, is necessary in constituting reality?
I'm thinking of money. It exists because we believe it exists, but it seems very pertinent to our lives. Could the beliefs surrounding pandemics and hot summers be similar?
We can describe money as something that exists only because we believe in it, but maybe a more productive description is it's a tool we use to track social obligations. Of course, obligations only exist because we inter-subjectively perceive them, but they seem necessary for a functioning society. Which makes money a social tool, which I think gives it a similar ontological status to ethical rules.
Whenever something seems ontologically strange, consider its causes and effects.
I agree with everything you pointed out here, and it's connected to my original point. The process of "believing something into existence" seems like it underpins a lot of useful processes. Not just money, which we believe into existence, but social obligations, which we believe into existence.
I would go further and propose that all ethics, ideology, schema, contracts, laws, and traditions are "believed into existence." If this is true, we need to ask ourselves whether we can "believe into existence" something that we'd consider objective. A contract, or a dollar, for example, would seem to depend on us treating them as objective facts.
"would you say we live in different realities?" We live with different definitions. Partisans don't like to agree on what are facts and what are opinions. That way an opponent isn't just wrong, they're a liar.
Good point about definitions. It makes for an especially obnoxious debate when people can't—or won't— agree about what constitutes a fact simply because they'd rather champion their party or cause.
Everyone one of us lives in the subjective reality of our own mental model. Yet I think a very good casual definition of sanity is the degree to which one's mental model corresponds with objective reality. Even so, a good talk with someone from a different political, social, gender, racial group can show just how differently even the sanest can see the world.
Same physical reality, but its meanings and implications vary considerably!
Indeed! It may be that this even-more-insane-than-previous political season has me overly aware of just how differently some see the world. Our mental models vary considerably -- mostly on how we assign values -- even when both correspond to objective reality very well. (And of course all mental models have bias. Especially in the Kantian sense of shaping how we think.)
Putting this back on topic, if I'm understanding correctly, what Neal is calling "truth" in the book (with regard to pigs in pens), is what I've seen as (mental) "model fitting". Which is what we constantly do with input data -- fit it to our mental model. We do this even with things we see with our eyes, let alone more complex structures such as language. That model is the context (what John Searle calls "the Background") for my understanding of "pen".
The generosity comes into play (AIUI) in how we do that fitting. Many of our inputs are ambiguous and don't readily fit our model. We need to slide the idea around to find the best fit -- the fit that "makes sense". Finding that non-perfect best fit requires being generous about how the concept fits our model. I mentioned I get stuck on "truth" when the *content* is clearly false (you own neither pig nor pen) but the truth of the *statement* (its sense; its logical fit with my model) still exists.
Which, BTW, I need to get back to the book! I'm ahead of you here -- more than halfway through -- but I put it down when some library books I had on hold came available and never got back to it (so many distractions in life). I was in the chapter about language...
Sorry I didn't see this comment when I responded to the previous one. I'm not entirely sure I understand you correctly, but if I do, then what you're calling a mental model is subjective, or "personal", but what I'm advocating is that since we can translate between languages, we must share the same mental model or our mental models must be roughly the same.
Yes, absolutely *roughly* the same because they're (hopefully) based on a consistent external reality -- Kant's noumena. Which I don't consider inaccessible. I think of our mental model as a "wireframe" of the real thing, a view through a dark glass. And that is why my casual definition of sanity is the degree to which one's mental model matches the reality.
If you think noumena is accessible, maybe you're not so Kantian after all. I recently heard Colin McGinn describe Kant as a sort of 'double realist', which I thought was an interesting way of thinking about him. Maybe, then, you're a single realist, which we just call 'realist'.
I'm definitely not a *strict* Kantian. As with most things, I take the parts that makes sense and ignore the parts that don't -- take what's useful and manageable, so to speak.
I agree our only physical sensation is phenomenal and that noumena are therefore *directly* inaccessible, but to me the phenomena arise directly from the noumena (in the case where we perceive the external world versus our memory, imagination, or hallucination), and this allows us to construct our mental model "around" (the phenomena arising from) the noumena. Hence our "wireframe" model of reality. Reasonably accurate but lacking precision, resolution, and much of the noumenal information.
I'm absolutely a philosophical realist. Hard-core. I don't have much sympathy for philosophical idealism. (OTOH, I'm equally absolutely a *personal* idealist. 🤩) I see Kant as a realist as well -- he believed noumena were physical reality. I take his transcendental idealism to mean our mental model transcends and is our only representation of physical reality. But that's just my spin on it.
Not, I think, responsive to your question, but science, and particularly math, has the potential to be a lingua franca between intelligent species. This is because there are certain clearly apparent constants therein that, if a generic symbology referring to them can be found, must be known to any species with science and math. The Arecibo Message, the Pioneer Plaques, and the Voyager Golden Records all banked their hopes on the presumptive truth of this.
With levels of understanding that "sorta" work. We can get pretty far without perfect understanding. No?
Do you know Steven Hayes' Relational Frame Theory"? I wonder if that might help explain how we can share many relations between our concepts without sharing all of them.
