Words, texts and their mattering….

I like words. Sometimes it’s just the sound of individual words that I’m drawn to (like ‘flibbertigibbet’). You may well have your own favourites. But more often it’s words strung into sentences, usually with the aim of communicating something. Hence I’m sitting here typing. And, presumably, that’s why you’re sitting where you are, reading. You like words too. Mind you, spoken words and written words are not identical (I don’t know what ‘flibbertigibbet’ sounds like inside your head). But they do serve the same sort of purposes, the main one being to communicate meaning. But meaning is a word, and slippery one too. Linguists, philosophers, theologians and scientists have all tacked the issue of what meaning “is”, and have not always arrived at compatible definitions. Some have therefore concluded that there is no such thing as meaning. But that would seem to subvert the whole business of communicating with one another, something humans have actually been doing for a very long time, and with a fairly high degree of success (an observation I’ve commented on before). And it is a view that is, basically, self-refuting.

But what this does highlight is that in using words, whether as a sender or receiver, thought and care are often required. When precision is needed, we can usually achieve it. It does complicate matters and tends to slow communication down. And sometimes we can all get a bit impatient with this. But there is something here that is familiar from many areas of life and behaviour - a speed accuracy trade-off. So when I’m speaking quickly, without much thought, the precision I am communicating with is reduced. A similar thing happens when I sit down at a keyboard and with little thought I just begin to type. Stringing words together isn’t particularly difficult. But stringing them together coherently is a different matter. And of course prior to the words are the concepts that the words are supposed to convey. If I haven’t given these much thought, then prior to the lack of clarity in the words, will be a lack of clarity in the thoughts. The net effect will be ambiguity and uncertainty. This is sometimes a thoughtful intention, but that is probably the exception rather than the rule, and carries its own meaning.

On the other side of the communication process, the same sort of considerations must apply. A whole series of processes are going on in your head right now. Some of them are fairly low-level and not under your control (at least to any great extent) – things like resolving the words on the screen you’re looking at so they are clear enough to read, or extracting meaning from individual words. But at a higher level, implicitly or explicitly, you will have to decide how much work you’re going to put into understanding what I’ve written. If you’re not particularly interested, you will probably merely skim the text, perhaps alighting on the odd word here or there, following the narrative or the argument (such as it is) at a superficial level. If I were to write something obviously crazy at this point (like “raspberry”) you might notice. But then again you might not (in which case the entire point of what I’ve just written will be lost on you!). But if I’ve succeeded in catching your attention, and you’re interested in the meaning of meaning, or the meaning of words, or the business of communication, you’ll be working to understand both what is written and what is meant. That will take time on your part, time that you could have spent doing something else. That implies a price that you either will, or will not be prepared to pay.

To be sure, there are lots of reasons why you might not want to pay a particularly high price to extract the meaning from this particular text. It is after all, merely a blog post, one of many on this blog (this is #152), and there are of course many blogs (plus books, magazines etc). But we all have an innate idea that some texts are much more important than others. And with these we have a sense that it will pay to do the work. And there are those texts which claim (or are claimed) to be potentially life changing (not something I’d claim for my blog I hasten to add). If you are persuaded that this is the case, the words (and the sentences and paragraphs they make up) will matter a lot and you’ll want to do the work to get at the meaning. While such claims may be spurious, Benjamin Franklin (among others), he of “Give me 26 lead soldiers and I will conquer the world” certainly thought that words could matter.

Part of the human condition is that our time and resources are finite, so choices have to made. Given the slipperiness of words, the question arises as to how best to spend our finite resources. Because we know that some words matter more than others we direct variable degrees of attention towards the text of adverts, comic strips, headlines in tabloid newspapers and captions on TikTok compared to those in a textbook we need to study to pass an exam or a philosophy book making an argument that we really want to get to the bottom of. Experience, our own and that of others, can also be a guide. Where we know that others have claimed to find particular words truly transformative (sometimes transformations we ourselves may have witnessed), these will be the ones we really want to pay attention to and work at to understand.

There is a particular text in mind (of course). It is one of the most critically scrutinised in history. It has been pilloried and banned in some jurisdictions. It has been lauded and literally worshipped in others. This wide range of responses and attitudes itself is evidence (of a sort) that here is something worth exposing oneself to, reading, reflecting on and responding to. Given the range of reactions to it, and conflicting claims about it, it is clearly likely to have its complexities. This can’t all be down to the vagaries of the readers and hearers of it. So it is likely that work will indeed be required. But at least there is a prima facie case that here indeed are words that should be encountered first hand, as opposed to depending on second-hand, necessarily filtered accounts of it. And there does appear to be a coherent core meaning that both historically and now millions have extracted from it (as well as some crazy conclusions and consequently crazy behaviour).

If the Bible is what it and many of its previous readers have claimed, then here are words that matter. And perhaps they matter more than anything else.

