Picture Post #76 Ancient Salt Marshes

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be

neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

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Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Remains of Cape Town's Salt Marshes (Thomas Scarborough, 2022)

In Cape Town, there are everywhere reminders of the Holocene ‘transgression’ which peaked around 3400 BC. At that time, most of the area on which the city now stands was invaded by sea and salt marshes. Then the sea retreated once more.

 

However, in this picture, railway lines, separating Cape Town’s suburbs of Milnerton and Rugby, reveal the remains of ancient marshes on either side of the tracks. One finds patches of these marshes all over: along freeways, on undeveloped properties, and surrounding remaining wetlands, in particular. Once one is aware of them, they seem to be everywhere. They are older than history, so often undervalued, and yet they are still among us.

The image reminds us us that another kind of history surrounds us everywhere. This is cultural history. I think in particular of the culture of thought. Richard Feynman once said, ‘History is fundamentally irrelevant.’ But is it? Where did today’s thoughts come from? Why? How much more would we better understand, if we were aware of the ancient remains among us?

Theological Self-Assembly

by Thomas Scarborough

The Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner wrote, ‘World-views may be grouped in pairs.’ His original word for ‘pairs’ was Gegensatzpaare—pairs of opposites.

We see this in every dictionary of philosophy: realism vs. anti-realism, theism vs. atheism, altruism vs. egoism, and so on. Brunner himself provided these examples: materialism–idealism, pantheism–deism, rationalism–sensualism, dogmatism–scepticism, and monism–dualism (pluralism).

When Brunner made this observation, in 1937, on the face of it he could have meant two things. He could have meant that truth will always have its opposite—or that world-views are merely manifestations of our dualistic thinking. That is, they are mere phenomena, which have little if anything to do with the merits or demerits of the world-views themselves.

In fact Brunner meant the former—namely, that truth will always have its opposite—yet with an interesting twist. All of our world-views are untrue, he wrote, while faith is true: ‘If faith is lacking, a world-viewis necessary.’ Further, world-views are theoretical, while faith is responsible. ‘We understand existence from the point of view of responsibility.’ Faith, therefore, belongs to a category all of its own, far from the realm of world-views.

This raises a thousand questions. Is this not intellectual suicide? Are world-views a true opposite of faith? Are world-views without responsibility? Do they not drive our actions in every case? And if faith is not about world-views, on what does one ground it? Of course, there is the question of definitions, too. How does one definefaith, and world-views? *

More than this, however, Brunner apparently did not see that grouping world-views in pairs of opposites is especially theological. Theologians themselves are past masters at it. The language of personal salvation suppresses the language of social commitment; the language of community excludes the language of justification by faith; the language of religious values marginalises the language of the glory of God, and so on, and vice versa.

In theology, we find pairs of opposites such as liberalism–conservatism, immanence–transcendence, legalism–antinomianism, premillennialism–postmillennialism, and so on. These are not peripheral doctrines, but belong to theology’s core, and demonstrate that theological language has a natural, powerful tendency to exclude other theological concepts.

Brunner himself was aware that the separation of faith and world-views could be problematic. He wrote, ‘Can we, for instance, understand the spirit without ideas, norms, values, laws of thought, logos?… There can never be any question of depreciating the reason, of hostility to reason, or of setting up a plea for irrationalism.’ Yet in that case, how may one interpret world-views as opposites of faith?

Theologians generally explain theological opposites in terms of the one-sidedness of their opponents—alternatively, they hold that their opponents are just plain wrong, or even apostate. Yet what if we simply have a natural tendency to generate pairs of opposites, regardless of truth?

It seems much like the honey-bee that remarks to another honey-bee that their colony has developed a most marvellous system: the exquisite selection of nectars and pollens, navigational skills second to none, with storage most wonderfully engineered. The other bee observes that the same is true, in fact, for all bees in every part of the world, over all of the known history of bees.

There is a powerful case in philosophy, not so much for our tendency to generate pairs of opposites, as our inability not to. The philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege described it as ‘the rule of words over the human mind.’ The literary critic and philosopher George Steiner wrote, ‘It is language that speaks, not, or not primordially, man.’ And the linguists Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen wrote, ‘We are thoroughly dominated by an unacknowledged metaphysics.’

That is, we are not free to think as we please. Whatever we turn out is the result of the dictatorship of ideas over the human mind—and over good sense, we might add. If this is the case in theology, then we have a theological crisis. Our cherished beliefs are merely the product of something more powerful than us, which holds us in its grip. How, then, to escape?

With our increasing awareness of various kinds of opposites—markedness, priority thoughts, term weighting, and otherness--among other things—it seems time that theologians should ask what is going on. For what reason are major concepts, both philosophical and theological, grouped in pairs of opposites? Is it, as is usually held, that some are true and others not? Is it that faith belongs to a category all of its own?

Or could it be that theological tenets of various kinds simply self-assemble?

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* Emil Brunner is difficult to interpret, perhaps due to no fault of interpreters. A seminal statement of his: ‘Our nous therefore is the vessel but not the source of the Word of God. Where it receives the Word of God it is called : faith.’ Bearing in mind that Brunner is not so much the subject here as Gegensatzpaare.

A Scientific Method of Holism

by Thomas O. Scarborough

Holistic thinking is much to be desired. It makes us more rounded, more balanced, and more skilled in every sphere, whether practical, structural, moral, intellectual, physical, emotional, or spiritual.

Yet how may we attain it?

Is holism something that we may merely hope for, merely aspire to, as we make our own best way forward—or is there a scientific method of pursuing it? Happily, yes, there is a scientific method of holism, although it is little known.

The video clip above, of 11 March 2022, gives us a classic example of the method—or rather, of one of its aspects. Here, CNN interviewer Alex Marquardt asks (so called) oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ‘Do they have any influence, these oligarchs ... any pressure, any sway, that they can put on President Putin?’

Khodorkovsky replies, ‘They cannot influence him. However, he can use them as a tool of influence, to influence the West.’

Notice, firstly, that the interviewer’s question is limited to the possibility of oligarchs influencing President Putin. It does not appear to cross his mind that influence could have another direction.

Khodorkovsky therefore brings a directional opposite into play, to reveal something that the interviewer does not see. In this way, he greatly expands our undertstanding of the situation. Khodorkovsky could have measured his answer to the question—'Do they have any influence ... on President Putin?’—but he did not. Instantly, he thought more holistically.

In linguistics, a directional opposite is one of several types of opposite—sometimes called oppositions. Directional opposites represent opposite directions on an axis: I influence you, you influence me; this goes up, that goes down, and so on. 

Two more familiar types of opposite are the antonym, which represents opposite extremes on a scale: that house is big, this house is small; we could seek war, we could seek peace. Then, there are heteronyms,* which represent alternatives within a given domain: Monday comes before Tuesday, which comes before Wednesday; we could travel by car, by boat, or by plane.