This is a really interesting chapter. You correctly point out that technical language is not enough to eliminate ambiguity, and point out that the interpretation requires generosity and the audience's capacity for generosity.
If, theoretically, technical language is a scaling down of the demands on the audience, how do you think we function when the demand for generosity is expanded? I'm thinking of the documents we dig up in ancient Mesopotamia or, even more, the Indus Valley Civilization.
In the case of Mesopotamia, we are more or less able to understand stories about Gilgamesh, and Tamuz and Ishtar, even though they make tons of references to things even the greatest scholars of the Ancient Middle East don't understand. In the case of the Indus Valley Civilization, we attempt to understand their writings, even when we aren't sure whether or not the symbols they wrote were, in fact, writing.
How do you think this works? Is generosity a process, partially, of "making shit up" until a narrative forms?
Thanks, Ben. Your questions are very much at the heart of the book and I think they'll be answered in later chapters, particularly the thought experiment on 'radical interpretation' and the part on literary analysis. Well, really the whole book. :)
As for understanding ancient writings, I think we have to assume what we're looking at is actually writing, so you have to have generosity right at the outset. I forget which language it was that was for a long time dismissed as decoration (I watched something on The Great Courses a while back), and that attitude hindered the discovery as you can imagine.
Incidentally, the story about how a combination of guesswork and historical knowledge was used to figure out an inscription in cuneiform without a Rosetta stone and without knowledge of the language is fascinating:
Essentially the guy who figured out the inscription assumed the text was naming kings and needed to find out which kings were being named. When he had things narrowed down to two possible kings—Darius and Cyrus—the determining factor that allowed him to eliminate Cyrus was the fact that Cyrus' father was Cambyses I and his son was Cambyses II. If those two happened to have different names, it wouldn't have been possible to eliminate Cyrus, at least not in this way, so it was a real stroke of luck.
The ways linguists have figured this stuff out it beyond impressive. And yeah, a lot of it hangs on little coincidences like Cambyses and Cambyses Jr. having the same name!
Given our political divides today, do we live in different realities? I agree here with Truth & Generosity--we must share basic common beliefs. Not just to communicate, but also to engage in any cooperative efforts. Just run your finger across the contours of a couch or car--despite our conceptual and ideological disagreements, there's a shared reality there. In the end, we must live together in practical ways within the confines of this reality, if we wish to flourish together rather than perish.
Hey, you made it into the comments section! Welcome!
Good point about cooperative efforts pointing to shared reality. What could be drawn from that is certain animals (I'm thinking of dogs and horses and the like) must share at least some of our fundamental beliefs about the world as well.
Oh, I'm sorry. I hate when that happens. It happened to me just the other day while I was posting a comment on a Wordpress blog. Somehow I lost the comment even though I had actually copied it just in case something happened and I'd need to paste it back in. Go figure! Anyway, just know your comment is appreciated, whatever it was. ;)
I've been away on holiday, and I have some catching up to do. I last weighed in at the Introduction, where I wondered whether the dominant factions in U.S. politics might be understood as " talking past one another: in effect, speaking different languages." I understand this inspired the poll question for Chapter 2: "Given our current political divides, would you say we live in different realities?"
My belated answer is "Well. . ." What interests me is how the principle of generosity might cast light on the political polarization of our times. First, can the polarization fruitfully be understood as a breakdown of language; that is to say, a violation of the principle of generosity? Second, if there is such a breakdown, does this imply a differentiation or alienation with respect to reality? (Are the links between language and reality as intimate as the thesis suggests?) Third, if there is some such differentiation or alienation, can we argue that the Democrats or the Republicans have a better grasp of reality?
Following the hints in Chapter 2, we might understand the current political divide as a breakdown of trust. To "interpret what is said in such a way as to assume the most painful possible meaning for yourself and attribute to the speaker the worst possible motives for saying it" -- this sounds like the political mandate of modern Democrats and Republicans alike, at least as played out in their respective media. What's interesting is the way this attitude reflects a spiteful and more or less wilful violation of the principle of charity. The question that Chapter 2 doesn't ask is whether this amounts to a wilful rejection of reality -- and why anyone would do that.
In subsequent chapters, many other points have been made pertaining to politics, and the question of trust is about to come up again. I'll try to stay plugged in.
If I understand you correctly, and I'm not sure I do, you are using the principle of generosity as it applies to political disagreements between people who already understand English. I was using it to get at what is a more fundamental understanding of how we acquire language to begin with. The principle of generosity may be applied to ordinary disagreements between people with more or less success, but failure at success in that endeavor would not invalidate the need for generosity at the fundamental level.
I suppose that nearly all falsehood involves some kind of misuse of language, but not all. If someone tells me that the Chinese eat unicorns for breakfast, the problem is not linguistic, it's informational.
I would not begin to try to say whether Democrats or Republicans are more guilty in this respect. But whoever is more guilty does violate a connection between language and reality.
Sorry to be so late in replying -- I've been unusually busy this spring.
