Kahneman, Dyson; Freud and James; plus Pinker (expanded)

Daniel Kahneman is an intellectual grey-eminence of the past several decades.  If you read at all, you have met some of his ideas (usually written in conjunction with his trusty sidekick Tversky) , though generally at second-hand.  Now he has written his own lengthy and systematic account of his research, aimed at a lay audience.

Most reviews of Daniel Kahneman’s new book (Thinking:  Fast and Slow) simply choose a few from his wealth of anecdotes  and recount them.  Not a bad plan -- they are all worth hearing.  By contrast, Freeman Dyson, in a typically canny offering in the current New York Review of Books, goes beyond the usual review, offering some trenchant personal experiences that illustrate the cognitive case being made, and -- quite surprisingly in the current climate -- puts in a word for Freud:  not the Freud of Die Traumdeutung or the cigars, but of the seminal Psychopathologie des Alltaglebens.   He concludes: “The insights of Kahneman and Freud  are complementary rather than contradictory.”

Noting that neither Sigmund Freud nor William James comes in for mention in Kahneman’s long book, Dyson also outlines the present relevance of this giant of psychology (and one of the heroes of this blog).

Make no mistake -- Kahneman, like Steven Pinker, is one of psychology’s good-guys, plumbing the richness of human experience  though coming to mostly dry and deflating conclusions.   Unlike the eliminative materialists (which includes many of the tribe of neuroscientists), they do not take mere mechanism as a posit, rather than as an occasional result.  James and Dyson, unlike most of their scientific colleagues then and now, have thought deeply about religion and take it quite seriously;  our family had the benefit of Dyson’s teaching at the Presbyterian Church in Princeton.   His invariably broad and thoughtful perspective is ever welcome.

Footnote:  I subsequently borrowed an audiobook of Thinking:  Fast and Slow from the library, to listen through in stages along my commute.   Alas, it turns out not to be suitable for that medium, save perhaps for a beginner.   Far too much of it is platitudinous  -- boring to sit through, while the reader-aloud drones on.    With a printed work, your eyes rapidly scans past the overly familiar, and plucks the occasional novel niblet.

Part of the problem is adumbrated in this passage from America’s premier psychologist of the nineteenth century:

Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produced a feeling of their rationality.

-- William James,  “The Sentiment of Rationality”, in The Will to Believe (1897).

Kahneman rediscovers that remarkable fact, with much spilling of ink, waving of hands, and conducting of unsurprising experiments. 

More interesting is what James writes immediately after that, showing that today’s postmodernist-style relativists  have also not brought forth something new under the sun:

The empiricist school has been so much struck by this circumstance  as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity  are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.

(I have satirized that dreadful mindset  here.)

~

In an earlier essay, we examined the politics and natural selection of sex as reflected in the writings of Steven Pinker.   There is a Kahnemanian cognitive dimension here as well, of which we now give an example.

Pinker wades patiently through the swamps of Political Correctness;  we salute his perseverence.   It really is remarkable, the sort of emotionally-founded cognitive distortions he must contend with.

Thus, consider this thought-experiment:  Imagine that some researchers published a study suggesting that the higher crime rate for American Blacks is a consequence of innate criminality.  They would of course be denounced by Blacks and their champions;  but would scarcely be denounced as blaming White crime victims.  So much is obvious.

Yet now put in different substitutions for x and y, and though the logical structure has not changed, the political picture has changed entirely.   The Blank Slate, p. 161:

Even heavier bipartisan fire has recently been aimed at Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer  for suggesting in their book A Natural History of Rape  that rape is a consequence of men’s sexuality.  A spokesperson from the Feminist Majority Foundation called the book “scary” and “regressive” because it “almost validates the crime and blames the victim.”

By contrast,  men as such  did not object.  We’re used to it.

The average zealot would be quite incapable of perceiving the logical parallelism between the two accounts.
Similarly Pinker, op. cit., p. 372, re the "Laws of Behavior Genetics":  "It is because the laws run roughshod over the Blank Slate, and the Blank Slate is so entrenched,  that many intellectuals cannot comprehend an alternative to it, let alone argue about whether it is right or wrong."  A depressing, accurate, and important observation.

