The Metaphorical Mind

Meh. It's not Shakespeare.

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:40:05 +0000

From the people who brought you "D'Oh!", we now have "Meh" from The Simpsons entering our lexicon, just a fancy word for dictionary by the way.

Here is a passage from the AP:

[Meh.] The expression of indifference or boredom has gained a place in the Collins English Dictionary after generating a surprising amount of enthusiasm among lexicographers.

Publisher HarperCollins announced Monday the word had been chosen from terms suggested by the public for inclusion in the dictionary's 30th anniversary edition, to be published next year.

The origins of "meh" are murky, but the term grew in popularity after being used in a 2001 episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer suggests a day trip to his children Bart and Lisa.

(It's certainly better than when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles re-popularized "Cowabunga!", which Apple's Spotlight dictionary informs me actually originated from the Howdy Doody Show.)

So it's official: we now have one more word to describe our indifference, apathy, disinterest, malaise, insouciance, and general boredom with doing anything so bold as taking a stand on a position—whether political, economic, scientific, or philosophical. I must say that there's a certain irony to the fact that this news is preferably referred to as "lexical" and not "lexiconical" (or "lexiconal") by my word-processing software. I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much (see below)! I grant that lexiconical doesn't sound as nice as lexical, but what if my blog post is about the state of the whole lexicon moreso than about the state of the words that comprise it? It's rough either way. So which word do I think describes my reaction to the announcement and my inability to type my thoughts on the matter crisply: Ehhhh, "meh". (You saw that coming.)

So what do you think? Ought this word be a word in the dictionary? Shakespeare certainly gets credited with inventing new words in the dictionary. What does it mean for a word to be in the dictionary—to be ‘official' and recognized in the first place? Ought anyone even care what is placed in or left out? Your decision on this matter ought not sink to the level of meh. In fact, divesting one of one's ability "to mean" something with words is cheating one of an understanding of what language is for. Do not leave it in the hands of lexicographers any more than you want bureaucrats in Washington to run your life; or paper-pushers to decide your health coverage instead of doctors; or scientists who study physico-chemical properties of neurotransmitters to tell you what a first kiss feels like or when you're in love. Meaning is not for dictionaries. Life is not the business of bureaucrats and scientists. They are different levels of analysis and significance. Grab a cup of coffee and a poet and you'll have a better shot of getting closer to the issue.

Where do words come from? In some sense, they are merely arbitrary sounds put together. But that seems empty. Different languages certainly sound different and have different sounds for different words, somewhat out of historical contingency, I grant. Different parts of the same country even can have different sounds for the same ‘word'. What interests me is that I think we don't really hear the ‘sounds' of words in normal language use, rather we hear ‘words' themselves, and there is a big difference there. It is this distinction between hearing sounds and hearing words that is at the crux of the issue of whether we ought to care what's in the dictionary. Words have meaning, both in the sense of some matter of discourse but also in our imaginations. They populate our narratives of ourselves and our culture. Words are our meanings. Sounds, however, are more like noise, at the level of an indistinguishable, undifferentiated acoustic stream: a meh of the natural world. One can measure the real, objective properties of this meh, but those tell a very different story than the real lives of the subjects discussed. We do not hear such white noise of sounds when we as young children seem intuitively to open our eyes wider to look for the source of a speaker. We do not hear the sounds "ah+ee+luh+uh+vuh+yuh+oo" on Valentine's Day. Instead, we hear the words, "I love you" and they have meaning.

So does a word get its meaning because of an authority figure or institution bestowing upon that word its meaning from without? Or does a word get its meaning because people agree (implicitly) to use it in a particular way to share a way of living or life? Clearly I think the latter. Words bind us for good and bad because they tell our stories. We do not consult dictionaries to tell us stories; some of the chapters in them are really long! We do not need an official decree for what is meaningful in our language. We know what is valued in the reaction in someone's face when we tell them someone has died or that they've just won the lottery.

Consider this passage from Heidegger's Being and Time: "What we ‘first' hear is never noises or complexes of sounds, but the creaking waggon [sic], the motor-cycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the fire cracking. It requires a very artificial and complicated frame of mind to ‘hear' a ‘pure noise'. (H. 163-164)

The dictionary, for all its "mehs" and otherwise, is a good paperweight, but it is certainly not where I look for meaning.