I'm applying the principle of generosity to people with political disagreements. In this case they all happen to speak English, and at that level, generosity is certainly required. I'm wondering whether we might consider other levels of language between them, which might also rely on the principle of generosity. Our interactions in a moral or political sphere, of which spoken language is a component, might require an environment of trust. For example, the plight of a pregnant teenager must be read sympathetically, while a deep concern for life must be accorded the respect it deserves. This wouldn't solve the political issue, but more generosity and less spite could change the character of the debate, and the possibility of a favourable outcome.
But if this much applies, then I'm led to wonder about the ontology required for these other languages. If an analysis of spoken language leads us to the recognition of certain necessary posits, would an analysis of other forms of intelligible interaction lead us to different posits -- or perhaps the same ones?
"Slab!" is where I'd go with this. We do things; this is foremost the source of meanings. We associate certain noises with our doings, and we call this language, but the meaning of our language is to be found deeper, in our interactions with one another and the world. These interactions are not unintelligible.
Now that Neal's weighed in, I'll give my response to your questions.
First, the poll: "Given our current political divides, would you say we live in different realities?"
I would say no. The idea that 'we live in different worlds' is a metaphor for a deep ideological division, but this division doesn't amount to total breakdown of language or a fracturing of reality. There can be a minor communication breakdown (which happens pretty much every time you watch a presidential debate), but I think if you put two political opposites in a room together, they might come to hate each other and purposefully misconstrue each other's words, but I doubt they would come to blows over whether the bottle of water on the table between them is really a bottle of water (so long as the bottle of water doesn't figure into their political dispute). What we take for granted is the greater background—a shared language and a shared foundation of fairly trivial and conventional beliefs—which makes possible their ability to hurl meaningful insults at one another.
I think what we loosely call 'different realities' is better expressed as 'information silos'. The democratization of information is a wonderful thing in many ways, but the constant barrage of information necessitates that we filter it somehow. We look to trusted sources for that. What constitutes a trusted source when everything becomes equalized? We tend to seek out news that confirms our beliefs—we all do it to some degree; it takes a deliberate and conscientious effort to even think about finding out what the other side is saying.
One thing I've noticed is there seems to be, at least on the liberal side, a swing away from the relativistic stance in favor of a vague, not-well-understood scientific worldview and a belief in objective facts. But what is a fact? That's a complicated question which philosophers continue to argue about. On the face of it, it's "evidence in support of a claim". But what counts as evidence? That's where there needs to be a reckoning. And if you believe in lizard people or if you believe men can become pregnant, the road to agreement will be long and hard.
There's a sense in which agreeing about bottles of water is agreeing about reality, but it emphasizes an impoverished reality of things we can all point at, or perhaps kick in order to refute the skeptics. Our human world is more than that. It is full of constructions, and these are the important things: whether the bottle should be glass or plastic, whether the water it contains is part of a secret mind-control plot by Big Bottlers.
We live in a time where construction has been noticed and made into a form of play. The fact that we cannot distinguish trusted sources is a source of freedom. The opportunity to flatter ourselves with echoes of our own image is apparently irresistible.
On the liberal side, there is an enthusiasm for "evidence-based policy," but also an enthusiasm for finding evidence in support of policy. The rights of LGTBQ2S+, for example, are taken as natural; they need not be deduced from studies. Studies may be adduced that lend support to their cause, while antithetical studies, if there are any, may be subject to de-platforming. The role of a scientific worldview in all this seems nominal. And as for the conservative side, its own extremes hardly need elaborating.
Between them stands "the evidence," but the evidence is scarcely important; what's important is the cause. The world of the cause is populated with the required evidence, because after Nietzsche, why not? To this extent, people choose their worlds, and they may choose to live in different ones. The act of choosing narcissistically is an abrogation of generosity.
To be honest, I think the problem is that people just aren't all that thoughtful or self-consistent, though I doubt this is a new phenomenon. It feels accelerated or more extreme with the proliferation of information, but maybe it's simply what has been the case all along, just magnified.
Good point about certain liberals being anti-scientific when it suits them. I had temporarily forgotten about that. Also there's the transgender athletics debates. It seems commonsensical to me that if you really believe in being scientific about it you'd have to tease apart what makes men have the biological advantage over women, then assess on a case by case basis whether someone qualifies as having an unfair advantage. But the way things are, you're not even allowed to talk about doing things this way.
I found it interesting that in his book, The Language Hoax, John McWhorter argues against linguistic relativism by pointing out that if it were true, the Chinese would be inferior to English speakers when it comes to understanding counterfactuals—not a conclusion liberals would like to be true. He even points to a case where someone did actually do a scientific study and came to that very conclusion about the Chinese, and of course liberals came down on him in a fury. (McWhorter's main argument is that the differences these studies find amongst various language speakers turns out to be so minor that it would be ridiculous to conclude from them ANY difference in the way we view the world. Being a fraction of a second faster at recognizing a certain shade of blue not only doesn't make for a worldview, it doesn't even make for a difference in perception.)
The point you make about the cause being the important thing over the evidence is true for many people, but I don't know about most. It's the extremists who get the megaphone. I think ordinary people just want to mind their own business, but of course that exacerbates the problem.