Life in the pandemic XXVI Words and the “death” of postmodernism

I have led a fairly sheltered intellectual and academic existence, just one of many advantages working on the science side of a modern University campus. Modern universities don’t really operate as universities of course. Ideally a university should be a community of scholars with cross-fertilization of ideas across a wide range of disciplines and outlooks. The idea is that even very different disciplines can enlighten and stimulate each other. I can’t be the only scientist to whom good ideas have come while sitting in a seminar whose topic is light years away from some current piece of gristle I’ve been chewing on. However, someone once quipped that academia is the business of getting to know more and more about less and less. On this logic, professors know everything about nothing. Would it be remiss of me to point out that I’m a mere Reader? But it is a fact that we tend to hunker down in ever tighter intellectual cliques and tribes as time and careers progress. Eventually the cell and molecular biologists rarely see those who work on the behaviour of whole organisms, never encounter those (still within the scientific family) who reside in the departments of the physical (as opposed to biological) sciences, and are barely aware of those mythical creatures across the road (actually usually across several roads) who deal in words or thought, sound or pictures. That said, such isolation does have its advantages.

Most of us in the scientific world are probably best described as “modern” in the way we go about our task. This doesn’t sound too bad until you understand that since the 1960s or thereabouts, “modernism” has been seen as dangerous tomfoolery by many of our more arty colleagues who generally consider themselves post-modernists. Modernism is that post-enlightenment mode of thinking that elevates human reason as the key tool for obtaining objective knowledge about the world around us, providing a sure way for humanity to progress. It has been both powered and validated by the apparent success of science and technology. However, it has always had its critics. Romanticism in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries was an early harbinger of trouble ahead. While the power and success of science seemed hard to deny, the materialism that usually accompanied modernity (and it was sometimes a radical materialism) seemed to leave something important out of the account. And the kind of progress science and technology generated wasn’t always perceived as an unalloyed good. The same industrialisation that provided economic progress for many, spawned dark satanic mills for some. Diseases may have been conquered, but poverty killed thousands. And even scientific endeavour had some ugly pseudoscientific offspring in the form of movements like social Darwinism and eugenics.

Bubbling away under the surface were the intellectual forces that eventually led to the “postmodernism” that emerged in the 1960s, sweeping all before it. Or at least it appeared to. Defining postmodernism is a bit like trying to eat soup with a fork; it’s an enterprise doomed to failure. But definitions abound. Britannica defines it as “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad scepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” Postmodernism came to be seen as a broad attack on the kind of reason and reasoning that we thought we depended upon in science, and even on the idea that words carry meaning and allow sensible discourse about a world “out there”. There was a specifically scientific manifestation of postmodernism in the form of Kuhn’s famous book “The structure of scientific revolutions” (discussed briefly here). This sought to reduce progress in science, in which a new theory or approach displaces and old one, to a type of “conversion” experience; scientific “progress” (so Kuhn’s critics claimed) was being reduced to a series of almost irrational leaps. Not that most of us scientists were that bothered you understand. Much of this “revolution” passed us by in our isolation from such intellectual fashions.

Perhaps it was because in principle we have to deal with reality as it is (or at least as we perceive it to be). All scientist are in some sense “realists” – there is a real external world, independent of my ideas and feelings about it, that can be prodded and poked. The methods that had stood us in good stead for a couple of centuries, seemed still, indeed seem still, to serve us well. So we left our colleagues in the humanities and social sciences to argue the toss over who was oppressing whom by this or that word or sentence, continued to prod and poke, wrote up and published our results, refined and refuted, and generally just got on with things. Admittedly, neither we nor our students thought as hard as we should have done about the thinking we were actually doing (something I lamented here). But, as the pandemic has demonstrated, it’s probably just as well that we did "just get on with it". Some of the most powerful tools that have led to effective vaccines being delivered in record time stem from just quietly beavering away. And perhaps that’s why, particularly in the pandemic, postmodernism appears to be in big trouble. At least in its more extreme forms it has been unmasked as is a diversion, an entertainment and an indulgence that can’t cope with hard realities. The science that is now saving lives has turned out to be more important than academic word games.

Personally, while not a complete fan of modernism (reason has always had its limits), some of postmodernism’s contentions always seemed ridiculous to me. There is a whole strand that prizes obscure language and then seeks to claim that reason must always be subverted by slippery communication with mixed motives. Words cannot be trusted to accurately convey meaning, they are inevitably ambiguous. The problem is that the proponents of these views apparently thought this only applied to other people’s words; their words were to be taken at face value. But this has to be a sort of self-refuting proposition. But it gets worse. It was the postmoderns’ deliberately obscure and convoluted language that turned out to be easily subverted and exploited by parody.

Famously, the physicist Alan Sokal composed a nonsense paper and submitted it to a prominent academic journal (Social Text). The paper went through the normal (rigorous?) review processes of the journal, and was accepted for publication in a revised form. It was, in Sokal’s words “brimming with absurdities and blatant non sequiturs” but was actually published in a special edition of the journal. The aftermath of the hoax, and the debate which followed, are detailed by Sokal and Bricmont in their book “Intellectual Impostures”. This was not a one off. In 2018 essentially the same thing was done on a much larger scale. Twenty fake papers were submitted to a number of prominent academic journals, bastions of postmodern thought in various forms. Of the 20 papers, seven were accepted for publication, and most of the others might well have been had not the perpetrators called time on their hoax. Only six of the twenty were thrown out. This was a field in trouble.

It turns out the trouble may be have been terminal. Having almost missed the “death”of new atheism, I may actually have missed the death of postmodernism. Before some of us had even begun to grapple with it at our end of the campus, Alan Kirby was writing in “Philosophy Now” that we all really should be post-postmodernists. That was back in 2006. It seems that words do convey meaning, and reason is reasonable again.  Some of us never thought anything different.