Palin v. Biden: Rumble in the Lipstick Jungle

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:02:02 +0000

When you look into the eyes of a politician, you hope to see the letters T-R-U-S-T-W-O-R-T-H-Y. (Admittedly, these have to be rather big eyes, so more often that not we're all disappointed.) Politicians in debates, for example, must constantly be vigilant between communicating trustworthiness (whether in policy or personality) and merely communicating that they are a big set of empty eyes staring at headlights.

Tonight's vice presidential debate offers a potential sound bite buffet. You can even structure a responsible adult drinking game around the possibilities. Governor Palin can invoke the equation pitbull + lipstick = hockeymom + Russian neighbor, and we can then all solve for x during gaps of silence on questions about the Supreme Court. Senator Biden can remind us that Senator Clinton would have been an equivalent or better #2 pick than he was and then invoke his un-chamber-of-commerce observation that you are required to have an Indian accent to work at a convenience store; he can then ask a man in a wheel chair to stand up. The vice presidential candidates stand in relief to the generally impressive performances of the first presidential debate. Although the ratings were low compared to recent ones, McCain v. Obama I. spared us a primetime gameshow and offered us something of a lesson on how the country deserves more than a few late semester public cram sessions before an election.

We want our politicians to be honest, but politicians know that we're generally impatient consumers and so over time they have become what they are—some of the best parsers of language. When you listen to a politician, it is less about what they say as what they fail to say, or even think they need to say out loud. Political discourse is a ‘marked' language and, thus, is inherently deceptive because it assumes a certain set of background knowledge. Words in language can be marked or unmarked. An unmarked word functions as a generic, or general, term that encompasses a marked term when doing things like asking questions. If I ask you, "How deep is your pool?" the reply could be for an above-ground pool "Four feet" or for a regular pool "Six feet." "If I ask you, "How shallow is your pool?" I would be implying that we all know you don't have a pool that is very deep at all and, in fact, I am really asking you to specify only one end of the entire depth spectrum (the low one). The same would go for things like asking about someone's height (cf. tall/short are you?) or the length of their hair (long/short is it?). By asking about depth, height, or length, it is assumed that there is a spectrum of possibilities for pools, people, and hair such that they need not be deep or tall or long at all. However, by using marked words like "shallow" or "short", we are specifying a more truncated acceptable range of answers. We bias our responses accordingly.

Political discourse is essentially a language that assumes other statements not stated directly. It seeks the most general so as not to be pinned to any specifics. It is a strategy that keeps you out of trouble while you get to move your mouth and ask questions and respond to the American people, all the while not really saying much at all.

If you're a Democrat, you pounce on Governor Palin with the familiar refrain of "heartbeat from the presidency." This is technically true of all Vice Presidents by line of succession. Its effect as a phrase, however, is predicated on what is not said directly. Senator McCain is old and old people die. Moohaha, you'll really voting for Palin!

What interests me about political discourse is that we all seek statements we want to hear—catchphrases, buzzwords, talking points—that confirm what we already believe; we want to be let in on the secret specifics hidden in the generalities of the political discourse we hear. For example, Republicans and Democrats both look for specific language as to someone's interpretation of the Constitution as it pertains to the appointment of Justices. If you don't support abortion, [in a hushed voice] the password is "originalist". We want to be let in on the secret specifics but do not force politicians to work harder at stating x and stating why not-x (the alternative) is unacceptable. At least indirectly, the first presidential debate offered an examination of contrasting worldviews that moves in the direction. Nowhere, however, did either argue (a) why their VP pick is the best and (b) why the people not chosen were not. It is both arguments that need to be made. Otherwise, we fall prey to selective language, which is often so general as to be a waste. (If you follow politics at all, you have heard plenty of speeches which last 30 minutes and say absolutely nothing.)

There is one example I would like to give which has troubled me for some months. Senator Clinton lost an impressively close Democratic primary to Senator Obama and yet the latter chose Senator Biden, a man who did not go over well with Democratic primary voters in his attempts at the nomination. Why not Senator Clinton? It is all well and good to have praised her during the Democratic convention, mentioning cracks and glass ceilings, as well as the accomplishments of the Clinton years in the White House. Those were the words we heard. It is what is left unsaid in politics that ought still to intrigue us. Arguments were put forth as to why Senator Biden would make an excellent VP: speaks his mind to anyone and everyone (to include a President Obama), family man who rides Amtrak and hails from small town America, foreign policy experience, etc. But as students of psychology know, when it comes to making decisions logically and critically thinking, it is not enough to state the affirmative (Why Biden?), one must also claim why the alternative is inappropriate (Why not Clinton?). There has never been a public account as to why Senator Clinton was not chosen. That Senator Biden has credentials is not questioned. The issue is what disqualified the choice of Senator Clinton.