~

Here and elsewhere, Pinker counters the Noble-Savage ideology that whatever is found in nature must be good.  P. 164

It is inherent to our value system that the interests of women should not be subordinated to those of men, and that control over one’s body is a fundamental right  that trumps other people’s desires.  So rape is not tolerated, regardless of any possible connection to the nature of men’s sexuality.

So far, the standard viewpoint, sensibly put.  But then Pinker, whose logical scalpel is sharp, cuts down another level to make a quite interesting philosophical point:

Note how this calculus requires a “deterministic” and “essentialist” claim about human nature:  that women abhor being raped.  Without that claim  we would have no way to choose between trying to deter rape  and trying to socialize women to accept it, which would be perfectly compatible with the supposedly progressive doctrine that we are malleable raw material.

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For college psychology instructors:

Here is an experiment you can do with your class, if you don’t mind being denied tenure.

Divide your students randomly into two groups, and send them to separate rooms.  To the first group, present the sentence:

Men are hot;  women are cold.

(This is along the lines of such parlor-game titles as “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”.)

To the other group, present this sentence:

Women are hot;  men are cold.

Assignment:  Discuss.

Prediction:  Both groups will denounce their respective sentence as sexist and anti-woman.

[Postscript]  Chesterton anticipated this sally:

Re G.B. Shaw:

He has pleased all the bohemians  by suggesting that women are equal to men;  but he has infuriated them by suggesting that men are equal to women.

-- G.K. Chesterton, Heretics (1905)

~

Kahneman, as Dyson points out, avoids discussing religion; this is probably just as well.  Pinker -- whose range of interests is extraordinarily broad -- to his credit  does not avoid it;  indeed he quotes (pp. 186-7) from the magnificent 1996 address by Pope John Paul II on the subject of Natural Selection and the “ontological  discontinuity” (we have treated of this subject here);    but analytically, in this arena, he is not at his best.  On page 189  he dishes up an absurd false-dichotomy:

Who says the doctrine of the soul is more humane than the understanding of the mind as a physical organ?

Already so much has gone wrong.  We do not adhere to the doctrine of the soul (or of free will) because it is “humane”, but because it is true, and we experience it as such.   Nor does such a doctrine impede or even impinge upon the understanding of the brain as a physical organ.  As for the mind as a physical organ, um, did you really mean to write that?  Are we back with Descartes and his lodgement of the soul in the pituitary or the pineal gland or wherever the hell he placed it?

It gets worse.  The consequences of the “doctrine” of the soul (though, in our view, this is rather like speaking of the “doctrine” of the existence of the physical world)  is “letting people die of hepatitis  or be ravaged by Parkinson’s disease  when a cure may lie in research on stem cells…”  Indeed a cure might be thus expedited, or it might not;  the soul is nothing to the issue.   The moral quandary is rather to what extent society is willing to go, to benefit group A at the expense of group B.   Effective but morally debateable maneuvers include:  harvesting stem cells from embroyos;  harvesting embryos; harvesting aborted fetuses; harvesting fetuses not yet aborted but which, for a fittybone, the unwed mother would be happy to sell you.  Plus harvesting organs from dead adults; from living but brain-dead adults; from criminals; from political prisoners; from the luckless, kidnapped for this very purpose.  Perhaps less effective from a flinty Western medical perspective, but quite real and effective to its practitioners, is harvesting such organs as genitals from living children (our group B, here rather at a disadvantage) for use in sorcery to benefit group A (which in their own estimation, includes all the best people).  All these practices may be found in the world today, though generally not in places where the influence of the Holy Mother Church is at its strongest.   John draws the line at one place, Mary at another; and if you were to do a statistical study, it might well be that churchgoers, on average, place it somewhat more towards the less-interventionist end  than do vivisectionists, grave-robbers or eliminative materialists.   That would be sociologically rather interesting, if true;  Pinker has however made no logical point.   Nor does his heroically rising to the defense of helpless Alzheimer’s patients, who apparently are being abused by nuns when these are not otherwise engaged in cackling over the sufferings of Parkinsonians,  contradict anything a theist would say (apart perhaps from heretics like Christian Scientists):  “Sources of immense misery” (notice the purely emotion-evoking addition of the adjective) “such as Alzheimer’s disease … will be alleviated   not by treating thought and emotion of manifestations of an immaterial soul  but by treating them as manifestations of physiology and genetics.”   Amen; hear, hear;  we can all of us drink to that.  Pinker’s lance has pierced a straw-man.

