Post truth (part 10) - words are our building blocks

Many posts ago, I started my exploration of the word post-truth.

I've thought about the human experience of reality, the social process of constructing a shared truth, the psychological and social role of truth, the weaknesses in human reasoning about their experience of the world, how many people take advantage of the nature of truth, and ended with the contention that post-truth was a camouflage word for propaganda, which I defined as 'truth determined by one person alone'.

I represented those concepts through the metaphor of the construction of a house - the ground being the reality we assume exists, the foundations and floor being humanity's probing, perception and interpretation of reality, the walls being the explanatory stories about the world, and the roof being the sense of safety and stability we need as humans and as societies to function. Read a summary of the series so far. 

Through the series, I have interrogated many words as part of telling explanatory stories, expositing facts, declaring evidence, and sharing a sense of reality with our society. 

What I have not yet explored is how words work in the construction of truth and how they fit in the house construction metaphor. 

This post explores words as things that humans use, to set the scene for a future post relating this to the construction of truth.  

Immersion and other metaphors for words

In the Wordly Explorations manifesto, I wrote: With words as our vehicle, artefacts and tools, we humans create a coherent sense of ourselves and our world. Our words allow us to reflect on, integrate and share our experiences and our understanding. Words are tools of the human activities of thinking and knowing. Our words allow us to impact the world. 

The metaphors I used for words were vehicles, artefacts and tools. These metaphors represent the function of words. 

However, the most common metaphor for words, talking and language you'll find is one of immersion in water. In this metaphor, we 'swim' all together in a sea of words for making meaning. 

Here's one example, from James Carroll: "Language is to humans what water is to fish. We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language." 

The immersion metaphor represents humanity's relationship with words. Words are all around us, the stuff of our existence, and something we take for granted. The post-structural theorists would suggest words are not individual things to use but an environment in which humans exist. As the poet Iris Murdoch said, 'Words are where we live as human beings and moral and spiritual agents'.  

The immersion metaphor for words highlights a conundrum: it is challenging to think about words and how we use them, because to do so, we have to use words. Words are ubiquitous, they are the stuff of our thinking and communicating. There is no getting outside them. 

We swim in words¹ as we construct a shared and meaningful view of the world. 

But most of the time, we don't realise we are in the metaphoric water. 

So, what the hell is a word?

But what exactly IS a word? The answer depends on who you ask: philosophers, linguists, language educators, neurologists, social scientists, etymologists, therapists, and artists all study words, and all have different definitions. Differences relate to whether individual words are a valid subject of study out of the context of use, and just how wide a context should be considered.² 

I find it more useful to ask: what kind of thing is a word? Which leads to:

♦️ a word is a symbolic unit that humans use to represent a thing or concept they experience.

When I say 'my favourite cup' - the unit my represents the concept of possession by me, the unit cup represents a physical container I drink out of, and the unit favourite represents a complex concept of comparison with other cups. (Words for complex abstract concepts will get more attention in the next post.) In this example, you can see my context is very narrow: just my kitchen and just today. More on that later. 

When we engage in maths, geology, football, morality, gossip, comedy, anecdotes, scientific research, applications for social security, aesthetics and fashion, politics, shoe shopping, film, technology, etc., we use words - symbolic units that represent things or concepts - to do so. 

We humans use words - we talk and listen, we write and read stories, we post and interact online with pictograms and icons, we connect to each other through words and language - all the time. We use words to represent and integrate our experiences into our coherent picture of the world. 

The different forms of words distract from their representative nature

A definition focused on form; not what words are.

As well as the impossibility of 'getting outside of words', there is a second stumbling block when we try to think about words. Words come in different forms, but we don't tend to see these different forms as equivalent ways to 'represent' things and concepts. 

The form of symbolic unit most familiar to most of us is the spoken word. We are so immersed in spoken words that we can easily forget they are symbolic representations. Spoken words evoke a thing or concept so powerfully, we tend to consider them as part of that thing or concept.