The game of politics is a subtle strategy of saying or affirming one vague thing after another and sweeping all others under a rug. It is because we often fail as political consumers to dig deeper and press our politicians that we settle for what they feed us. What is necessary for a truly participatory government, however, is not only to accept the tablescraps we are given but to pull up our seat to the table itself and ask, "What else do you have?" I suspect we would discover a few more answers and accountability.

Did Usain Bolt have a Phelpsian Olympics or Phelps a Boltian?

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:25:26 +0000

As the Olympics have drawn to a close, we might well ask with Juliet, “What’s in a name?” What people will likely remember from the Olympics are two singular athletic performances, that of swimmer Michael Phelps and runner Usain Bolt. So, did Usain Bolt have a Phelpsian Olympics or Phelps a Boltian? The potential words Phelpsian and Boltian are examples of eponyms (a linguistic and literary device in which a person’s name can come to symbolize, refer to, or otherwise lend itself to a quality or item.

On NBC’s Olympic coverage, Bob Costas even described Usain Bolt as the “poetically-named Bolt”, in that presumably his speed could be lightning-Boltian speed, but that sounds almost too convenient. What about all the extraordinarily lethargic Bolts out there? More coincidence than poetry, it would seem. For example, is there a prolific writer Jurgen Blog out there (or Jurgen Web Log) who will comment on my entry? It’s like meeting an enlisted man in the US Army named Paul Sergeant and finding out his rank is Sergeant.

Let’s examine what it means to be Phelpsian. It is certainly unhelpful to say that Phelpsian means “of, relating to, resembling, or suggesting American swimmer Michael Phelps (b. 1985)”. It might go as follows:

Phelpsian
Grammatical class:
adjective
Date:
August 2008, Beijing Olympics
1: of, relating to, or aspiring to Olympic greatness, particularly in water, particularly while many people are watching, possibly on a four-year cycle
2: having qualities of strength and endurance, as well as a long torso and protruding ears
3: characterized by incredible, suspenseful finishes in linear races, whether individually or part of a team, especially wearing very tight outfits
4: arguably better than individuals and achievements characterized as Spitzian
5. characterized as once-in-a-lifetime, or every thirty years or so, especially a high-level achievement, especially while breaking records in a pool constructed to break sometimes long-held records
5: relating to a diet consisting of tens of thousands of calories per day
6: someone who looks suspiciously like NFL Giants quarterback Eli Manning, but with better abs

Obviously people’s interpretations will vary and an entire linguistic community can settle on a definition better than I, but eponyms are tricky in that they come to life only from an achievement or quality of a person’s life, and a whole person is quite complicated.

What about other eponyms and their fate? We all know about Freudian slips, and most have some passing knowledge about what those might indicate. Some will reflect on the Faustian ratings decision NBC made to cover a Beijing Olympics without taking advantage of the enormous audience to educate (better, anyway) the world about the darker side of China and communism. Film aficionados understand (though noone completely) what a Tarkovskian cinematic experience is. People can hazard guesses at einsteinium or a newton and have a suspicion about an Amber Alert, the Jarvik artificial heart, or Reaganomics. When I say I’m more of a Lennon-Beatles than a McCartney-Beatles when it comes to music generally, I think that my taste can be gathered by many. But who remembers the individuals behind Dow Jones or Doppler radar (factoid: Philadelphia possesses a Doppler 10,000, which I assume is thousands of times better than your local station); what about Mount Everest or the Stanley Cup? Most of the above still retain the capitalization from the proper name from which they were derived and so the eponymous person is generally still there in a way, but what about bloomers, leotards, and sideburns? People’s achievements or unique qualities can become condensed to a moment of their lives such that the entire person is lost to the usefulness of some arbitrary string of sounds. In a sense, some words behave like gravestones, and noone visits.

What responsibility does one have in using an eponym? Do people even have a right to their own names, and its use? Consider the recent history of Oregonian Samantha Buck, owner of Sam Buck’s coffee shop. She was sued by Starbucks to cease and desist use of her name to the shop she owned. “Sam Buck’s” was too close to the intellectual property of “Starbucks”. Starbucks won that case! I suspect that Kafka would not have appreciated being such an integral part of refrigerator magnetic poetry kits and the resultant ‘poetry’. (By the way, I have a running tally of twelve conversations in which someone used “Kafkaesque” and none of them have been pleasant.) In addition, sometimes words are misleading. My favorite history of psychology text is, of course, the Boring History of Experimental Psychology (Edwin Boring, that is). Also, as an undergraduate psychology major, my favorite definition of culture was authored by Goodenough (pronounced good-ee-know).