You know how long it took me and my Republican friend to come to an agreement on raising the minimum wage? About 30 minutes. I think the key word there is 'friend'.
I haven't read McWhorter's book, but a review by Jed Rothwell at Amazon (easily found by sorting the comments by "Most recent") anticipates my concerns. "I think McWhorter has picked only soft targets to make his point," he writes. "Only trivial examples, such as the Russian color, or the Japanese lack of pronouns. I think the Japanese language does, in fact, shape people’s world view." Rothwell goes on to explain this point extensively; it's worth looking up. What he says jibes with some other things I've read about Eastern and Western modes of thought -- most recently the book _Absence_ by Byung-Chul Han, but also Richard E. Nisbett's _The Geography of Thought_ (which I reviewed obliquely at https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2022/08/13/the-geography-of-thought-an-oblique-review/) and Francois Julien's _The Propensity of Things_, a half-read book on my shelf in which, according to the dust jacket, "prejudices toward the simplicity and 'naivete' of Chinese thought, Hegelian and otherwise, are dismantled one by one to to reveal the intricate and coherent structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking and representing reality." Then there is the intriguing opposition of "stories" proposed by Charles Eisenstein, which I've discussed briefly at https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/charles-eisenstein-on-story-and-myth/.
These reports and observations suggest to me that there are different ways of experiencing the world, expressed in different cultures. What this has to do with language is another question. If our reality is determined by our language, and if a certain camp wants to find for an objective reality or a non-relativistic world, there is a temptation to downplay the possibility of serious linguistic differences, and thus the possibility of serious differences in world-view. Much as I might like to find for an objective reality and an absolute or "correct" world-view, I feel compelled to take any contrary evidence into account (rather than knock it down in the manner of McWhorter). I hold at arms' length the idea that our spoken language, whether English or Chinese, is anything more than foam on the sea of human experience; even so, that foam may take certain shapes, depending on the prevailing currents.
No doubt there are differences in cultures. But as you say, "What this has to do with language is another question." Exactly.
I checked out the review and I don't think anything he is saying contradicts what McWhorter says. I was expecting him to point out research that doesn't support McWhorter's view, but instead he talks about hierarchical features embedded in the Japanese language. That's true in many languages, but does that hierarchical thinking come from the language or the culture?
McWhorter does cherry pick his examples, but I think it's fair to say he's basing his examples off the numerous popular articles using those same examples to make overblown claims:
"Words are a powerful tool for communicating an experience to others, but they can also alter your own perception of that experience entirely."
"Studies in linguistic diversity suggest that the languages we speak profoundly shape our experiences of the world. How does your language affect you?"
And:
"The question is why: why does language — something apparently so arbitrary, with its sounds and symbols having no connection to meaning beyond those who can interpret them — have such a profound grip on how we experience the world?"
McWhorter addresses the experiements cited over and over in popular articles. He doesn't argue with the results of the actual experiments or the conclusions drawn by their authors, which are often modest and fair, but against the overblown reinterpretation of these experiments found in numerous popular articles.
He says, "The problem is the announcement, 'Tribe without numbers in their language cannot do math,' with breathless speculations about how language shapes their existence. We have to imagine equivalent claims, 'Tribe without letters cannot write': notice how unlikely such a headline seems. Not having letters would seem to be the very essence of not writing. When we encounter a group without writing, we speculate as to the historical or cultural reasons that explain why they have not adopted it. What would we think of someone who was instead mesmerized with the fact that the group have no conception of letters, seeing it as a valuable insight that this ignorance of letters is what prevents the people from writing anything down or being much good at trying to do so if asked? 'Illiteracy prevents writing,' the headlines announce—and we wonder whether we have had a small stroke."
So it's not that there is no differences in cultures. It's that language is often seen to be the determining factor for those differences, without taking into account other reasons, such as the fact that cultures are simply different from one another, or that geography plays a role in how a group conceptualizes space (but that group will re-conceptualize space when moved to the big city), and so on.
Thanks for explaining McWhorter's views at greater length. If the sources he critiques are indeed using such weak examples for their case, they deserve to be called on it.
What is the role of language in culture? As you say, some take it to be a determining factor for cultural differences, overlooking other influences. On the other hand, those influences may have shaped the language to reflect them. If it's true that language depends on a mutually-agreed reality, then surely the mutually-agreed reality of a lived culture can emerge in its language.
The question I see at issue here is is not whether language can or must embody a mutually-agreed reality; it is whether there can be more than one mutually-agreed reality. Here I think we begin to slip up on definitions of "reality."
I'd say we're all in the same reality. We're subject to the same increasingly hot summers, macro-economic conditions, and pandemic effects regardless of what we believe. On the other hand, we obviously believe very different things about that reality. Our worldviews are different, with different sources of information reinforcing those views. In a way, our group consciousness is split, or maybe more accurately, fractured.
Well put! The pandemic seems an especially poignant reminder that there can be serious consequences if our beliefs don't reflect reality. Of course reality doesn't always give us such clear and immediate feedback.
Too true!
Do you think that believing in non-real things, or things made real by belief and belief alone, is necessary in constituting reality?