How then may we apply these types of opposite? 

In any given situation, we may examine the words which we use to describe it. Then we may search for their directional opposites, antonyms, heteronyms**—to consider how these may complement or expand the thoughts which we have thought so far.

As observed in the video clip above, this is not merely ‘semantics’. It genuinely opens up other possibilities to our thinking, and leads us into a greater holism. This applies in a multitude of fields, whether, for example, researching a subject, crafting an object, pursuing a goal, or solving a personal dilemma.

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* Heteronyms may be variously defined. The linguist Sebastian Löbner defines them as 'members of a set'. This is how I define them here.
** One may add, in particular, complementaries and converses.

Hope Against Hope

Thomas Scarborough. After the Veldfire.

By Thomas Scarborough

There are better things to look forward to.  That is what hope is about.  I hope to be happy.  I hope to be well.  I hope to succeed.  Even through struggle and strife, I hope for it all to be worthwhile.  The philosopher Immanuel Kant put it simply, ‘All hope concerns happiness.’ 

But wait, said the ancient Greek philosophers.  On what does one base such hope?  Hope is 'empty', wrote Solon. ‘Mindless’, wrote Plato.  Then the Roman philosopher Seneca saw the dark side, which has cast a shadow over hope ever since.  Hope and fear, he wrote, ‘march in unison like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to. Fear keeps pace with hope.’

The standard account of hope is this: the object of hope must be uncertain, and a person must wish for it—and here is the trouble with hope.  There is not much about hope that is rational.  We have no sound reason to believe it is justified.  It is clear that one’s hopes may not come true.

Why then hope?  Even when hopes are fulfilled—if they are fulfilled—the journey often involves struggle, and heartache, and not a little luck.  And when I have been through all that, I may well have to go through it all again.  Another goal, another relationship. How often?  At what cost?  Often enough, our hopes, once realised, may still disappoint.  They so often leave us with less to hope for than we had before.

There is a psychological problem, too.  It is called the ‘problem of action’.  Today few disagree that, most basically, I am motivated to act when I hold up the world in my mind to the world itself, and there discover a disjoint between the two.  To put it another way, we are motivated by mental models.

Yet the opposite is true, too.  Just as a disjoint between expectation and reality motivates me, so a lack of such disjoint demotivates me.  It may potentially remove any motivation at all.  We cannot go on with a view of the world which is born of the world itself.

There is a hope, observed the philosopher Roe Fremstedal, which occurs spontaneously in youth, yet is often disappointed in time.  Many start out in life with high hopes, pleasant dreams, and enthusiasm to spare.  But as we progress through life, disillusionment sets in.  And disillusionment, presumably, means coming to see things for what they are.  The disjoint is lost.

And then, death. What kind of hope can overcome death?  Death destroys everything.  An anonymous poet wrote,

Nothing remains but decline,
Nothing but age and decay.

Someone might object.  ‘This is seeing the glass half empty.  Why not see it half full?’  But put it like this.  There is certainly no greater reason to hope than there is to fear or despair.

Is there hope for me?  Is there hope for my environment?  For society?  History?  The universe?  I side with the ancient Greeks.  They had the courage to tell it like it is.  Hope as we generally know it is mere deception and superstition.  ‘Hope,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.’

When I was at school, we sang a song.  To schoolboys at the time, it seemed like a statement of boundless optimism and cheer.  Titled ‘The Impossible Dream’, it came from a Broadway musical of 1965—and it closes with these words:

Yes, and I'll reach
The unreachable star!

It seems hard to tell now whether the songwriter was sincere.  Some say that the striving which the words represent is more important than the words themselves.  Some say the songwriter was characterising his starry-eyed younger self.  More likely, it seems, he was raving against a contradictory universe, in a nonsensical song.

People have tried in various ways to get around the problems of hope.  We should best project our hopes onto something else, they say: society, history, eternity.  Some have said that hope just happens—so let it happen.  Some have said that we should quell our hopes—which might work if our minds did not transcend time.  Lately, hope tends to be studied as a mere phenomenon: this is how we define it; this is what it does.

The only way to hope in this life, wrote the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, is to ‘relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good’.  In fact, ‘at every moment always,’ he wrote, ‘one should hope all things’.  We hope, because there are all good things to look forward to, always.*

If this is to be true, there is one necessary condition.  All of our present actions, and all events, must serve our good and happiness.  Even our greatest disappointments, our greatest causes for despair—even death itself—must be interpreted as hope and be grounded in hope.  True hope cannot be conditional, as the Greeks rightly saw.

What guarantees such hope?  The theologian Stephen Travis wrote, ‘To hope means to look forward expectantly for God’s future activity’.  This de-objectifies hope—it relativises it, because God's activity cannot be known—and it provides the translation of fear and despair, to hope.  Yet even without bringing God into it, there would have to be something that translates fear and despair.  The only challenge that remains is to identify it and appropriate it.

Whatever comes my way—everything that comes my way—is something to be hoped for, not because I hope according to the standard account, but because I have an unconditional hope.  We call it ‘hope against hope’.

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* Note, however, that there is a more existential possibility. If I have an unconditional hope which is, as it were, already fulfilled in the present—the present already representing 'all good things'—then I may expect the same of the future.  This overcomes the notion that hope it too future-orientated.

Picture Post #52 - The Township

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Hastily boarded-up window 
at New Rest, in South Africa's Eastern Cape

It is hard to know where to begin, describing the township here.

Many houses, the doors or windows have been taken. Including the neighbour's, twice. Severely damaged through crime, he put in reinforced concrete frames. It did no good. They made off with his ceiling, plumbing, and much of the plaster, too. Every second house, broken glass is replaced with broken boards, carpet tiles, plastic.

A resident came round yesterday. Someone tried to batter down his door, he said, when he was in bed. The door was ruined, but they didn't get in. He armed himself. Then a sergeant came round. If they found someone dead on his floor, he said, he would go straight to jail. My host sleeps with a loaded rifle next to his bed.

A few nights ago, criminals mounted a vast raid on a group of townships, including this one. I had two locks on my car damaged. A friend had a window smashed, too. The same day, in front of me, a man flew off a pickup truck which swerved recklessly to avoid potholes, and those are filled with water from broken pipes. He hit the tar at speed, and lay motionless in a storm gutter. I was the only one to help him, and was astonished that he could (slowly) get up, although he was bloodied all over.

Plastic waste tumbles down the hillsides, and recently carved ravines scar the earth. People are gaunt, their teeth are out, their clothes are ragged. Even the neighbour came begging for bread.

God: a New Argument from Design

The game of our universe does not reveal sameness

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The venerable ‘argument from design’ proposes that the creation reveals a Creator. More than this, that the creation reveals the power and glory of God. Isaac Newton was one among many who believed it—stating in an appendix to his 1637 Principia or Principles of Mathematics:

‘This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.’