We more readily identify the symbolic representative nature of words in non-spoken forms: written words using letters, ideographs (丙), maths symbols (𝛑, ⅀), graphic symbols (♂), pictograms (💬), or hand signs and formalised gestures (👍, 👌). We can see the representation in these word forms.

For some reason, we consider the written word or the maths symbol, etc., to represent the spoken word, but we consider the spoken word to be part of the thing, rather than a representation of it.

This misconception seems to come from languages with alphabetic written systems (English, for example) where the written word form has a phonetic relationship with the spoken word form. In alphabetic writing systems, letters represent sounds ³. Thus the written word form does represent the spoken word form in alphabetic languages. 

However, the fact that in alphabetic languages written words represent spoken words is a distraction from a much more important idea. 

All forms of a word are a representation of a thing or concept. 

Source: pictograms and written words

The equivalent status of spoken words with other symbolic representations is more obvious outside of alphabetic languages. These include ideographic languages (e.g. Chinese), non-spoken languages (e.g. Auslan), and languages used by people who don't have access to talking (e.g. pictograms). In these other language systems, the written/signed/pictorial forms of words do not also have the function of representing spoken words. 

The various spoken, written, formalised gestures, etc. symbolic units are all equivalent but different word forms we use to represent a thing or a concept. The form of words is not my concern here, but it takes up a lot of theoretical and philosophical writing about words, which is why I wanted to clear it up here, and then ignore it.⁴

So when I write 'word' in this post, I am referring to 'a representative symbolic unit', not any specific form of words. However, later, I will be exploring some issues that arise from the assumption that spoken words are part of, rather than representations of, things or concepts.

To understand how words work in the construction of truth, the key is to focus on their symbolic representative nature, not what form they come in. 

What is the nature of representation?  

As symbolic units that represent things and concepts, words (in all forms) are both the means and the limit to making sense of our experience of the world. 

From early childhood, we learn to use words as representations so well and so constantly, that we fail to remember that’s what we are doing. Because we are immersed in words, because we need them to function in society, because they perform well enough much of the time as tools of work and play, and because we use them to hold together our sense of reality, we treat words themselves as stable, neutral, objective and real things. 

Which contradicts what words actually are: representations of things and concepts. 

What does it mean to 'represent'? It means to use something - a word in this case - to 'stand in' for things or concepts. When you use a word, you engage with an abstraction from the thing or concept. When I utter, write, sign or pictogram the word 'cup', the word 'stands in for' my idea of a cup. Your idea of a cup might be different from mine, and very different from a person who lives in rainforest culture (e.g. Yanomami). 

The act of 'representing' - abstracting from a thing or concept - introduces subjectivity, values, contextual factors, etc. It is, after all, a subjective, value-forming, contextually based human being who is doing the abstracting. 

Detail from Stealers Wheel album cover

When we experience misunderstandings or can't communicate  what we want to convey we are forced to confront how subjectivity, values and context lead to 'different representations' of the one word. But we tend to see that as a problem of finding the right words, not as an inherent feature of words themselves. 

However, it is the very nature of representation - using a symbolic unit to 'stand in for' a thing or concept - that means our individual ideas, details, subtleties, etc., will not match those of a listener/reader/viewer. We end up with the fabulous quote from Stealers Wheel. 

It is interesting that we recognise that the many other ways we represent human experience - painting, dance, music, etc. - are subjective and far from neutral or stable. We accept this because we understand they are 'representations'; yet we fail to recall that our main tool for representation - words - is of the same nature.

There is no such thing as a stable, neutral, objective or real (part of) representation - it is always abstract, and it is always subjective. That is the nature of representation. 

That is also thus the nature of words as representative units. As representations, words cannot be absolute, objective, neutral, stable or real (i.e. part of the things and concepts they represent).  

We are so familiar with using words that we often forget that idea. After all, we swim in words: how can we be examining them at the same time as we use them? Well, we can't. ("What the hell is water?")

More than that, we don't want to contemplate that words may not be absolute, objective, neutral, stable, or real because we need to assume they are in order to construct a sense of reality, and our sense of truth. 