I'm thinking of money. It exists because we believe it exists, but it seems very pertinent to our lives. Could the beliefs surrounding pandemics and hot summers be similar?
We can describe money as something that exists only because we believe in it, but maybe a more productive description is it's a tool we use to track social obligations. Of course, obligations only exist because we inter-subjectively perceive them, but they seem necessary for a functioning society. Which makes money a social tool, which I think gives it a similar ontological status to ethical rules.
Whenever something seems ontologically strange, consider its causes and effects.
I agree with everything you pointed out here, and it's connected to my original point. The process of "believing something into existence" seems like it underpins a lot of useful processes. Not just money, which we believe into existence, but social obligations, which we believe into existence.
I would go further and propose that all ethics, ideology, schema, contracts, laws, and traditions are "believed into existence." If this is true, we need to ask ourselves whether we can "believe into existence" something that we'd consider objective. A contract, or a dollar, for example, would seem to depend on us treating them as objective facts.
"would you say we live in different realities?" We live with different definitions. Partisans don't like to agree on what are facts and what are opinions. That way an opponent isn't just wrong, they're a liar.
Good point about definitions. It makes for an especially obnoxious debate when people can't—or won't— agree about what constitutes a fact simply because they'd rather champion their party or cause.
Everyone one of us lives in the subjective reality of our own mental model. Yet I think a very good casual definition of sanity is the degree to which one's mental model corresponds with objective reality. Even so, a good talk with someone from a different political, social, gender, racial group can show just how differently even the sanest can see the world.
Same physical reality, but its meanings and implications vary considerably!
The mental model sounds very Kantian. :)
Indeed! It may be that this even-more-insane-than-previous political season has me overly aware of just how differently some see the world. Our mental models vary considerably -- mostly on how we assign values -- even when both correspond to objective reality very well. (And of course all mental models have bias. Especially in the Kantian sense of shaping how we think.)
Putting this back on topic, if I'm understanding correctly, what Neal is calling "truth" in the book (with regard to pigs in pens), is what I've seen as (mental) "model fitting". Which is what we constantly do with input data -- fit it to our mental model. We do this even with things we see with our eyes, let alone more complex structures such as language. That model is the context (what John Searle calls "the Background") for my understanding of "pen".
The generosity comes into play (AIUI) in how we do that fitting. Many of our inputs are ambiguous and don't readily fit our model. We need to slide the idea around to find the best fit -- the fit that "makes sense". Finding that non-perfect best fit requires being generous about how the concept fits our model. I mentioned I get stuck on "truth" when the *content* is clearly false (you own neither pig nor pen) but the truth of the *statement* (its sense; its logical fit with my model) still exists.
Which, BTW, I need to get back to the book! I'm ahead of you here -- more than halfway through -- but I put it down when some library books I had on hold came available and never got back to it (so many distractions in life). I was in the chapter about language...
Sorry I didn't see this comment when I responded to the previous one. I'm not entirely sure I understand you correctly, but if I do, then what you're calling a mental model is subjective, or "personal", but what I'm advocating is that since we can translate between languages, we must share the same mental model or our mental models must be roughly the same.
Yes, absolutely *roughly* the same because they're (hopefully) based on a consistent external reality -- Kant's noumena. Which I don't consider inaccessible. I think of our mental model as a "wireframe" of the real thing, a view through a dark glass. And that is why my casual definition of sanity is the degree to which one's mental model matches the reality.
If you think noumena is accessible, maybe you're not so Kantian after all. I recently heard Colin McGinn describe Kant as a sort of 'double realist', which I thought was an interesting way of thinking about him. Maybe, then, you're a single realist, which we just call 'realist'.
I'm definitely not a *strict* Kantian. As with most things, I take the parts that makes sense and ignore the parts that don't -- take what's useful and manageable, so to speak.
I agree our only physical sensation is phenomenal and that noumena are therefore *directly* inaccessible, but to me the phenomena arise directly from the noumena (in the case where we perceive the external world versus our memory, imagination, or hallucination), and this allows us to construct our mental model "around" (the phenomena arising from) the noumena. Hence our "wireframe" model of reality. Reasonably accurate but lacking precision, resolution, and much of the noumenal information.
I'm absolutely a philosophical realist. Hard-core. I don't have much sympathy for philosophical idealism. (OTOH, I'm equally absolutely a *personal* idealist. 🤩) I see Kant as a realist as well -- he believed noumena were physical reality. I take his transcendental idealism to mean our mental model transcends and is our only representation of physical reality. But that's just my spin on it.
I have a question for you: how could people who don't share the same science talk to one another?
Not, I think, responsive to your question, but science, and particularly math, has the potential to be a lingua franca between intelligent species. This is because there are certain clearly apparent constants therein that, if a generic symbology referring to them can be found, must be known to any species with science and math. The Arecibo Message, the Pioneer Plaques, and the Voyager Golden Records all banked their hopes on the presumptive truth of this.
With levels of understanding that "sorta" work. We can get pretty far without perfect understanding. No?