The trouble is, there are alternative explanations for design—in fact complete, coherent explanations. To put it in a nutshell, there are other ways that order and design can come about. So, today, the argument is often said to be inconclusive. The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, writes that it is ‘unanswerable'—which is not to say, however, that it is disproven.

Yet suppose that we push the whole argument back—back beyond all talk of power and glory—back beyond the simplest conceptions of design, to a core, a point of ‘ground zero'. Here we find the first and most basic characteristic of design: it is more than chaos or, alternatively, it is more than featurelessness.

On the surface of it, our universe ought to be only one or the other. Our universe is governed by laws which ought not to produce any more than chaos on the one hand, or featurelessness on the other. We might use the analogy of a chess game, although the analogy only goes so far.* A careful observer of a chess match reports that the entire game is governed by rules, and there is no departure from such rules.

Yet there is clearly, at the same time, something happening in the game at a different level. Games get won, and games get lost, and games play out in different ways each time. There is something beyond the laws. We may even infer that there is intelligence behind each game – but let us not rush to go that far.

However, without seeing the players, one could assume that they must exist—or something which resembles them. To put it as basically as we can: the game lacks sameness from game to game—whether this be the sameness of chaos or the sameness of featurelessness. Something else is happening there. Now apply this to our universe. We ought to see complete chaos, or we ought to see complete featurelessness. We ought not to see asymmetry or diversity, or anything of that sort—let alone anything which could resemble design.

The problem is familiar to science. The physicist, Stephen Hawking, wrote:

‘Why is it (the universe) not in a state of complete disorder at all times? After all, this might seem more probable.’

That is, there is no good explanation for it. Given the laws of nature, we cannot derive from them a universe which is as complex as the one we see. On the other hand, biologist Stuart Kauffman writes,

‘We have no adequate theory for why our universe is complex.’

This is the opposite view. We ought not to see any complexity emerging. No matter what degree of complexity we find today, whether it be Newton's system of the universe, or the basic fact that complexity exists, it should not happen. It is as if there is more than the rules—because the game of our universe does not reveal sameness.

This idea of ‘more’—of different levels of reality—has been seriously entertained by various scientists. The  science writer Natalie Wolchover says, ‘Space-time may be a translation of some other description of reality,’ and while she does not propose the existence of the supernatural, the idea of some other description of reality could open the door to this.

Call this the ‘ground zero’, the epicentre of the argument from design. There is something going on, at a level we do not see, which we may never discover by examining the rules. In the analogy of the chess game, where we observe something beyond the rules, we may not be able to tell what that something is—yet it is clear that it is.

This argument differs from the familiar version of the theological argument from design, which generally assumes that God created the rules which the design displays. On the contrary, this argument proposes that God may exist beyond the rules, through the very fact that we see order.

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* A problem with the analogy is that a chess game manifests complexity to begin with. The important point is, however, that the game reveals more than it should.

The Octave Illusion

Posted by Thomas Scarborough*

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440Hz and 880Hz alternating R and L

The Octave Illusion was discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1973. It produced two alternating tones, one octave apart, in each ear. However, when the tone in one ear went ‘high’, the tone in the other ear went ‘low’, and vice versa. (Click the arrow to play.)

The tones used here are A4 (440 Hz) and A5 (880 Hz) - in this case reproduced with the precision of the modern computer. The effect is the same whether this is played through headphones or loudspeakers -- and interestingly, does not change when the headphones or loudspeakers are swapped around.

It is a simple auditory illusion, yet most powerful. Instead of hearing two alternating tones in each ear - as one should - most people hear alternating tones bouncing from ear to ear. It seems that the brain has therefore removed two tones, one from each ear. That is, the tones are replaced with silences.

There is copious literature on what this might mean, and what might cause the effect - yet the general agreement is that there is no simple explanation.

It might not seem at first that an auditory illusion has anything to do with philosophy. However, what we have in this particular case is auditory ‘objects’ -- a range of auditory ‘things’ which include bangs, ringtones, meows, and so on -- which belong to the much larger set of ‘objects’ in general.

To this day, then, we search for ways to decide what is or is not illusory ...

space, time, numbers

identity, free will

things, events, properties

society, language

money

matter, force, energy

causes, physical laws...

... and even God.

Thus, illusions such as that above -- of which we all now are aware -- have a lot to do with the way we perceive our world.  It has not always been so. There once was a time - or so it is thought - where we perceived everything as real. Today, to borrow the words of the British philosophy professor Simon Blackburn, we have left this far behind: ‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers.’

It falls under the subject of ontology - and it all started, according to the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, when we separated objects from ideas. The Octave Illusion is just one of many evidences that our experience is not the same as the ideas we have about it. Our brains have already interpreted it for us.

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* The author once designed a simple electronic unit to produce this effect. This is still obtainable from the publisher at https://www.elektormagazine.com/magazine/elektor-200411/17842

The world in crisis: it’s not what we think

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The real danger is an explosion - of Big Data

We lived once with the dream of a better world: more comfortable, more secure, and more advanced.  Political commentator Dinesh D’Souza called it ‘the notion that things are getting better, and will continue to get better in the future’.  We call it progress.  Yet while our world has in many ways advanced and improved, we seem unsure today whether the payoff matches the investment.  In fact, we all feel sure that something has gone peculiarly wrong—but what?  Why has the climate turned on us?  Why is the world still unsafe?  Why do we still suffer vast injustices and inequalities?  Why do we still struggle, if not materially, then with our sense of well-being and quality of life?  Is there anything in our travails which is common to all, and lies at the root of them all?

It will be helpful to consider what it is that has brought us progress—which in itself may lead us to the problem.  There have been various proposals:  that progress is of the inexorable kind; that it is illusory and rooted in the hubristic belief that earlier civilisations were always backward; or it is seen as a result of our escape from blind authority and appeal to tradition.  Yet above all, progress is associated with the liberating power of knowledge, which now expands at an exhilarating pace on all fronts.  ‘The idea of progress,’ wrote the philosopher Charles Frankel, ‘is peculiarly a response to ... organized scientific inquiry’.

Further, science, within our own generation, has quietly entered a major new phase, which began around the start of the 21st Century.  We now have big data, which is extremely large data sets which may be analysed computationally.

Now when we graph the explosion of big data, we interestingly find that this (roughly) coincides on two axes with various global trends—among them increased greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, economic growth, resource use, air travel—even increased substance abuse, and increased terrorism.  There is something, too, which seems more felt than it is demonstrable.  A great many people sense that modern society burdens us—more so than it did in former times.

Why should an explosion of big data roughly coincide—even correlate—with an explosion of global travails?