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Pinker touches bottom with this assertion:  “The doctrine of a soul that outlives the body  is anything but righteous, because it necessarily devalues the lives we live on earth.”   (Compare:  "The doctrine that we should become adults  is offensive, as it devalues childhood.")
Leave aside that outsider’s-assessment-word “righteous”, analogous to the skewed perspective of the word “humane” above (We believe, or disbelieve, or simply hope, as the case may be, in eternal life, from conviction or revelation or even logic or what have you, but not because such a belief -- true or false -- seems “righteous”).  Notice, though, that qualifier “necessarily”, which changes the assertion from a sociological generalization or barroom opinion  into one of logico-philosophical apodixis.  Yet the only evidence he offers for this extraordinary doctrine  is the self-serving rationalizations (or irrationalizations) of maniacs who kill their kids, and the rants of al-Qaeda suicide-bombers.  (Page 189 -- look it up if you can’t believe your eyes.)

Good - Heavens!  For all we know, some serial killer has excused his crime-spree by an allusion to the Riemann Hypothesis;  the effect of such grotesques upon number theory  will rightly be nil.

Beyond the logical point, Pinker’s assertion is psychologically absurd.   It may well be the case (though God forbid), that those who hope they may one day rest in the bosom of Abraham  are destined to be cruelly disabused;  but their doctrine does tend rather to distinguish this view of life  from that of scorpions in a bottle.

For a glimpse at the value placed upon human life  among a proud, free people  unpolluted by Christian superstitions, click here, and here.
[update 8 May 2012] And now here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/05/south-koreans-confiscated-pills-human-remains.html
South Korean customs said it had confiscated more than 17,000 “health” capsules smuggled from China that contain human flesh, most likely extracted from aborted fetuses or stillborn babies.



(Note, though:  these are quibbles;  just a turf thang, folks.  Pinker's book overall is broad, sound, and beautifully written.)

(For more along these lines: )

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

In Defense of “Pascal’s Wager” (expanded)

I have always particularly disliked Pascal’s Wager.   First, on logical grounds, since, like Anselm’s Ontological Argument, it can just as easily lead to the Great Pumpkin or the Great Penguin, as to God as conceived by Christians (of whatever stripe).  Second, on psycho-religious.   Romeo does not pitch upon Juliet by a process of totting up her good points, and subtracting her bad (suitably weighted  statistically or otherwise), comparing the result with the similar figure for the other wenches in Verona, meanwhile having his accountant double-check for accuracy, and then proceeding (with degree X of Bayesian confidence) to the balcony of the lucky winner.   Nor do such cold considerations yield any sense of the Christian feelings and beliefs about God.

The tart-tongued psychologist-philosopher William James  felt a similar aversion.  In his essay “The Will to Believe” (1896), he writes:

You probably feel that, when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps.  … If we were ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off believers of this pattern  from their infinite reward.

"Va-banque on black !"

Nevertheless, I am uncomfortably aware of having embraced something somewhat akin -- a leap of faith across a crevasse of uncertainty, borne on the wings of reason -- in subscribing to the Nicene Creed.

Credo ut intelligam

But just now, perusing the thoughtful and chatty treatise of a (non-religious) philosopher, this:

Very few people today are impressed by Pascal’s wagers.  But decision theorists have long been using the arguments he invented … Pascal’s logic is sound. The trouble is that his starting points  no longer apply for most of us.  They are no longer “live possibilities”.

-- Ian Hacking, An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001), p. 123

Bingo!   That crack about the Great Pumpkin  misses the mark, because that portly vegetable only comes into perspective when seen from afar, from some philosopher’s distant star.   For anyone else (with the possible exception of Seneca the younger -- vide “The Pumpkinification of Claudius”), that rotund worthy is not a Live Possibility.

Our purpose here is not to argue for the intellectual respectability of adhering to the Christian faith (or to that of Islam), but to pursue the (psycho)logical point.   For, you,  respected and right-thinking reader, have almost certainly (if you are reading these words) made a similar bargain yourself:  in embracing the Religion of Science.