Ways to think about humans, representation, words and reality

Um, if you say so, Aristotle. 

Philosophers, sociolinguists and others who try to examine how words work as representations have to use words, i.e. representations, to do so. They end up resorting to obscure (or confusingly familiar) words as jargon for complex ideas about representation and meaning. It can sound pretty loopy. 

Following is a ridiculously brief summary of some ideas about words as representations of things and concepts without the jargon and hopefully not the loopiness. 

Logocentrism 

For a long time, Western philosophy⁵ was based on 'logocentrism', the idea that a word is a representation of the ideal or essence of the thing and concept it stands for. It follows that that humans and the world can be understood by studying words and language.

Words were thought to have a direct relationship to physical and social reality. It's a reassuring view. 

Post-structuralism

This idea was challenged by post-structuralism (PS).⁶ The premise of PS is that words shape our experience of reality in important, continuous, and unavoidable ways. It contends that as humans use words to represent their experience of the world, they imbue those words with human values, beliefs, previous experience, etc. which influence their experience of the world, which influences how they use words to represent that experience, ad infinitum.

In contrast to the earlier, long-standing assumption, words are thought to have no direct or absolute relationship with reality. This is far from reassuring. 

It is hard to consider if, as so many of us do, we have assumed that a word is part of the thing or concept it represents. If we assume that words are reality.

A naïve (and dangerous⁷) interpretation of PS analysis is that reality is not important, and nothing means anything. However, claiming that humans use subjective, value-laden, context-based words to represent their experience of reality does not logically lead to a conclusion that reality is not important, does not exist, or that nothing means anything. 

Rather than challenging the importance of (an assumed) reality, PS writers were trying to explore the process, nature, broader context, limits and pitfalls of representing the human experience of reality with symbolic units - with words. That is extremely challenging to do. 

Post-structuralism says we can consider all those things we do with words - establish facts, share explanatory stories, develop a coherent picture of the word - as incorporating an historical and sociological overlay. We can examine and acknowledge the assumptions and values with which we imbue our words. We can more consciously choose which words to use with this knowledge.

The claims of PS are not really that disturbing if you start from the premise that words are representations; it's just that we cannot hold this idea in our minds without, at the same time, using words to think it. Then you start to wonder whether the words you are using to think about PS ideas are themselves problematic! Then you lose the ideas themselves in a sea of words with no stable or objective meaning. 

You can really start feeling loopy. Lots of people don't like that feeling.

The Structural Differential

Another approach that explores words as representations, at the same time as using them, is the Structural Differential (SD) published by Alfred Korzybski (in Science and Sanity) in 1933. 

The Structural Differential by Korzybski
Adapted from Marino108LFS 

The SD shows the relationship between humans, their experience of reality, and words as representations of that experience. ⁸

From the 'event' (reality), humans 'abstract' to various levels; but there is potentially no end to the levels of abstraction. The lines from the 'event' show the partial 'connection' only between reality and the words we use to represent our experience of it. The label-shaped images represent words as labels, showing decreasing connection to reality as abstraction increases.

The SD illustration is a useful way to reflect on how humans imbue words with values and assumptions (but not what those assumptions are), and also the inescapable subjective nature of representing our experience of reality with words. I find it a much less disconcerting approach than PS, despite covering similar ideas.

Korzybski said that if we forget that words are representations, at increasing abstractions from our experience of reality, we tend to make specific 'errors' with words that include:

• treating the word as if it were part of the thing it stands for (which I've already mentioned) 
• treating the word as the container of the meaning without recognising human's role in creating and construing meaning
• confusing experience with our inferences, assumptions, beliefs about our experience
• imposing a sense of simple dichotomies on reality because we have dichotomous pairs of words (e.g. black/white, right/wrong, etc., my favourite topic), 
• assuming if we have a word (e.g. 'mind') that such a thing exists as an entity. 

I'll revisit these in part 2 and how we embed these 'errors' in explanatory stories and our sense of truth.