On the one hand, big data has proved beyond doubt that it has many benefits.  Through the analysis of extremely large data sets, we have found new correlations to spot business trends, prevent diseases, and combat crime—among other things.  At the same time, big data presents us with a raft of problems: privacy concerns, interoperability challenges, the problem of imperfect algorithms, and the law of diminishing returns.  A major difficulty lies in the interpretation of big data.  Researchers Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford observe, ‘Working with Big Data is still subjective, and what it quantifies does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective truth.’  Not least, big data depends on social sorting and segmentation—mostly invisible—which may have various unfair effects.

Yet apart from the familiar problems, we find a bigger one.  The goal of big data, to put it very simply, is to make things fit.  Production must fit consumption; foodstuffs must fit our dietary requirements and tastes; goods and services must fit our wants and inclinations; and so on.  As the demands for a better fit increase, so the demand for greater detail increases.  Advertisements are now tailored to our smallest, most fleeting interests, popping up at every turn.  The print on our foodstuffs has multiplied, even to become unreadable.  Farming now includes the elaborate testing and evaluation of seeds, pesticides, nutrients, and so much more.  There is no end to this tendency towards a better fit.

The more big data we have, the more we can tailor any number of things to our need:  insurances, medicines, regulations, news feeds, transport, and so on.  However, there is a problem.  As we increase the detail, so we require great energy to do it.  There are increased demands on our faculties, and on our world—not merely on us as individuals, but on all that surrounds us.  To find a can of baked beans on a shop shelf is one thing.  To have a can of French navy beans delivered to my door in quick time is quite another.  This is crucial.  The goal of a better fit involves enormous activity, and stresses our society and environment.  Media academic Lloyd Spencer writes, ‘Reason itself appears insane as the world acquires systematic totality.’  Big data is a form of totalitarianism, in that it requires complete obedience to the need for a better fit.

Therefore the crisis of our world is not primarily that of production or consumption, of emissions, pollution, or even, in the final analysis, over-population.  It goes deeper than this.  It is a problem of knowledge—which now includes big data.  This in turn rests on another, fundamental problem of science: it progresses by screening things out.  Science must minimise unwanted influences on independent variables to succeed—and the biggest of these variables is the world itself.

Typically, we view the problems of big data from the inside, as it were—the familiar issues of privacy, the limits of big data, its interpretation, and so on.  Yet all these represent an enclosed view.  When we consider big data in the context of the open system which is the world, its danger becomes clear.  We have screened out its effects on the world—on a grand scale.  Through big data, we have over-stressed the system which is planet Earth.  The crisis which besets us is not what we think.  It is big data.

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The top ten firms leveraging Big Data in January 2018: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Chevron, Acxiom, National Security Agency, General Electric, Tencent, Wikimedia (Source: Data Science Graduate Programs).

Sample graphs. Red shade superimposed on statistics from 2000.

The Will-Ought Distinction

David Hume, the originator of the is-ought distinction

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The is-ought distinction is a philosophical classic which lies at the core of moral philosophy. It states that one cannot derive ‘ought’ sentences from ‘is’ sentences -- in other words, one cannot derive ethics from fact. This rests in turn on the things-relations distinction. While ‘is’ describes how things are related to one another, it is unable to describe how they ought to be related.

Instead, here, I seek to introduce another distinction which, as far as I can see, is non-existent in the world of philosophy  -- yet may be more important than the is-ought distinction.  The goal here is to present a will-ought distinction. It is offered in broad outline, while acknowledging the fact that there are many nuances at play (that is, what follows is necessarily simplistic).

Now ‘is’ and ‘will’ play a large part in science.  The scientist begins with ‘is’, which is the facts -- or the pieces of what is out there -- and these facts, for a scientist, may not make much sense in the beginning.  As scientists seek to understand the facts, then, they play with them -- they rearrange them, reword them, have a few drinks together as they argue over them -- even bet on hypotheses, and so on.  In other words, the ‘is’ of the matter may be a fairly detached activity.

This is the first of the (if one so prefers) four parts of the scientific method: characterisations, hypotheses, predictions, and experiments -- and the first of these four, namely characterisations, is about observations, definitions, and measurements of the subject of inquiry.  In other words, it is about establishing the facts.

Yet facts alone offer little or no explanation of phenomena.  There comes a point where these facts must be combined in such a way as to present a theory.  At this point, ‘is’ (the facts) becomes ‘will’ (the theory).  Theory is, after all, that which will happen.  Theories predict things.  If they do not predict things, they are not theories.  We now find, besides ‘is’ and ‘ought’, a third category.  In the context of science:

• ‘is’ refers to fact,
• ‘will’ refers to theory,
• while ‘ought’ refers to value

Let us now notice that ‘will’ and ‘ought’ both have to do with expectation.  Both may be defined -- at least in a great many cases -- as ‘reasoned expectation’ -- and reasoned expectation is a fairly standard definition for theory.  One cannot call theory reasoned certainty of course, as every scientist will freely point out.  Neither is this true of ‘ought’.

Further, both ‘will’ and ‘ought’ may refer both to personal and impersonal things.  This fits well with the things-relations distinction above.  They both have to do with how we expect things to be related to one another.  Things ‘will’ be so and so ordered, or they ‘ought’ to be, whether this refers to a person's behaviour (‘She will ...’ ‘He ought ...’) or to the arrangement of objects, events, or concepts (‘It ought ...’ ‘That will ...’).

How, then, should we distinguish ‘will’ from ‘ought’?

Unlike ‘will’, ‘ought’ may often be non-normative -- which means that one may not seriously, in every case, expect it to happen.  As an extreme example, someone might say, ‘There ought to be two moons orbiting the earth’ (which is impossible).  But then, too, someone might consider, ‘Crystal Palace ought to win the Premier League’ (possible, though not likely), ‘The rocket ought to land safely’ (likely), or 'This experiment ought to produce an alkali’ (all but sure).  There is a continuum of additional information, therefore.

Now I need to make a further distinction.  In that case of proposing two moons, we might really have meant, ‘There ought to have been (perfect tense) two moons.’  A great many ‘ought’ sentences may be interpreted in this way.  Subtract such examples from all examples, and this increases the number of oughts which are more seriously about the future.  ‘Ought’ now comes a lot closer to ‘will’.

Perhaps one might argue, too, that ‘ought’ may be distinguished from ‘will’ by seeing the term as applying only to ethics -- and not to such neutral subjects as those of science.  Yet how should one make such a distinction?  It is artificial -- not to speak of old-fashioned.  I have said that ‘ought’ represents the way that things ought to be related to one another, and this does not in principle separate ethics from science, or from any other activity for that matter.  This brings two important questions:

•  Is science in reality a language of ‘ought’? (Which is, all about value?)
•  Can one really separate ‘ought’ from ‘will’? (That is, to separate moral acts from any acts at all).

And one last question too:

•  Is every move we make a moral one?