Not knocking science, nor denying its partly empirical character:  ever since my seventeenth year, my almost every effort has been bent in pursuit of scientific understanding.   But such is not easily to be had, even for those who majored in scientific subjects at top-flight colleges  and never slacked or looked back.   Most of what we accept, at least outside our own field of research, we largely accept on faith.  And indeed, even within that field -- QFT or String Theory, say -- there are doctrines and assumptions you just swallow  and then push forward, not really questioning these, trying to come up with something publishable that hews to the Narrative, at least until you get tenure.   "Allez en avant -- la foi vous viendra." (That celebrated epigram was actually not uttered by a prior or a bishop, but by d'Alembert, anent the mysteries of the calculus.)   To reject science sweepingly is intellectually disasterous;  but embracing it involves certain … wagers.

(For more on the subject, try this:  Veracity and Verifiability.)

Bonus:  For a relatively friendly look at Anselmian ontology, try this.
For a previously-unpublished tractate of the Saint:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2015/01/saint-anselms-proof-of-perfection-of.html

[Update May 2017]  Late-breaking developments on the logico-philosophical front:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-side-bet-for-pascals-wager.html

Slices of Time

Brian Greene monostich

(Not quite a monostich,

nor a haiku neither.

It is  what it is.)

Every moment is illuminated,

and every moment    remains illuminated.

Every moment  is.

-- Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), p. 141

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_Is_Illuminated

~

I have  on occasion  fulminated against “Physics porn” -- the tawdry down-dumbing of physics for a popular audience -- not so much a matter of (necessary) simplification, as of appealing to their baser, sensationalistic instincts.

Brian Greene does not practice that. The books of his that I have read (The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos) -- with titles like the Parthenon, elegant but restrained -- are worthy examples of haute vulgarisation.   The matters he treats of  are difficult to explain, even to fellow-physicists (if they work in a different lab, and thus subscribe to a different groupthink); he does a laudable job of trying.  Moreover, the fellow writes really, really well -- at times even poetically (witness the above).

Nor is the cited haikustich  poetry merely.  The idea behind it, appears in the next paragraph  in plain prose:

Einstein said that the problem of The Now  worried him seriously.  He explained that the experience of the Now  means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference  does not  and cannot occur within physics.

Albert Einstein,  worrying about The Now

That is not to suggest that the Now at all resembles a mathematical instant, as in the calculus and thus in classical physics.  Each perceived ‘moment’ of consciousness presumably corresponds to an integral over some interval.   The ‘density’ being integrated need have no determinate evaluation at a single point of the continuum, any more than does the Dirac delta.  The psychological present is more of a Nowabouts.

The same point, with a different metaphor:

The practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own  on which we sit perched.

-- William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. I, p. 609

The present is simply the past’s ever-moving outer edge.

-- Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker, 18 Dec 2006, p. 33

~

That the “now”, as such, has no special status in physics, is unsurprising, since it is relative to each observer.  That simultaneity (implicitly dependent thereon:  “Both A and B are happening now”) turns out to be untenable, was a shock introduced by Einstein; eventually you sort of learn to live with it.   The real scandal is that physics is likewise agnostic as to any distinction in principle between the future and the past.   And that thesis is cognitively and theologically abhorrent.

Feynman among others calmly accepted solutions to equations, whereby certain particles ran backwards in time.  At its grandest, as a prominent mathmatician-cosmologist writes, “the time-reverse of the universe  is just as much a solution of the dynamical equations” as the one we thought we lived in (Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 729).

For humans, the unidirectionality of time’s arrow  is as fundamental as the privileged status of the Now.  America’s premier 19^th-century psychologist, on remembering:

However the associationist may represent the present ideas as throning and arranging themselves, still, the spiritualist insists, he has in the end to admit that something, be it brain, be it ‘ideas’, be it ‘association’, knows past time as past, and fills it out with this or that event.

-- William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. I, p. 2

eppur’ si muove …

~

James crops up in the first paragraph of a New York Times op-ed concerning durée (subjective time) from 10 May 2015, by Gregory Hickok, a professor of cognitive science:

In 1890, the American psychologist William James  famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream … the stream … of consciousness.

The professor then puts his predecessor in his place:

Recent research has shown that the ‘stream’ of consciousness  is, in fact, an illusion.  We actually perceive the world in rhythmic pulses rather than as continuous flow.