So, will others find such a term as Phelpsian or Boltian acceptable and use it beyond this Olympic cycle? Personally, I rather like the sound of Phelpsian (or at least phelpsian). It just sounds pleasant. But even if Phelpsian or Boltian become common, will we remember the actual people Phelps and Bolts, beyond their ties to the words and their usefulness? What does that say about our humanism (or at least our language’s capacity for humanism) to adopt a word based on a person’s name, only to discard later the actual person from our social memory?

I finally got to be a homunculus part II.

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:12:29 +0000

In the previous post of The metaphorical mind, not surprisingly entitled I finally got to be a homunculus part I., I argued that philosophical and psychological theories (and for that matter, commonsensical theories) that appeal to a homunculus to explain how a human being perceives or thinks simply shifts the problem confusingly inwards. The ‘little man’ inside you does not explain how something happens, it only adds an infinite regress problem to one’s account, for there must be a homunculus inside the head of each homunculus to explain its internal workings. Pretty soon, it’s turtles all the way down.

Noone much uses homuncular explanations anymore—at least not explicitly—but its worth bringing up because the thread is present in some neuropsychological accounts of psychological functioning: Brain explains mind, and so the mystery stops there at the ‘science’ of the brain. As I noted, however, one flaw of appealing to homunculi, known as the mereological fallacy (in which parts are inappropriately afforded properties of the whole) applies to some neuroscientific accounts. After all, what perceives and thinks about the world is an organism, not a homunculus or brain. Brains are a necessary part of the story, but not a complete story. There are no brains in vats in which the ‘person’ is living inside their brain unaware they are trapped. (Think how odd that is: a person is completely turned inside-out and then shrunk so that the whole person is trapped in a part of the originally whole person. Unless you believe in the Tartus in Dr. Who or take Danielewski’s House of Leaves way too seriously, insides and parts of wholes are generally smaller than the wholes they came from).

Paraphrasing from the last blog, what is remarkable in all of this is that to understand ourselves better we have resorted to inventing a copy of ourselves inside ourselves. So how did I get to be a homunculus, and what did I learn? Interestingly, I shrank myself—in a way—and starting thinking about how we have come to invent ourselves outside of ourselves as well as inside.

I fuzzily recall an English teacher once telling me that the house in Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher resembled a human head and face. Whether accurate or not, the idea of two windows as eyes and a door for a mouth or picket-fence teeth has intrigued me as a way of describing and establishing fictional characters. A physical structure like a building ages and, yet, despite perhaps remarkable changes over time to its once youthful vibrancy, there is a stability and permanence to its identity. The parallel between buildings and human beings fascinates me. For example, haunted houses become resolute main characters in stories (and more than mere settings) when they can reflect a certain way in which we think about our own psyches. Even in architecture, then, our own best model is ourselves as physical and psychological creatures. We find a home and are at home in a dwelling that resembles us. Some people are log cabins; some people are lofts.

Bioethicist Paul Wolpe, in a public talk he gave at the University of Pennsylvania this summer, offered an instructive metaphor regarding brain imaging. He likened the fancily-lit brain activation pictures to aerial photographs of buildings at night. One could see with some degree of certainty lights in certain buildings—whether they were on or off—and so could localize certain activities or where the little people might be. The limitation, of course, is that no pilot overhead could tell why these little people were doing anything at all or even whether or not any little people were in the room at the time pictures were taken. It’s all just lights. (I should hasten to add that some things generally go on in rooms with the lights off.) Brain imaging reveals a where but not a what’s-it-like (lights on or off). These little people in buildings are not unlike homunculi in a way.

In a certain sense, the little people are controlling the lights in their rooms, pushing buttons and riding their elevators up and down, cruising their cars down main streets flashing their highbeams, etc. Each of these little people controls a part of their world and intertwined, it is as if the rooms, whole buildings, and even the city has sprung to life. Watch a time-lapse video of a major city block and it will seem like that at this newly calibrated time scale one starts to relate to the heartbeat of a city. Indeed, only so long as there are people willing to light up the buildings and streets, there can be a city that never sleeps.