Soap Operas in Africa

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Posters for Kenyan and South African Soap Operas

Who are the influencers in Africa? The politicians? Preachers? Educators? Revolutionaries?

There are some we may seldom think of: the producers of Africa’s soap operas. According to Discovery Networks, the average TV viewer in South Africa watches a massive 4.5 hours a day – a large part of which is taken up with soap operas. Statistics show that South Africa’s top five soap operas have about five billion views a year.  It is, according to journalist Tiema Muindi, ‘habitual viewing’.

Now before any person or group can influence another, there need to be certain conditions in place. It is generally agreed that people are motivated – not only motivated, but induced to act – when they hold up a picture of the world to the world itself, and there find a difference or disjoint. Psychologist Richard Gregory describes it as finding the ‘unexpected’, and the philosopher Willard Quine adds: the expected which fails to happen.

I look from my kitchen window, to see my little girl with her face down in the grass. This is not what I expected to see – and I spring into action. Or I did not expect to see a woman assaulted on the street, or a child malnourished. Again, I spring into action. To put it simply, psychologists say that our behaviour is controlled by mental models – and this, said the philosopher Plato, spells danger. Show people things which change their expectations, and you distract and destabilise all of society. Or so he thought.

It would be important to know, therefore, whether Africa’s soap operas give Africa a picture of the world which is different to the world itself. We are all aware of the shock-factor of soap operas in general: conflicts, intrigue, and the breaking of cultural taboos. Yet in Africa, there is something that would seem to loom larger than any of this. We see it in virtually all of the soap opera posters – which are the 'door', so to speak, to the soap operas themselves. It is affluence. Designer dresses, tailored suits, expensive smartphones, sumptuous settings, and more.

We may open this door and enter in. Here we find, again, affluence. Meals in fine restaurants, fitted kitchens, fast cars, expensive whisky, and so on – not to speak of the expensive pursuits of the characters themselves.

Yet in the real world which is Africa, a vast number of people live in poverty.  By some statistics, 33% in Nigeria, 42% in Kenya, and 55% in South Africa. In reality, one sees shacks made with wood and iron and empty agricultural sacks – overcrowded trains, dusty streets, and children playing with wire toys. Given this context, how might the soap operas influence Africa? There are various possibilities:

• They do not significantly shape a continent’s views and expectations – they are merely soap operas, after all. This seems unlikely.

• They may lead people to believe that Africa really looks the way that it is presented in the soap operas. May we then blame the wealthier classes, for failing to recognise or understand the desperate struggles of the poor?

• The soap operas may dull the senses and desires of the masses – leading them to feel that they are absorbed by the fantasy world they see, to become one with it, as it were.

• They may lead viewers to expect the life that they see on TV. And what happens then? Do viewers make these values their own highest good – old colonial values, one might add? Or do they grieve within, to see that they fall so far short of the dream? Or are they motivated to strive for more?

One may ask, too: what would it do to people’s expectations, if they were to view more realistic soap operas? Would these conscientise societies more effectively as to their real plight? Would they lead people to be more realistic in their plans and strategies – with their feet now firmly planted on the ground? Or would they lower their expectations, or degrade them?

Few seem to have given it much thought. Both academic research and popular articles are very thin on the ground. A rare paper on How Do Soap Operas Affect the Poor? Experiences of Turkish Women, by Turkish academics Aras Ozgun et al, concludes that ‘we need to understand the issue from the perspectives of the vulnerable’. There are troubling signs. In particular, in most cases in their study, soap operas led to ‘self-imposed alienation’ amongst the poor, including feelings of shame, anger, dissatisfaction, and powerlessness.

What Truly Exists?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Magritte’s iconic painting of a man looking in a mirror,
reminds us that the world we perceive is not real,
but rather constructed

A core question of ontology, or theories about the nature of being and existence—and perhaps its most pressing question from a practical point of view—is which individuals or 'things' are really real. What truly exists? It seems that there are three broad possibilities:

• material entities alone (which is materialism),
• mental entities alone (which is idealism),
• or both (which is dualism).

However it is very difficult, as the cognitive scientist Aaron Sloman has put it, to distinguish between ‘real existents’ and ‘useful fictions’—or for that matter, useless ones. As philosophy professor Simon Blackburn notes:

‘Everything you can think of has at some time or another been declared to be a fiction by philosophers bent on keeping a firm check on reality—among them matter, force, energy, causes, physical laws, space, time, possibilities, numbers, infinity, selves, freedom of the will, the will itself, desires, beliefs, identity, things, properties, society, language, and money.’

Intuitively, we feel that what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch—or perceive in any way with our senses—is real. Yet what are we to make of things we do not perceive—either because, momentarily, we find that they lie beyond our senses, or because they are what we call ‘constructs'—compound ideas which may lack empirical evidence?

The problem strikes close to home. Take the one hundred most commonly used nouns in English. The first on the list is ‘time’. You cannot see it or touch it or anything like that. The second is ‘year’. The same applies. The third on the list is ‘people’. Now here is something we can see and touch—at least when those people happen to be around. The fourth term, though, ‘way’, is both real and unreal. And so, depending on how we categorise these nouns, fully half of them may not be ‘real’ at all.

It would be helpful to start with the simplest distinction—namely that which we make between real things we experience directly, and real things we do not.

Imagine that I am cycling down a narrow cycle track under some coconut palms. I see the world in front of me as I go—but do not see the world behind me. I saw it a moment ago—a thicket of breadfruit trees, and children playing. But I know that they are there. I saw them, heard them, smelled them. Besides, I could easily stop my bicycle now and look back to confirm it.

In what sense, then, are those things there, which are now behind me? After all, I do not directly perceive them.

We may conduct a simple thought experiment.

Imagine that, as I ride my bicycle under the coconut trees, we switch off my senses and freeze this moment in time. Without my senses, the perceived and the unperceived look largely the same in my brain—namely, arrangements of synapses in a vast network of neurons.

In my brain, then, there is little difference between the seen and the unseen (or the heard and the unheard, and so on). Both exist in the vast neural network which is or contains the mind. Everything, whether real or imaginary, ends up there. The question now is not so much whether my mind contains things perceived or unperceived. In the first case, my senses are activated; in the second, they are not—but in both cases, they are as real to me as anything possibly can be.

This becomes important now for the more vexing question as to how we are to understand constructs. There is more to riding my bicycle than what I see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. If there were not, I would be wobbling on my bicycle without anything left to orientate me:

Does this outing fit my purpose? Did I steal this bicycle? Do I need a passport here? Should I turn around now? And so on. None of these ‘surplus’ things—purpose, ownership, citizenship, and so on—is immediately real to me, yet all of them are vital. My mind is filled, not only with the things that I see, or saw a moment ago—but with many things which are in a sense unreal. One could say, things which are lacking empirical evidence, although in every case, they can be tested in some way.