The cognitive scientist then climbs down a bit from the claim that this insight is “recent” -- “Some of the first hints of this new understanding came as early as the 1920s, when physiologists discovered brain waves.”

One suspects, however, that James would not slap his forehead upon being apprized of this newly-minted insight, since he cites “the Humian doctrine that our thought is composed of separate independent parts, and is not a sensibly continuous stream”.  (Hume wrote in the eighteenth century.)

Esse est percipi (redivivus ter)

“To be is to be perceived” -- Bishop Berkeley
[corresponding to the Latin   esse est percipi, pronounced ESS-ay est pare-KIP-ee.  Percipi is the passive infinitive, a delightful category, which does not exist in any of the other languages with which I am conversant.]

“We call a real dynamical variable whose eigenstates form a complete set   an observable.”  -- Paul Dirac

“To be  is to be the value of a variable.”  --  W.V.O. Quine

*

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am Bishop Berkeley, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

Three radically different takes on  being and seeing.

(Cf. "Seeing is believing" -- vs. Berkeley:  Being seen  is being.)

The first and most famous of the epigrams above  applies to the ontology of basic objects, such as coffee-cups -- about which no plain man has any doubts whatsoever.   (Quine's quip  will, however, frequently detain us further;  e.g. here.)

A related but different question  concerns things which, unlike a coffee-cup or its relativistic mass, you cannot directly perceive -- though someone else might.

Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century (2003), vol. I, p. 17, re the views of G.E. Moore:

For things presented in space, but not things to be met with in space, to exist is to be perceived.  That is, afterimages .. and pains  can only exist when they are perceived or experienced.

Or, classically,  “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.

A psychological vice ontological version of Bekeley’s epigram, is the vernacular “Out of sight, out of mind.”  (Cf. French, "Si tu te tais, ni vu ni connu.")  Or, as Fielding wittily put it in Tom Jones,

De non apparentibus, et non existentibus,

eadem est ratio. -- In English, ‘When a woman is not seen to blush, she doth not blush at all.’ 

(Lawfolk interpret this Latin tag more prosaically:  “What is not juridically presented cannot be judicially decided.”   Spoilsports.)

~

A noted intuitionist philosopher, anent “the celebrated [loathsome, leprotic -- ed.] thesis that mathematical statements do not relate to an objective mathematical reality  existing independently of us”, writes that, on such a view, to be is to be conceived:

Unlike material objects,  mathematical objects are, on this thesis, creations of the human mind.  They are objects of thought, not merely in the sense that they can be thought about, but in the sense that their being is to be thought of [or rather, thought into existence -- ed.];  for them, esse est concipi.

-- Michael Dummett,  “ The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic”, in: Truth and other enigmas (1978), p.  228

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The above is really just a placeholder post, reminding me to someday address the deeper problem of observables.   This may never happen.  To begin with, even in the simplest quantum-mechanical case, an observable is an operator on Hilbert space, so you have to wrap your mind around that.  With some luck and some study, that might be doable.  But just now I encountered the following dismaying sentence:

In quantum field theory, unlike in quantum mechanics, position is not an observable.

I may well have retired to my hamster farm, before ever figuring such things out.

In the meantime, some further thoughts about ontology  here.

~

Bonus quote:

  How do you know you’re having fun  if there’s no one watching you have it?

  --Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe (1980).

~

Visitors to the site have enquired about the pronunciation of the classic Latin phrase “esse est percipi”.   About this (although I used to be editor of pronunciation at Merriam-Webster, back in the day) I have so far had nothing to say.  Embarrassed, I messaged my colleague and comrade Dr. Keith Massey (officially out of comms, but reachable in the bush), as follows:

More than once, someone has searched the blog via
   pronounce esse est percipi
-- alas in vain.  In my head, I have always pronounced this pear-KIP-ee, but, given that the vowel is short, the Latin would be more like PEAR-kip-ee, no?
Or rather, the Vulgar Latin, since Latin itself, being quantitative, lacked phonemic lexical stress.  Correct so far?
A second question is how philosophers in various countries pronounce it -- anglicized, frenchified, etc.