Understanding being a part of a whole this big is a rare opportunity, in the sense that a person can feel pretty miniscule and unimportant to a whole city or even the goings-on of a single building. (Just think about the existential crisis of being one person on a little blue planet in the vastness of the universe.) But I recently had the opportunity to control a whole building with my fingertips in a way that did not feel like I was a just a cog in a massive city-shaped organism, but a homunculus (who stood in line with other would-be homunculi) to be in control of a massive physical structure.

What I had the good fortune of attending was the exhibit, “Playing the Building”, which runs until late August, at the Battery Maritime Building in New York City. (If you would like to learn more about the exhibit, attend it, or see video of it, click here.) The Manhattan exhibit is the creation of musician and artist David Byrne. The set-up is simple, but the implications are fascinating for one inclined to think a free afternoon (admission is actually free) can have philosophical import. A souvenir poster is only a dollar.

I found myself sitting at an old organ keyboard, to which was attached many cables that disappear to the far away parts of the building. It looked almost like the keyboard was a marionette and the building its puppeteer, but with me sitting there, it was quite the reverse. Pressing down on the black and white keys, there were the sounds of hammers striking radiators; air fed through water pipes sounded like ethereal flutes. The deep resonance of vibrating girders and posts sounded like Tibetan chants. Music was all around me and with each new note I played I looked for where the music was coming from this time. The music was defining the space. Amazingly, the keys in a modest sense indicated a scale of notes so that I could compose a bit. I was controlling the organs of a great body from within.

Let’s ignore the philosophical complication that I was actually playing a duet with a good friend, for the feeling was fascinatingly like what I imagine a homunculus would experience. Unfortunately, the feeling was short-lived. The more I played, the more the building did not feel alive. Instead, the more I played the more I became invested in the building. The music was my music, not the building’s. I extended my intentions through the goings-on of the building—its vibrating and hammering. The building was not a separate body of parts controlled by me. The building became an extension of me as musician just as a blind man extends his perception through a cane or a person feels the road through the tires of a car. The building would cease its life—as it were—the moment I stopped playing notes. The more I played, the more it became clear that I was not really a homunculus controlling a building (no matter how complicated a building could be imagined in the future, whatever the bells and whistles). The building was only alive when people were playing it, and it was only alive because the people were so inclined to share such life and experience.

I am reminded of a quote attributed to von Uexkull by Buytendijk (cited in the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of behavior): “Every organism is a melody that sings itself.” (Merleau-Ponty, himself, says something similar in his Phenomenology of Perception.) As I have mentioned, what is remarkable in the homuncular language philosophers and psychologists use to explain perceptual and cognitive experiences is the need to invent something other than ourselves to understand ourselves. We search outside and appeal to gods or inside and appeal to homunculi or brains, instead of confronting ourselves as a totality.

To understand the whole of human psychology, one cannot get lost in the inside/outside, internal/external, mind/body, innate/learning, genes/culture dichotomies of language. To choose between is to lose. What was important about the “Playing the Building” exhibit was neither me sitting at the organ’s keyboard nor the building itself. The building and I were both necessary components, of course, but what was important was respecting and acknowledging the brief life of the notes played, as well as taking note of those who heard the music and decided to play their own.

I finally got to be a homunculus part I.

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:15:32 +0000

Some children hope to grow up to be firemen, policemen, or astronauts. Some believe that being a pirate will be an acceptable vocation given a shift in global markets. Others altogether see a future in pinball wizardry. And then still others grow up and realize they can become homunculi.

In the past three posts on this blog—Metaphor, metaphor! Wherefore art thou, Metaphor? and When AT&T asked us to ‘Reach out and touch someone’, did they mean that literally? and Race, language, black holes—I have argued that language can reveal more about how we think and in particular how we think about ourselves than is customarily believed. Homunculi (the plural of homunculus) provide an interesting example in philosophical and psychological discourse as to how we characterize ourselves.

A homunculus is essentially ‘a little man’ inside you, the agent behind your actions, the decider behind your decisions, the see-er behind your sight. Think of the so-called Cartesian theater inside your mind. All of your thoughts enter stage right, perform, and exit stage left. But who’s doing the seeing, considering, evaluating, etc. of these thoughts if they’re inside you? Not you! It’s the homunculus inside you, of course, who is the audience to this private mental show. The problem with homunculi is not so much their presence (as something inside you making decisions) as the fact that you need a homunculus inside a homunculus ad infinitum. Each smaller homunculus does the seeing, considering, evaluating for the previous one, but no matter how small you get, you need another homunculus. After all, who’s inside the homunculus’ head but another homunculus?