Do you know Steven Hayes' Relational Frame Theory"? I wonder if that might help explain how we can share many relations between our concepts without sharing all of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_frame_theory
This is a really interesting chapter. You correctly point out that technical language is not enough to eliminate ambiguity, and point out that the interpretation requires generosity and the audience's capacity for generosity.
If, theoretically, technical language is a scaling down of the demands on the audience, how do you think we function when the demand for generosity is expanded? I'm thinking of the documents we dig up in ancient Mesopotamia or, even more, the Indus Valley Civilization.
In the case of Mesopotamia, we are more or less able to understand stories about Gilgamesh, and Tamuz and Ishtar, even though they make tons of references to things even the greatest scholars of the Ancient Middle East don't understand. In the case of the Indus Valley Civilization, we attempt to understand their writings, even when we aren't sure whether or not the symbols they wrote were, in fact, writing.
How do you think this works? Is generosity a process, partially, of "making shit up" until a narrative forms?
Thanks, Ben. Your questions are very much at the heart of the book and I think they'll be answered in later chapters, particularly the thought experiment on 'radical interpretation' and the part on literary analysis. Well, really the whole book. :)
As for understanding ancient writings, I think we have to assume what we're looking at is actually writing, so you have to have generosity right at the outset. I forget which language it was that was for a long time dismissed as decoration (I watched something on The Great Courses a while back), and that attitude hindered the discovery as you can imagine.
Incidentally, the story about how a combination of guesswork and historical knowledge was used to figure out an inscription in cuneiform without a Rosetta stone and without knowledge of the language is fascinating:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform
Essentially the guy who figured out the inscription assumed the text was naming kings and needed to find out which kings were being named. When he had things narrowed down to two possible kings—Darius and Cyrus—the determining factor that allowed him to eliminate Cyrus was the fact that Cyrus' father was Cambyses I and his son was Cambyses II. If those two happened to have different names, it wouldn't have been possible to eliminate Cyrus, at least not in this way, so it was a real stroke of luck.
The ways linguists have figured this stuff out it beyond impressive. And yeah, a lot of it hangs on little coincidences like Cambyses and Cambyses Jr. having the same name!
Ditto on what Tina said. I think the rest of the book will address the questions you're asking here, hopefully.
I look forward to it.
Given our political divides today, do we live in different realities? I agree here with Truth & Generosity--we must share basic common beliefs. Not just to communicate, but also to engage in any cooperative efforts. Just run your finger across the contours of a couch or car--despite our conceptual and ideological disagreements, there's a shared reality there. In the end, we must live together in practical ways within the confines of this reality, if we wish to flourish together rather than perish.
Hey, you made it into the comments section! Welcome!
Good point about cooperative efforts pointing to shared reality. What could be drawn from that is certain animals (I'm thinking of dogs and horses and the like) must share at least some of our fundamental beliefs about the world as well.
I replied today to your post from yesterday--unfortunately my reply didn't get through and was lost in the machine...
Oh, I'm sorry. I hate when that happens. It happened to me just the other day while I was posting a comment on a Wordpress blog. Somehow I lost the comment even though I had actually copied it just in case something happened and I'd need to paste it back in. Go figure! Anyway, just know your comment is appreciated, whatever it was. ;)
I've been away on holiday, and I have some catching up to do. I last weighed in at the Introduction, where I wondered whether the dominant factions in U.S. politics might be understood as " talking past one another: in effect, speaking different languages." I understand this inspired the poll question for Chapter 2: "Given our current political divides, would you say we live in different realities?"
My belated answer is "Well. . ." What interests me is how the principle of generosity might cast light on the political polarization of our times. First, can the polarization fruitfully be understood as a breakdown of language; that is to say, a violation of the principle of generosity? Second, if there is such a breakdown, does this imply a differentiation or alienation with respect to reality? (Are the links between language and reality as intimate as the thesis suggests?) Third, if there is some such differentiation or alienation, can we argue that the Democrats or the Republicans have a better grasp of reality?
Following the hints in Chapter 2, we might understand the current political divide as a breakdown of trust. To "interpret what is said in such a way as to assume the most painful possible meaning for yourself and attribute to the speaker the worst possible motives for saying it" -- this sounds like the political mandate of modern Democrats and Republicans alike, at least as played out in their respective media. What's interesting is the way this attitude reflects a spiteful and more or less wilful violation of the principle of charity. The question that Chapter 2 doesn't ask is whether this amounts to a wilful rejection of reality -- and why anyone would do that.
In subsequent chapters, many other points have been made pertaining to politics, and the question of trust is about to come up again. I'll try to stay plugged in.
So glad you're back! I hope you had a wonderful vacation.
These are GREAT questions. I'll pass them along to Neal—they might even awaken him from his retirement slumber. ;)
If I understand you correctly, and I'm not sure I do, you are using the principle of generosity as it applies to political disagreements between people who already understand English. I was using it to get at what is a more fundamental understanding of how we acquire language to begin with. The principle of generosity may be applied to ordinary disagreements between people with more or less success, but failure at success in that endeavor would not invalidate the need for generosity at the fundamental level.
I suppose that nearly all falsehood involves some kind of misuse of language, but not all. If someone tells me that the Chinese eat unicorns for breakfast, the problem is not linguistic, it's informational.