Swifter than lightning, our colleague replied:

In classical Latin the C is always pronounced as a K. But we don't know when the thing started to change before E and I. I suspect it was already being realized regionally as something else in the Late Imperial period. And speakers of Latin dialects took to pronouncing their classical Latin as if it were their living register. And so, in France,  percipi was pronounced “persipee”. In Italy perchipee, and in Spanish pershipee (attested still in Ladino) and later, in Iberia as perthipee, and, yet later in the New World, as persipee.

Accent in Latin is a hotly debated topic. I personally follow the view that the classical accent is unknowable and therefore all we have to work from is the living dialects and the rules of Ecclesiastical Latin. And so, penultimate except in a few cases. Accent falls in the syllable before -ibus. But I'd say perCIPee.

As for Anglo-Latin, this is an exciting topic. There's some evidence that a Romance language survived in the Isles for a several centuries after the withdrawal of forces in 380. It apparently, from inscriptional evidence, turned long E into a long I, fecit --> feecit. The way we pronounce phrases like Habeas Corpus may actually be representative of the pronounciation of Anglo-Romance, rather than a later scholastic recasting.

Those further interested in this topic can consult the essay by Thomas Pyles, “The Pronunciation of Latin in English:  A Lexicographical Dilemma”, reprinted in his Selected essays on English usage (1979).  Executive summary:  The history is so tangled, it is now an unresolvable mess.

In his “Tempest in Teapot: Reform in Latin Pronunciation”, reprinted in the same volume, Pyles quotes an amusing epigram that alludes to what became of Latin in Spain, where original v and b merged into a bilabial fricative:

~ Felix natio, ubi vivere est bibere ~

[Variant: "o felix iberia, ubi vivere est bibere"]

For further adventures in pronunciation, click here. 

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Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

Distinguishing discontinuous state-reduction (which he dubs R) from linear evolution as per the Schrödinger equation -- i.e., the “collapse of the wave-function” upon “observation”, a mathematician remarks:

I do not mean to imply that the experimenter deliberately sets up a ‘measurement’ to achieve this.  … Nature herself is continually enacting R-process effects,  without any deliberate intentions on the part of an experimenter or any intervention by a ‘conscious observer’.

-- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 593

Thus achieving the esse of percipi  ‘naturally’ (vacuously).

.

Weasel Words of the Day: “stronger”; “about”.

weasel word [fr. the weasel’s reputed habit of sucking the contents out of an egg  while leaving the shell superficially intact] (1900) :

a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position

-- Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition

Certain terms are, in our society, inherently weasel-words:  pro-life; pro-choice.   Nobody in the debate opposes either “life” or “choice” simpliciter;  to find such factions, you would have to attend a meeting of Death-Eaters (anti-life) or neuroscientists (denying the existence of the faculty of choice -- Free Will).   The resort to these euphemisms  degrades the debate.

For other terms, it’s not so obvious.  Take the expression “Let me be perfectly clear.”   For many people, this phrase seems consumately weasely in itself;  but really, this is only because of its well-known characteristic use by Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, who would typically follow up the phrase  with a lie or an obfuscation.  But such infractions do not inhere in the phrase.   Owing to our long memory of its Nixonian misuse, no-one can any longer say it with a straight face  (a snide version of the phrase, "Read My Lips", similarly fell out of favor owing to a spectacular mishap by Bush senior); but in principle, a straightforward and respectable use exists for it.   At the lower end, it would be just a kind of throat-clearing, giving the reporters time to get out their pencils and lend an ear.   (Note to the new generation: Back in Nixon’s day, reporters used these things called “pencils”.  They’re kind of hard to describe.)  At the highest end, the use of the phrase would follow the following pragmatic conditions.  (Note to the laity:  “Pragmatic” in the linguistic sense of pragmatics, the discourse-related partner of semantics,  rather than in the politician’s sense of “yes this is lame but let’s do it anyway  because anything else could hurt our poll numbers”.)

Conditions of legitimate use:

(1)  What I am about to say is no off-the-cuff throwaway line.  I have thought about what I am about to say, and you are free to quote me; I won’t complain, when the outcry arises, that the remark was “taken out of context” or that “that wasn’t what I meant”.

This licenses the expression’s use in a moral and alethic sense;  so used, it is admirable, statesmanlike.