It is rather remarkable, then, when one considers the very odd theoretical maneuver in which to understand ourselves better we feel it is felt necessary to invent a copy of ourselves inside ourselves. This shifts the problem, but doesn’t eliminate our identity issues as the complex thinking-things we are.

The very idea that there is a little imaginary person inside you might strike someone as odd—your faith in your inner child notwithstanding. But the general idea is not unique to psychology or philosophy. For example, as noted by theorists of biology like Richard Lewontin and Susan Oyama, preformationists had similar explanatory concepts (e.g., there is a little human being inside each single spermatozoa, which then grows and later becomes a complete human being, thus making a mother little more than a glorified receptacle and incubator and masturbation with ejaculation sinful mass murder).

Thus, homunculi play the general role of origin, and though generally now considered to be anathema in any account of consciousness, perception, or cognition, they quite frankly are still implicitly present in many theories, despite explicit avows to the contrary. Consider a model of a homunculus based on topographical representations of the body in the brain. It likely does not strike you as a self-portrait. The large hands and lips of the homunculus indicate that the brain devotes more resources to these areas of the body (which is why passionate Friday nights tend toward kissing and touching and not knee-on-knee titillation). It is as if the brain represents us in a distorted miniature form inside us. If one wished to stretch this uncomfortably, on this account, it is logically possible to represent a body in a brain, copy that representation, destroy that body (and brain for that matter) and replace it with a robot or complicated array of sensors such that the brain (or the copy of its representations) would never be wise to anything changing extra-cranially. You could be locked inside your brain and not know it. [Insert Matrix soundtrack now.]

The problem with some neuroscientific and homunculus-driven accounts of psychological processes like consciousness or cognition is that they fall prey to a particular fallacy, namely the mereological fallacy (i.e., relating to part-whole relations). Bennett and Hacker in their Philosophical foundations of neuroscience put it thus: “The brain is not a logically appropriate subject for psychological predicates” [italics in original] (p. 72). What applies to wholes (like human beings) does not necessarily apply to the parts of those wholes (like brains or homunculi). Thus, it does not make any sense to say brains think or see or decide or that homunculi inside people consider or evaluate or perceive. (It’s so difficult in our language even that in the previous paragraph I had to submit to its communicative power to get my point across.) Parts are necessary for the wholes to do what they do, but they are not themselves sufficiently capable of doing what wholes do. In other words, that I as a human being think does not mean that my foot also has the ability to think (or not-think); in fact, it’s simply inappropriate to consider it one way or the other. And so we rightly do not hold fingers criminally responsible for something that is the actions of the whole. (Imagine sending a trigger finger to jail and letting the rest of a person go free.)

But concerning childhood dreams to become a homunculus and what I learned about human beings from this experience, please come back for part II of I finally got to be a homunculus.

Race, language, black holes

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:22:12 +0000

One could be forgiven for thinking that the title of this blog post sounds like a transcript to a bewildering game of word association. I wish it were.

In my first post, Metaphor, metaphor! Wherefore art thou, Metaphor? I discussed the penchant of psychology and cognitive science (which includes philosophy and linguistics) to pay more attention (both in terms of their research output and theoretical emphasis) to literal language, at the expense of the more poetic features of the human mind. Indeed the study of poetry, metaphors, and creativity is a negligible portion of the above fields, much to the dismay of those who in fact study it. In the second post, When AT&T asked us to ‘Reach out and touch someone’, did they mean that literally? I discussed the nature of a specific metaphor (‘touch’) with respect to technology and human social psychology, in hopes of giving a ‘tangible’ example of the ubiquity of metaphor in our language and what it can reveal were one willing to ‘embrace’ the importance of its closer inspection.

The subtitle to my Psychology Today blog is “What our language reveals about how we think and who we are”. I pointed out in the last post that language reveals the fundamental social nature of human beings. In a sense, this post is an extension of that idea.

Language fulfills a promise, in which we all commit to certain words meaning certain things. When I hear English, for example, there is something about it that unites me to a person such that if I were told to “Go bleep myself” by that person, I would be offended, but only to the extent that I knew the language being spoken was a language (called English) and the nature of said bleeping—and what it could do to me should I undertake such bleeping myself, as instructed. Language reveals our social bonds and how they are susceptible to breaking, as well as giving us the lessons of those feelings of loss when we are betrayed or insulted. Words are powerful, but only inasmuch as they are part of something bigger.