I would not begin to try to say whether Democrats or Republicans are more guilty in this respect. But whoever is more guilty does violate a connection between language and reality.
Sorry to be so late in replying -- I've been unusually busy this spring.
I'm applying the principle of generosity to people with political disagreements. In this case they all happen to speak English, and at that level, generosity is certainly required. I'm wondering whether we might consider other levels of language between them, which might also rely on the principle of generosity. Our interactions in a moral or political sphere, of which spoken language is a component, might require an environment of trust. For example, the plight of a pregnant teenager must be read sympathetically, while a deep concern for life must be accorded the respect it deserves. This wouldn't solve the political issue, but more generosity and less spite could change the character of the debate, and the possibility of a favourable outcome.
But if this much applies, then I'm led to wonder about the ontology required for these other languages. If an analysis of spoken language leads us to the recognition of certain necessary posits, would an analysis of other forms of intelligible interaction lead us to different posits -- or perhaps the same ones?
What forms of intelligible interaction did you have in mind?
"Slab!" is where I'd go with this. We do things; this is foremost the source of meanings. We associate certain noises with our doings, and we call this language, but the meaning of our language is to be found deeper, in our interactions with one another and the world. These interactions are not unintelligible.
Now that Neal's weighed in, I'll give my response to your questions.
First, the poll: "Given our current political divides, would you say we live in different realities?"
I would say no. The idea that 'we live in different worlds' is a metaphor for a deep ideological division, but this division doesn't amount to total breakdown of language or a fracturing of reality. There can be a minor communication breakdown (which happens pretty much every time you watch a presidential debate), but I think if you put two political opposites in a room together, they might come to hate each other and purposefully misconstrue each other's words, but I doubt they would come to blows over whether the bottle of water on the table between them is really a bottle of water (so long as the bottle of water doesn't figure into their political dispute). What we take for granted is the greater background—a shared language and a shared foundation of fairly trivial and conventional beliefs—which makes possible their ability to hurl meaningful insults at one another.
I think what we loosely call 'different realities' is better expressed as 'information silos'. The democratization of information is a wonderful thing in many ways, but the constant barrage of information necessitates that we filter it somehow. We look to trusted sources for that. What constitutes a trusted source when everything becomes equalized? We tend to seek out news that confirms our beliefs—we all do it to some degree; it takes a deliberate and conscientious effort to even think about finding out what the other side is saying.
One thing I've noticed is there seems to be, at least on the liberal side, a swing away from the relativistic stance in favor of a vague, not-well-understood scientific worldview and a belief in objective facts. But what is a fact? That's a complicated question which philosophers continue to argue about. On the face of it, it's "evidence in support of a claim". But what counts as evidence? That's where there needs to be a reckoning. And if you believe in lizard people or if you believe men can become pregnant, the road to agreement will be long and hard.
There's a sense in which agreeing about bottles of water is agreeing about reality, but it emphasizes an impoverished reality of things we can all point at, or perhaps kick in order to refute the skeptics. Our human world is more than that. It is full of constructions, and these are the important things: whether the bottle should be glass or plastic, whether the water it contains is part of a secret mind-control plot by Big Bottlers.
We live in a time where construction has been noticed and made into a form of play. The fact that we cannot distinguish trusted sources is a source of freedom. The opportunity to flatter ourselves with echoes of our own image is apparently irresistible.
On the liberal side, there is an enthusiasm for "evidence-based policy," but also an enthusiasm for finding evidence in support of policy. The rights of LGTBQ2S+, for example, are taken as natural; they need not be deduced from studies. Studies may be adduced that lend support to their cause, while antithetical studies, if there are any, may be subject to de-platforming. The role of a scientific worldview in all this seems nominal. And as for the conservative side, its own extremes hardly need elaborating.
Between them stands "the evidence," but the evidence is scarcely important; what's important is the cause. The world of the cause is populated with the required evidence, because after Nietzsche, why not? To this extent, people choose their worlds, and they may choose to live in different ones. The act of choosing narcissistically is an abrogation of generosity.
To be honest, I think the problem is that people just aren't all that thoughtful or self-consistent, though I doubt this is a new phenomenon. It feels accelerated or more extreme with the proliferation of information, but maybe it's simply what has been the case all along, just magnified.
Good point about certain liberals being anti-scientific when it suits them. I had temporarily forgotten about that. Also there's the transgender athletics debates. It seems commonsensical to me that if you really believe in being scientific about it you'd have to tease apart what makes men have the biological advantage over women, then assess on a case by case basis whether someone qualifies as having an unfair advantage. But the way things are, you're not even allowed to talk about doing things this way.
I found it interesting that in his book, The Language Hoax, John McWhorter argues against linguistic relativism by pointing out that if it were true, the Chinese would be inferior to English speakers when it comes to understanding counterfactuals—not a conclusion liberals would like to be true. He even points to a case where someone did actually do a scientific study and came to that very conclusion about the Chinese, and of course liberals came down on him in a fury. (McWhorter's main argument is that the differences these studies find amongst various language speakers turns out to be so minor that it would be ridiculous to conclude from them ANY difference in the way we view the world. Being a fraction of a second faster at recognizing a certain shade of blue not only doesn't make for a worldview, it doesn't even make for a difference in perception.)