Then further, at the next meta level up,  there is a pragmatic consideration that licenses the speaker even to use an expression (any expression that make such claims as in (1), not just this one) in the first place:

(2)  I am, by general acknowledgement, in a position of some authority;  I am a person whose words must be well-weighed, as they are likely to be acted upon.

~

We earlier analyzed (and excoriated) certain other weaselly expressions that lately have proliferated weed-like in the public square: as, “Well, again, …”    Here are two more -- neither of them obvious weasels, but which reveal their mustelid nature upon analysis.

(I)  “stronger”

This one looks innocent enough, and most uses of it indeed are.   The instance that caught my attention, on the news broadcast this morning on NPR, was not truly weaselly in the sense of wittingly devious, but it was at best intellectually lazy -- and thus, in the event, reprehensible, since the woman who used it is a prominent newscaster for National Public Radio, and should know better.   The subject was U.S. policy towards Syria, and the newswoman asked her interviewee whether, in his opinion, the U.S. reponse should be “stronger” -- point à la ligne;  no indication of what that might entail.

It is a subtle point, but that move already corrupted the terms of the discussion, by presupposing a linear dimension of assessment, running from weaker to stronger.  There are a very few cases in life where so simple an evaluatory topology may be in place:  say,  “This beam is stronger than that one”.  (Note:  I had to rack my brains to come up with a use that would be semantically impeccable; but even here, you would need to qualify:  Are you speaking of transverse bearing-strength; longitudinal bearing-strength;  resistence to sharp impact, from an impact angle ranging from 0 to 180; resistence to compression; resistance to elongation; resistence to torsion; or what.  You see, even the simplest things  are not so simple).    Such a state of affairs certainly does not obtain in the boiling Syrian cauldron:  not statics but chaos theory would be the relevant quantitative handmaid.

But it is worse than that.  The antonym of “strong” is “weak”, and weak is what no President ever, ever wants to be called -- not simply for political reasons, but for socio-psychoanalytical (the President as the symbolic Father of the Country; weak = impotent:  the worst possible thing for a would-be father to be).  Hence, the subtext or subspin offered by presenting the problem in terms of “stronger” or “weaker” politicies, is simply to provoke unconsidered military action -- “Don't just stand there -- bomb something!”   Such an attitude does indeed characterize the premature-ejaculatory public pronouncements (better some jism that falls to the ground, than not getting it up at all, one supposes) of some Republican Vulcan chickenhawks:  but they know not whereof they speak.

Try this experiment.   Ask one of the Congressional sword-rattlers whether the U.S. should ofter “stronger support to the Syrian Christian community than the Obama administration has been willing to offer”;   you are likely to get a forcefully bellowed “Yes!”  But the principle dividing-line at present, in that fractured and ever-shifting Syrian mosaic, runs between, on the one side, the Asad regime and its allies in the religious minorities, Alawite, Kurd, and … Christian;  and on the other, a hodge-podge of ill-coordinated Sunni Syrian rebels, plus an increasingly potent and more tightly organized and more violent al-Nusrah Front, which is run by al-Qaeda.  So, Senator, just what exactly did you have in mind?

There is nothing wrong with toughness per se;  it is simply a socio-rhetorical fact about America that, frequently, the call to “get tough” is made in blithe independence of the facts on the ground.    Thus, if you maintain that the Obama administration have been panty-waisted pussyfoots in dealing with Iran, you are free to do so;  but intellectually you are in arrears if you do this in ignorance of things like the Stuxnet attack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet), or the affects of our increased sanctions against that steaming, simmering, and suffering land.  To take one item at random from the morning’s news:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-iran-hanging-20130121,0,2907702.story

In Iran, two muggers caught on video are hanged

The death sentences are seen as a get-tough message from Iranian authorities alarmed about escalating street thuggery amid a sanctions-driven economic downturn.

Students of history are familiar with the sometimes unfortunate effects of harsh sanctions, for instance against the Weimar republic, which paved the way for National Socialism.

(II) “about”

A new rhetorical formula has sprung up, now everywhere to be heard on broadcast political discussion (I say “broadcast” because the formula is more characteristic of speech than of writing):  “It’s not about X, it’s about Y.”