Are these constructs real? In fact they are real—at least, as real as the coconut trees before me, and the breadfruit trees and the children behind me, given the fact that I arrange them, too, in my mind—each as a distinct concept with a unique label. As such, they do not fundamentally differ from those things which ‘exist’.

It would be wise for us to pause for a moment. We know well that we are capable, as human beings, of thinking of fictions which are not so. On the one hand, fictitious concepts—say magic spells, or the quintessence—on the other hand, fictitious entities—say the planet Vulcan, or fairies and gnomes. Sometimes, too, we believe that our fictions exist—or that they will exist at some time in the future.

Yet the separation of the real and the fictitious would seem to be fairly straightforward. ‘Real’ things correspond with the reality we perceive, while pure fictions do not. Does time therefore exist—or identity or society or any one of hundreds of thousands of constructs there are? Given that they correspond with the reality we perceive, we can only say yes.

The ultimate question is, does God exist? Given the right conditions, the answer to this, too, could be yes. The ‘right conditions’ for God’s existence would be threefold:

• that he is not purely ideational
• that the concept ‘God’ corresponds with the reality we perceive
• and that this concept is not invoked arbitrarily.

Or put it this way—for God to exist, there needs to be something permanent in our experience which necessitates him.

Picture Post #43: The Signpost

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

    

A signpost on a public road in South Africa’s remote Suurveld. What stood out for me immediately was the letter ‘O’. The signmaker, a long time ago, clearly made a better job of the ‘O’s than the other letters. Some day, I thought, one may make out little more than the ‘O’s.

Great men and women of the past left our civilisation with vital signposts: the rule of law, universal suffrage, equal rights, and more. Some of their signposts are no longer clearly seen, nor are the reasons why they put them there. How well are our signposts made today, for tomorrow?

 

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Picture Post #43: The Signpost

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

    

A  signpost on a public road in South Africa’s remote Suurveld. What stood out for me immediately was the letter ‘O’. The signmaker, a long time ago, clearly made a better job of the ‘O’s than the other letters. Some day, I thought, one may make out little more than the ‘O’s.

Great men and women of the past left our civilisation with vital signposts: the rule of law, universal suffrage, equal rights, and more. Some of their signposts are no longer clearly seen, nor are the reasons why they put them there. How well are our signposts made today, for tomorrow?

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PP #40 The Noble Savage

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) -- a painter whose legacy is not only disputed today, but increasingly disputed.  An interesting feature of Gauguin's paintings in his 'Pacific phase' was their great beauty on the surface of it, while in the background lurked death, suffering, and cruelty.

In seminary, they taught us like this: Gauguin travelled to Tahiti, hoping to find untrammelled freedom in the ideal of the 'noble savage', but instead he discovered death, suffering, and cruelty.  Therefore it was a false ideal.

The photo reminds me of the art of Paul Gauguin.  I am the boy on the left -- in my own 'Pacific phase' in childhood.  On the surface of it, the photo shows healthy, happy people.  But as in the art of Gauguin, a deformed man crouches in their midst.  I was fearful of him then.

Yet he was in the photo because he was included.  He was loved.  He was cared for.  Is this what Gauguin saw?  Did his fascination with the 'dark side' originate, not in his disillusionment with the ideal, but in the strange goodness of the 'noble savage'?

Fact and Value: The False Dichotomy

Image credit: The Guardian.

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The fact-value distinction is one of the most important problems of philosophy.  The Scottish philosopher David Hume gave it its classical formulation: it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.  That is, it is impossible to establish any value amidst an ocean of facts. 

On the surface of it, Hume would seem to be unimpeachably right.  The facts cannot tell us what to do.  But here is a problem.  Neither can value.  While one cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, neither can one derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘ought’, as it were.

Take, as an example, a statement of fact: ‘We are ready to hoist the spinnaker.’  Such a statement gives us no idea as to whether we should hoist the spinnaker.

Yet we find no difference with a statement of value: ‘We ought now to hoist the spinnaker.’  Why ought we to?  What gives us the authority to say so?  We find that such a statement is quite adrift, and equally unable to tell us whether we should or not.

What, then, was Hume thinking when he wrote about ‘ought’? 

It would seem to me that Hume made a lazy assumption, of the kind that philosophers fail to examine any further, on thinking that they have gained a special insight.  The assumption would be something like this: that there is a certainty which lies in value which fact does not possess.  Thus Hume equated value with a ground for our behaviour—if one should ever find it. 

To put it another way, Hume’s fact-value distinction would seem to be a false dichotomy.

What is it, then, that fact and value have in common, that neither will deliver ‘value’—in the sense of a ground for our behaviour?

I would propose that the scope of both fact and value is too limited for either to deliver universal truth.  Both statements of fact and statements of value exist in limited contexts, without being referenced to any fixed points except their own—while the question of certainty lies beyond this, in something which is far more expansive.

It may be easy to see, for instance, that I should hoist a spinnaker if I wish to win the race—and this I may state both as an ‘is’ and as an ‘ought’:

Given such and such conditions, the spinnaker will secure a win—alternatively, I ought to hoist the spinnaker to clinch it.  In both cases, it would be true and compelling that I need a spinnaker—yet not if I should expand my horizon, to ask whether I should have entered this race at all.

How then might we reference statements to something broader than simple fact and value?  An analogy might help.

I am in a boat on the ocean, to anchor a buoy.  If I reference its position to the seaweed I see underneath it, or the birds which circle overhead, I have in this case an unstable reference.  Or I may reference it to a spit of land that I see in the distance.  This would seem to be more stable, though not completely so—the wind and the waves may change it.  Or I may reference it to the stars—but even the stars will move. 

Ideally, my buoy would be referenced to everything.

This may not be as absurd as it sounds.  If the context is big enough—and if we should know just what kind of a context this should be—we may well be able to ground both fact and value.

If we reference everything to everything, there may be a way forward.  While space does not allow me to explore this further here, readers may refer to a post in which I sketched some thoughts on how this might be done: How Shall We Re-Establish Ethics in Our Time?

Is There a Rational Basis For Human Compassion?

By Thomas Scarborough

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy was ‘utterly without grace’. It was a fierce condemnation of Kant.

Kant  favoured autonomy—which is defined as the capacity of an agent to act in accordance with objective morality rather than under the influence of desires. Today this is a view which, by and large, drives all of our ethical thinking. The problem, in Kierkegaard’s eyes, was that it lacked compassion. This is true. We place great emphasis on civil rights, the rule of law, social norms, and so on, while compassion is not comfortably accommodated in the scheme. How may it be possible to bridge the gap—rationally? This is the subject of this post.