The point you make about the cause being the important thing over the evidence is true for many people, but I don't know about most. It's the extremists who get the megaphone. I think ordinary people just want to mind their own business, but of course that exacerbates the problem.
You know how long it took me and my Republican friend to come to an agreement on raising the minimum wage? About 30 minutes. I think the key word there is 'friend'.
I haven't read McWhorter's book, but a review by Jed Rothwell at Amazon (easily found by sorting the comments by "Most recent") anticipates my concerns. "I think McWhorter has picked only soft targets to make his point," he writes. "Only trivial examples, such as the Russian color, or the Japanese lack of pronouns. I think the Japanese language does, in fact, shape people’s world view." Rothwell goes on to explain this point extensively; it's worth looking up. What he says jibes with some other things I've read about Eastern and Western modes of thought -- most recently the book _Absence_ by Byung-Chul Han, but also Richard E. Nisbett's _The Geography of Thought_ (which I reviewed obliquely at https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2022/08/13/the-geography-of-thought-an-oblique-review/) and Francois Julien's _The Propensity of Things_, a half-read book on my shelf in which, according to the dust jacket, "prejudices toward the simplicity and 'naivete' of Chinese thought, Hegelian and otherwise, are dismantled one by one to to reveal the intricate and coherent structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking and representing reality." Then there is the intriguing opposition of "stories" proposed by Charles Eisenstein, which I've discussed briefly at https://staggeringimplications.wordpress.com/2023/03/08/charles-eisenstein-on-story-and-myth/.
These reports and observations suggest to me that there are different ways of experiencing the world, expressed in different cultures. What this has to do with language is another question. If our reality is determined by our language, and if a certain camp wants to find for an objective reality or a non-relativistic world, there is a temptation to downplay the possibility of serious linguistic differences, and thus the possibility of serious differences in world-view. Much as I might like to find for an objective reality and an absolute or "correct" world-view, I feel compelled to take any contrary evidence into account (rather than knock it down in the manner of McWhorter). I hold at arms' length the idea that our spoken language, whether English or Chinese, is anything more than foam on the sea of human experience; even so, that foam may take certain shapes, depending on the prevailing currents.
No doubt there are differences in cultures. But as you say, "What this has to do with language is another question." Exactly.
I checked out the review and I don't think anything he is saying contradicts what McWhorter says. I was expecting him to point out research that doesn't support McWhorter's view, but instead he talks about hierarchical features embedded in the Japanese language. That's true in many languages, but does that hierarchical thinking come from the language or the culture?
McWhorter does cherry pick his examples, but I think it's fair to say he's basing his examples off the numerous popular articles using those same examples to make overblown claims:
"Words are a powerful tool for communicating an experience to others, but they can also alter your own perception of that experience entirely."
https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/how-language-shapes-our-understanding-of-reality
"Studies in linguistic diversity suggest that the languages we speak profoundly shape our experiences of the world. How does your language affect you?"
And:
"The question is why: why does language — something apparently so arbitrary, with its sounds and symbols having no connection to meaning beyond those who can interpret them — have such a profound grip on how we experience the world?"
https://philosophybreak.com/articles/language-shapes-reality/
McWhorter addresses the experiements cited over and over in popular articles. He doesn't argue with the results of the actual experiments or the conclusions drawn by their authors, which are often modest and fair, but against the overblown reinterpretation of these experiments found in numerous popular articles.
He says, "The problem is the announcement, 'Tribe without numbers in their language cannot do math,' with breathless speculations about how language shapes their existence. We have to imagine equivalent claims, 'Tribe without letters cannot write': notice how unlikely such a headline seems. Not having letters would seem to be the very essence of not writing. When we encounter a group without writing, we speculate as to the historical or cultural reasons that explain why they have not adopted it. What would we think of someone who was instead mesmerized with the fact that the group have no conception of letters, seeing it as a valuable insight that this ignorance of letters is what prevents the people from writing anything down or being much good at trying to do so if asked? 'Illiteracy prevents writing,' the headlines announce—and we wonder whether we have had a small stroke."
So it's not that there is no differences in cultures. It's that language is often seen to be the determining factor for those differences, without taking into account other reasons, such as the fact that cultures are simply different from one another, or that geography plays a role in how a group conceptualizes space (but that group will re-conceptualize space when moved to the big city), and so on.
Thanks for explaining McWhorter's views at greater length. If the sources he critiques are indeed using such weak examples for their case, they deserve to be called on it.
What is the role of language in culture? As you say, some take it to be a determining factor for cultural differences, overlooking other influences. On the other hand, those influences may have shaped the language to reflect them. If it's true that language depends on a mutually-agreed reality, then surely the mutually-agreed reality of a lived culture can emerge in its language.
The question I see at issue here is is not whether language can or must embody a mutually-agreed reality; it is whether there can be more than one mutually-agreed reality. Here I think we begin to slip up on definitions of "reality."