There exists, of course,  a perfectly valid use of this formula:  but it crucially depends on what the meaning of “it” is (to coin a phrase).   If, say, It here refers to A Tale of Two Cities, then the following are pragmatically impeccable statements (the first false, the second true):

(i)  It’s not about London and Paris, it’s about Minneapolis and St. Paul.

(ii) It’s not about the Franco-Prussian war, it’s about the French revolution.

Whereas, the characteristic of the new use which we wish here to put beneath the magnifying-glass (and upon the rack), is that now the word “it” … does not actually refer to anything;  it is more like the “expletive” it (again, I use the term expletive in the sense of grammarians, not in that of the Nixon tapes) in expressions like “It’s raining” or “It’s a shame the way things worked out””.    In the latter instance, the “it” is non-referring, but the copula still has some work to do, having the same value as it does in the non-cleft relative  “The way things worked out is a shame.”   Whereas in the new use -- “It’s not about profits, it’s about America” or “It’s not about moving forward, it’s about the environment”  and so forth -- the copula too is emptied of all significance, having (so to speak) nothing left to copulate with.   The resulting formulae mean almost nothing, and are virtually impossible to paraphrase.

The context of this morning’s use -- again from “Weekend Edition” -- was a discussion of the proposal to put armed guards in every school.   (My own alternative proposal, to put an etymologist in every school, did not come up for discussion.)  The person being interviewed said:

“It’s not about romance or drama,

 it’s about protecting our kids.”

Almost nothing else was offered by way of argument;   the above statement was allowed to ring over the airwaves unchallenged, as a genuine argument in the debate.

Now, take out your pencils (ask Gramps what that means) because this is a test:   Does that statement present an argument in favor of the proposal, or against it?  And, in the event that the statement is semantically vacuous, with no “cognitive content” at all,  was it intended, as a rhetorical move, to support or refute the proposal?

[The exciting answer will be revealed tomorrow.   Meanwhile, tell your friends.]

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~ Commercial break ~

Nook lovers are book lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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Footnote:   There is an interesting -- and telling -- meta-pragmatic condition-of-use here, basically opposite to that in (2) above for “Let me be perfectly clear”.  The latter is a Winner’s phrase;  whereas “It’s not about X, it’s about Y” is used either by, or when addressing, subalterns.   The very vacuous semantics and collapse of syntax, dissected above, are badges it wears on its sleeve.   The warrant-for-use condition would go something like this:

(3)  Me’m jist folks here, as are y’all -- never did have much of a head for grammar, or argumentation, or cogency, or exposition -- but b’dang this here thing comes from m’heart!

The kinesic equivalent of the phrase would be a plaintive look from a puppy basset-hound.

[Note on the note:  Another linguistic technical expression.  Kinetic is already a twenty-dollar word, whereas kinesic will setcha back a fitty-bone.

For those fond of words costing upwards of a hundred dollars, click here:

Logophilia. ]

Historical bonus:

Over a century ago, the psychologist and philosopher William James  already adverts to the weaseliness of “about”:

All dumb psychic states have … been coolly suppressed; or, if recognised at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts “about” this object or “about” that,  the stolid word about  engulphing all their delicate idiosyncracies in its monotonous sound.

-- William James, “On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology” (in Mind, 1884)

[Update, 24 January 2013]   This morning, NPR interviewed a woman who was trying to get gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered  covered under the Violence Against Women Act.  Her concluding statement:

"This is not about identity politics; this is about where the unmet needs remain."

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~ Commercial break ~

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

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[Update later that evening]  You needn't listen long to NPR, before being exposed to yet more semantically vacuous tricks of syntax.  Just now, with reference to the Newtown shootings:

"It's the commission's job

to allow victims to be victims."

This echoes the brain-damaged slogan of the '80's, "Let Reagan be Reagan."   It's not a question of weasel words, since any word can be used in this structure, which we dub "Triumphalist Tautalogy".  It's weasel syntax.  Other examples:  "Business is business" (used by someone screwing you); "Boys will be boys" (excusing bad behavior), "War is war" (excusing even worse behavior).

[Meta-update]  I have pondered deeply a wealth of examples of such Sappy Syntax,  and extracted this pearl of wisdom from its oystershell grip:

~  The Meaning of Life  ~

~  is to live  ~

~  a life full of Meaning … ~