Indeed, for all I know, last night when I walked down the block to throw away the garbage, every cricket could have been mocking me and my shorts, telling me to “Go bleep myself”. Thankfully, their ‘language’ does not instill in me an inter-species bond in need of recognition and so I felt no friendship or prospect of loss, irrespective of whether or not their chirps were mocking me.

The real-life inspiration for revisiting the social nature of language in this post was unexpectedly and disappointingly available this past week as an example of when a community of speakers breaks down and the poisonous and tragic consequences that follow such a breach of trust. Consider the following, from the July 7, 2008 City Hall blog, providing a recap of a special meeting of county commissioners (original source available here):

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon.

County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts.

Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.

Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole."

That prompted Judge Thomas Jones, who is black, to demand an apology from Mayfield for his racially insensitive analogy.

Mayfield shot back that it was a figure of speech and a science term. A black hole, according to Webster's, is perhaps "the invisible remains of a collapsed star, with an intense gravitational field from which neither light nor matter can escape."

Other county officials quickly interceded to break it up and get the meeting back on track. TV news cameras were rolling, after all.

Video of the exchange can be found here.

The first time I read this, I took Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield’s appeal that a black hole was “a figure of speech and a science term” to be a sort of flailing apology. I thought: It’s a science term, end of story; there was no figure of speech to be misunderstood. There is no need for an apology. It actually didn’t dawn on me right away that the scientific term “black hole” was quite obviously named in a figurative way when coined. What caught me off-guard was that someone in 2008 took black-ness and hole-ness figuratively in order to create something negative, something racially insensitive and incendiary, when I read the term as quite ‘literal’, in that it had a technical, official scientific meaning. Why would someone opt for a more 'poetic' construction?

When a speaker in a linguistic community can no longer trust the bonds formed by sharing a set of words with another speaker, they both begin to speak different languages and begin to become different peoples.

So what does this example of our language reveal about how we think and who we are as a people? It underscores the power of language, first of all—its lure and potency and how one can get unwittingly lost in that world of arbitrary symbols and sounds and forget the world of flesh-and-bone people. But it reminds me of a lesson from Martin Luther King, Jr., (paraphrasing): Let us not judge a person by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Let us not also get lost in unfounded interpretations of words that serve only to divide. I don’t know Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, but there would seem to be no reason to judge his words ill-of-character and certainly no reason to judge him by the colors he uses in his words or for someone with a different skin color to see the worst possibilities in his words.

(Race, language, and black holes was prompted originally by Eric Berger’s science blog at the Houston Chronicle, and I am thankful he chose to report this incident, though I am discouraged that what he reported even occurred.)

When AT&T asked us to ‘Reach out and touch someone’, did they mean that literally?

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:55:45 +0000

In the 80s, AT&T urged people—metaphorically—to ‘reach out and touch someone’ with their telephone service. (A literal suggestion to do so would have been baffling and possibly criminal.) So what did this metaphor of contact evoke exactly, and why was it so effective a tag-line? Telephones have always defied the distances society has created through migration, colonization, and urbanization—a magic that can now seem ordinary. Telephones allow a grandmother to speak to her grandson she has never seen and a daughter to ask her father for college money. Even if only in an illusory or metaphorical sense, a telephone can bring people—the anonymity of a conference call notwithstanding—‘closer’ together, as if they were in the same room sharing a moment as a family, the subjective space shrinking without regard to the objective distance maintained.

What about today’s ubiquitous cell phone? It can be a surreal sight to turn a corner on a street and see a wall of people—without exception—on their cell phones coming toward you. It can be an unsettling sight altogether to see someone shout at a pocket of empty space, before noticing he or she is using a hands-free device. Is everyone speaking to their grandmother or asking for money over long distances? Further, what is the need in society for this immediacy in which the time between statement and response becomes shorter and shorter? People have no conception any longer of correspondence by letter and the anticipation of a reply.

AT&T’s campaign was, of course, during the pre-historic time before cell phones, let alone the more literal reach-out-and-touch-your-iPhone interface. It is interesting to note, however, that the encouragement to ‘reach out and touch someone’ can be regarded now as almost more of an admonition against the very use of the cell phone itself. Stop talking on your cell phone and ‘literally’ go reach out and touch someone. I once had a professor in an introductory sociology course practically lament the passing of the days of letter-writing and in apocalyptic overtones note how the cell phone was keeping people from speaking face to face any longer. I can remember thinking he was old and ‘out of touch’. Flash forward a Ph.D. later and I don’t accept text messages and would prefer students just to see me after class.