Ethics is a very human thing. Regardless of the intellectual debate, or the final framing of our ethics private or public, it always originates in the human person. It is, above all, a person's formation of a certain outlook on the world. Aristotle thought of ethics as ‘the golden mean’—the balanced life—where the ‘mean’ is defined as a quality or action which is equally removed from two opposite extremes. Thus ethics represents the achievement of a balance in the human person—between economic and social goals, individual and communal goals, unity and diversity, novelty and tradition, thought and feeling, and so much more. This is our starting point in this post—that it is about balance—of which further discussion would unfortunately deny us room to develop the theme in the available space.

In order to develop the ‘golden mean’, then, it stands to reason that we should weigh a great number of opposites in our minds, not to speak of variations, one against the other. The scope of this is important here: as we do so, we typically have as our goal to balance the world around us, no more and no less. I should say, I have as my goal to balance the world around me—in my own individual mind—so as to develop (I should hope) a balanced outlook on my world. This is true—but it is simplistic. It is a more nuanced view of the process which should help us to open up our ethical thinking to human compassion.

I live in a world of others—tens, thousands, millions, in fact billions of others. As soon as I take these others into account, not merely as numbers, entities, or abstractions, I open up some important considerations. Each of these others carries in their own mind an evaluation of the world—without which my own evaluation of the world cannot be complete. It matters a great deal, not merely that others exist in my world, but that they each arrange the world in their own particular way. Therefore in a sense. we now have uncountable worlds within a world. It is easy to overlook this. These others perceive things, assess things, plan things, and act upon things which are of critical importance to that ‘golden mean’ which Aristotle spoke about. Perhaps this much goes without saying.

However this now introduces a quantum leap of complexity to my task of arranging my world, since now I must combine their world with mine—tens, thousands, even millions of worlds in other people’s minds. Then, too, this all has to do with semiotic codes, which are the means through which others reveal their own arrangement of the world—codes that are all too often all but inscrutable. A smile, a jig, a nod of the head—candles on the table, or a hush in the hallway—President Kennedy's visit to West Berlin, the Bomb under Mururoa, the public appearances or Her Majesty the Queen, and a host of so-called ‘interpretative devices’. In order to have some command of such things, I need to have an intimate ‘feel’ for others.

The existence of others in my world—further, the existence of their worlds within my world, and the ways in which they communicate their worlds with me—means that ethics may often come down to something all too human. I now need to be sensitive to the expressions, gestures, and postures of others, and a great variety of semiotic codes besides—not to speak of the sufferings, desires, and hopes which lie behind them. I need to understand—to borrow a term from the polymath Thomas Browne—‘the motto of our souls’. This represents a rapport which rests to a very large extent on a careful, sensitive reading of the many others involved in my world, whether this involvement is direct or indirectl. Thus we incorporate personal rapport in a rational ethics—which is human compassion.

The Decline of Materialism

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Materialism is the theory that matter alone exists – however this is too simple. Let us assume, rather, that materialism is the arranging of our world in our minds – and since we are speaking of materialism, we do this on the basis of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. 

That is, in speaking of materialism, we are speaking of all that we learn about a material world through our senses – either directly, or through the instruments which we use. And so defined, materialism may seem to promise us a complete understanding of our world. We have certainly made enormous strides. We are able to tease apart the sub-atomic world, see billions of years back in time, and map and manipulate the complex genetic code – among many other things. However, there are at least four limiting and complicating factors to a materialistic outlook, each of which vastly reduces its scope and its power:

• It is one thing to discover the laws of nature, yet quite another to predict their outcomes. We see an analogy in the game of chess. While the rules of the game are simple – a pawn advances like this, and a king like that – the outcome of these rules is another matter altogether. A chess board, which is simplicity itself in the scheme of things – a mere sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces – taxes the human mind to the very limits of its powers. It is the easy part, one might say, to design a supercomputer, or to plot a trajectory to Pluto. The impossible part is to predict the ripples on a pond, or to anticipate the path of a snail on a wall. Worse than this, we too often fail to foresee the negative outcomes of laws we imagined we had mastered.

• If materialism is the arranging of a material world in our minds on the basis of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, consider then that others, too, arrange the world in their minds – and these others enter my world and my considerations. It is not I alone now, who seek to arrange the world in my mind. As soon as I factor another human being into my thinking – let alone a few, even hundreds, not to speak of a million more – the complexity of knowing my world becomes unthinkable. It is beyond imagination on the graph of intrinsic complexity.  We therefore separate out such situations from the ‘natural sciences’, and call them ‘human sciences’. It happens wherever others enter the picture.

• The natural sciences are, in a sense, an open book. Yet in order to understand the human sciences, we need to understand how others arrange their worlds in their minds. In order to accomplish this, we now find that we need to understand how they communicate this – and we must infer it from semiotic codes.  A plethora of views, an ocean of feelings, vast beyond our comprehension, is expressed with facial expressions, nuances of speech, gestures, postures, behavioural codes, ideological codes, and so much more – all of them full of variation and caprice.  This takes us another quantum leap away from that materialism which advances through the senses.

• But the way that we use these semiotic codes, noted Jacques Derrida, we are continually deferring meaning.  Francis Bacon put it like this: words beget words (which beget words).  It is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money. Which is to say that, while the things of sense seem concrete, our words merely hover over the surface of reality.  If mind and matter were to correspond in a one-to-one relationship, we would have to be mere ‘machines’. Yet suppose now that all living forms have such ‘hovering’ minds.  We may in fact be living in a vast, teeming world which is wakeful in every part.

Materialism, we said, is the arranging of our world in our minds, on the basis of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. On the surface of it, this promises us a complete understanding of our world.  Yet then we come up against the problem of outcomes. Further, we come up against the problem of others – through which we separate out the human sciences. Then we discover that we need to engage with complex and subtle semiotic codes. And finally, we might need to account for a world which is populated not merely with seven billion human beings, but with living agents beyond number or knowing. One by one, each of these four steps, in quantum leaps, diminishes the usefulness of materialism. By and large, our advancing understanding of the world would seem to be taking us further and further away from the materialism the philosophers once knew.

The Bridging Inference

A Pi Special Investigation into the workings of language

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

How is a definition defined? Much may depend on the answer to this simple question—including, arguably, the shape of our entire (post)modern society today. But more of this in a moment. The way that one typically defines a word is with the most economical statement of its descriptive meaning. Therefore the Oxford English Dictionary defines a 'dog' as 'a domesticated, carnivorous mammal'.

However, not every linguist would agree that this is how one should go about definition. Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen took a suspicious view of this notion—considering that such definition is necessary but inadequate ¹. It is, they suggested, 'a mere abbreviation'. A true definition of a word would require so much more.

But so it is: In terms of classical linguistics, in order to define a word, one enumerates its 'necessary and sufficient features' ². Such definition may also be referred to as the denotative meaning of a word, or its 'hard core of meaning'—as opposed to its 'meanings around the edges', or its connotative meaning ³.

How is a definition defined?

In probing the answer to the question here, the linguistic feature the anaphora provides a useful starting point. The anaphora, in turn, is related to a lesser-known linguistic feature, the bridging inference. This promises to be more useful still.