In a recent issue of the journal Nature it was reported that people using cell phones are predictable in their movement patterns. It turns out that even with the technology to span the globe in search of adventure and still be subjectively near someone at a moment’s notice (depending on your willingness to accept roaming charges) we are not going anywhere too far from each other. We like the social routine of contact and known places.

It seems there is a certain ambivalence we feel toward modern technologies upon which the AT&T metaphor was ‘touching’. Freud even noted in Civilization and its Discontents that

“If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him.”

We use technologies so that we may be closer to those for whom we most care and we use them so that we may keep our distance from those we cannot or will not yet face. It is in this ambivalence that our language and metaphors seek some expression.

The contrast between ‘reaching out and touching someone’ and reaching out and touching someone reveals something more than simply our use of metaphors or so-called literal language: it reveals who we are as human beings. The kind of psychology necessary to understand us as human beings is one that does not smooth over our paradoxical beliefs and behaviors as if our mind were merely a mirror of a straightforward and less-than-metaphorical nature. Human beings are complicated and psychology ought to be more so than what textbooks present.

In one sense, one can regard language and metaphor as the making publicly observable of one’s private observations. It is a blurring of boundaries of sorts. This is a blog by someone whom you have not met. I doubt it will ever prove ‘touching’ in some overly sentimental sense of that word, but it is certainly true that even though we are no closer to each other than strangers, these words have brought us together for a short while. What language in general and a metaphor like ‘reaching out and touching someone’ in particular reveals is that—despite our seemingly paradoxical search for personal identity and individuality, as well as our insistence on privacy—we seek each other out. All psychology is inherently and constitutively a social psychology.

Metaphor, metaphor! Wherefore art thou, Metaphor?

Christopher H. Ramey, Ph.D. — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:12:15 +0000

Historically, metaphors and figurative language have been ignored as a serious topic of study in psychology and philosophy, exiled to the land of rhetoricians or literary analysts. In fact, even in those realms (normally housed in a different part of a college campus than where the ‘scientists' are) so-called ‘proper' language use and its study was for quite some time only about the literal communication of facts about the world: Don't embellish. Just the facts. Call it like you see it, not like you imagine it to be. To do otherwise was to corrupt the minds and distort reality. This corruptive opinion of metaphors and figurative language is vividly seen in Locke's An essay concerning human understanding:

But yet, if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where Truth and Knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the Language or Person that makes use of them.

Those would be called fighting words. This restrictive view of language and its effect has been profound for our understanding about ourselves and the mind in the West.

I have always been concerned about my discipline's bias: that sentences like "Juliet is the sun" are studied far less often than "John and Mary went for a picnic". I have nothing against John or Mary—though I've heard things—but there is something more revealing about humanity in identifying one Juliet with the sun than simply communicating straightforward information.

Future entries on this blog will explore various modern and historical metaphors (within psychology and without), as well other examples of figurative language and their implications. For now, I would like to provide a specific example of how my field has largely looked the other way when it comes to more figurative uses of language.

Consider linguist Noam Chomsky's famous example sentence: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." What was it supposed to demonstrate? If you read the sentence aloud, you'll notice the flow of it. It sounds like English—in a way. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." It's much different than "Ideas colorless sleep green furiously." You probably noticed how you slowed down for that one. CGISF reveals how semantics (what words mean) and syntax (the grammatical relationships among and between words, or how nouns do verby things in adverbial ways) can dissociate. CGISF is grammatical and syntactically correct, whereas ICSGF is not. Both, however, are literally nonsensical and, thus, their semantics are off. For Chomsky and others, syntax (the way stuff goes together, regardless of the stuff) becomes key to understanding the mind.

If you're like me, however, when you say, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," there is something meaningful about it, and that's important. It sounds like poetry, whereas "Ideas colorless sleep green furiously" sounds like gibberish. It seems wrong to ignore the poetic when we find it.

Since the mid twentieth century, when modern cognitive scientists in psychology, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and robotics started to think about the mind as syntax and grammar (think of your PC computer crashing as the result of an ungrammatical sentence creating a meltdown in your most persnickety English instructor), it left out the poetic, the imaginative, the emotive, the sexual, etc. It seemed to leave out a good bit of what is great.

Through this blog and your comments, I hope to examine language in all its glory and I hope that my analyses and comments on language don't feel like an elementary school grammar lesson.

If you spot a good recent metaphor or have a favorite, please send it my way!