But first, the anaphora.

The Anaphora

The anaphora, according to linguists Simon Botley and Tony McEnery, is particularly useful in telling us 'some things about how language is understood and processed' ⁴. That is, it opens windows into the inner workings of our language, which would normally seem closed to us.

The anaphora is called a referring expression—for the reason that it refers to another linguistic element in a text. Typically, it refers back. An example: 'Aristotle owned a house. He lived in it.' Here, 'He' refers back to Aristotle, while 'it' refers back to his house. Both 'He' and 'it', therefore, are anaphoras.

A fact less emphasised is that the meaning of the anaphora must match the meaning of the linguistic element which it refers to—otherwise an anaphora is 'unresolved'. For example: 'Aristotle owned a house. It popped,' or: 'Aristotle owned a house. It chased rabbits.' In these two examples, the meaning of the anaphora and the meaning of the referent do not coincide—as they ought to.

This deserves special emphasis: the anaphora refers to a linguistic element which is well defined, on the surface of it reflecting its denotative meaning.

 So a house is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as 'a building used for human habitation,' or (Collins) 'a building used as a home,' or (Macmillan) 'a building for living in'. Thus the anaphora 'it', above, takes on the definition of a house—or so it would seem.

Thus far with the anaphora.

The Bridging Inference

Closely related to the anaphora is the lesser known referring expression the bridging inference. Like the anaphora, this typically refers back.
Here follows an example of a bridging inference: 'Aristotle owned a house. The plumbing was blocked.' At first glance, this might seem identical to the anaphora—yet it is quite different.

While no one should have a problem understanding these two sentences, the house is now no longer in explicit focus ⁵. Or to put it another way: one typically recognises a bridging inference by the fact that one cannot replace it with a pronoun. One cannot say, for instance: 'Aristotle owned a house. It was blocked.'

In the above example, the inference is that a house contains plumbing. However, there is something apparently inexplicable that meets us here. No definition of a house includes plumbing. The bridging inference assumes that when one speaks about a house, one knows something that one should not know, or does not need to know.

In fact, we intuitively relate many things to a house: 'Aristotle owned a house. The karma was bad,' or: 'Aristotle owned a house. The ceilings were sagging,' or: 'Aristotle owned a house. The valuation was too low.' In all of these examples and more, a house is intuitively understood to have karma, ceilings, value, and so on. To put it simply, all of these sentences work—in spite of having nothing to do with the definition of a house, as one finds it in the dictionary.

This is important. If something has nothing to do with the definition of a house, yet is intuitively understood to be a part of what it is, then we have a problem with the common notion of a definition.

The ease with which one uses inferences is all the more appreciated when incompatible inferences are made: 'Aristotle owned a house. The crank shaft was broken,' or: 'Aristotle owned a house. The preservative was vinegar.' One sees here, all the more clearly, how inferences are dependent on the meaning of the referent.

We return now to the anaphora.

The Anaphora Again

On the surface of it, the anaphora would seem to refer to the stock standard definition of a word—namely, its 'necessary and sufficient features'—while the bridging inference would seem to stray into 'meanings around the edges'. That is to say, on the surface of it the anaphora has more to do with the denotative meaning of a word, while the bridging inference has more to do with its connotative meaning.

Yet does this hold true?

If it does not, then there may be many more inferences in our language than we have supposed. Or to put it another way: the features of our definitions of words may not be as 'necessary' or 'sufficient' as they seem.

By way of experiment, consider what happens when one converts some of the bridging inferences above to anaphoras: 'Aristotle owned a house. It had bad karma,' or: 'Aristotle owned a house. It had sagging ceilings.'

At first glance, there may seem to be no inferences here: the anaphora 'It' would seem, in each case, to refer back to the house. However, it becomes clear that one is dealing with inferences as soon as one tries some false ones. For example: 'Aristotle owned a house. It had a broken crank shaft,' or: 'Aristotle owned a house. It was preserved with vinegar.'

What we see here is that the anaphora has to be compatible with various inferences which relate to a house. It is a precondition for the anaphora to work.

In fact we might go so far as to say that the English language depends on innumerable inferences. Both the bridging inference and the anaphora reveal that we make inferences which exceed the definition of a word—and with that, 'play old Harry' with the notion of the denotative meaning of the word.

'Every utterance, no matter how laboured,' said philosopher and linguist Max Black, 'trails clouds of implication' ⁶.

For what reason, then, might the bridging inference and the anaphora instantly be understood—where they have nothing to do with the definition of a thing?

Here follow some broad suggestions:

The Definition of a Definition

An answer to the puzzle may lie in what we have already seen, although it might seem alien to our analytical thinking today:

If there is any apparent relation between two things—between a house, say, and the plumbing—or between a house and its karma—then these will inevitably have something to do with each other's definition. If there is no apparent relation—between a house and a crank shaft, say, or a house and its preservative—then these will have nothing to do with each other's definition.

This has an important corollary.

It has to mean that the definitions of words are relational, not analytic: definitions are not first about features, they are about relations—and there may be a great many relations.

In fact it was Aristotle who first suggested that definitions are not features 'piled in a heap', but that they are 'disposed in a certain way' ⁷. That is, their features stand in a certain relationship with one another—as many as these may be.

Now if linguistics is a descriptive endeavour, not prescriptive—if it is about 'how people actually speak or write' ⁸—then what shall we do with the customary definition of a definition?

If definitions are relational, not analytic—then it may be suggested, on the basis of the way that we use words today, that the (post)modern era has gone vastly astray. Is it not our dissection of reality—rather than our being able to see its relatedness—that has led to environmental degradation, social disintegration, and a host of other ills?

The analytical view of the world should be compensated by a relational one. This may begin with the way that we see language. Or to put it another way: the way that we see language today may shape the entire society in which we live.

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Matters arising - and some notes




The Question

Let us pause, to pose the question(s):

• What is a definition—in light of the bridging inference in particular?  
  
• What is it that denotation denotes?
  
• And if a word is to be seen in relational terms, then how does one define it?
  
  

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Citation

This post was written by Thomas Scarborough for PI Alpha, February 2014.

• 1 Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen. Logical Propaedeutic, p. 65, 1984.
• 2 John Taylor. Linguistic Categorization, p. 23, 1995.
• 3 James Hurford and Brendan Heasley. Semantics, p. 90, 1990.
• 4 Simon Botley and Tony McEnery. Corpus-Based and Computational Approaches to Discourse Anaphora, p. 3, 2000.
• 5 Alan Garnham. Psycholingusitics, p. 156, 1985.
• 6 Max Black. The Labyrinth of Language, p. 137, 1968.
• 7 Aristotle. The Metaphysics, Book VII, 11.
• 8 David Crystal. Linguistics, p. 595, 1999.