Words evoke a reality as they represent things and concepts

We tend to think of words as labels for the world 'out there'. We think that we first experience reality, and then we use words to label the things and concepts that we experience. But 'representation' with words doesn't really work that way.

As young children we are given words by those around us. We use them to label 'bits' of our experience. Over time, we tend to notice only those 'bits' of our experience of reality for which we have words. In part 4 Tell me a story, I referred to this as being 'pre-primed' to interpret reality a certain way.  

And where did those around us get their words?  And the people before them?

Why is it called a podcast?⁹

All words have a history and a context upon which they have been built. This means they are representations built on (usually) generations of people's previous representations of reality.  

The words we use are never actually 'ours'. (Unless we invent a new word; but Urban Dictionary shows that within a day or two other people will have used and imbued that new word with their own values and nuances.) Each word incorporates ideas and assumptions that are built on others' and previous ideas, biases, preferences, assumptions, etc.

This means words come to us already containing a perspective or particular understanding of reality. 

Words are not neutral; every time we speak, write, sign, listen, read, or view a word, we 'bring forth' those particular ideas about reality. 

When we use a word, we evoke a set of ideas and understandings of existence, of reality, including our ideas on human values, power relations, and innumerable other assumptions and ideas, etc. Any number of things we don't say are nevertheless 'contained' within the words we use. 

While we may not 'utter' them, our understanding of reality and ourselves is evoked and maintained through the words we use in the sharing of our stories of meaning.  

The capacity to evoke a person's sense of reality is why words are so powerful. It allows us to do many things we enjoy and benefit from - literature, science, friendly interactions, political argument, etc. 

But it is also a trap - we have words to represent things and concepts, therefore we think we know reality. Because words so powerfully evoke a sense of reality, we mistake this for direct contact with reality. We use words in our explanatory stories, they evoke particular ideas and assumptions about reality, and we think we understand how the word really is. 

We think we know truth. 

Words are not stable, neutral, objective or a direct link to reality, but we have to assume they are to use them

A lot of people get distressed about the idea that words are not stable, neutral, objective or real things, because we mix up our representations of things and concepts - our words - with reality itself. We can't abide the idea that our sense of truth is not based on a stable, neutral and objective reality.

So... humanity creates an abstract system of units to represent and share its experience of reality and then people get upset when told those units are not objective. Now that's really loopy! 

It's amazing to think about: words don't COME from anywhere in a straight line (an neutral 'real' definition) and they don't POINT anywhere in a straight line (an stable, objective meaning).  And yet, assuming that words are stable, neutral, objective and a direct link to reality has enabled humans to do so much. We meet our human needs for belonging, agency and safety with a bunch of subjective representations of our experience of reality, and that feels good. 

We spend all day doing a damn fine job of representation, while forgetting that is what we are doing. Instead, we focus on meeting our fundamental human need to construct a coherent sense of reality and maintain our sense of truth. 

We can 'know' theoretically that words are not at all stable, neutral or objective, and that they are representations rather than 'real things' themselves, but we need to treat them as all these things in order to use them. 

With that assumption, despite how wrong it is, words then become useful building materials for constructing a sense of reality. 

Words are building blocks in the house construction metaphor for truth

Above I talked about the many metaphors for words - the most common of which is immersion in water. Now I want to introduce a new metaphor to refocus my exploration of truth. 

Metaphorically, I want to illustrate that words are representations, but I also want to encompass the human need for words to be solid things. 

In the house construction metaphor for truth, words are the building blocks. But not a crisp clean brick; more like a very rough, handmade, unfired, clay brick with bits of straw sticking out. The clay brick is roughly shaped, made of a mixture of local available materials, maybe a bit ugly, but it does the job of making a 'floor of facts', the 'walls of explanatory stories' and thus holding the roof up.   

There's nothing quite as real and solid as a handmade clay brick, right? You can hold it in your hand. But they also easily crumble, crack, dry out, erode, get smashed by people or eaten by vermin, etc. so they no longer work as part of a structure. 

The handmade brick is an apt metaphor for the way we treat words as 'real' or 'solid'. We need to assume that words are stable and objective, and we are taken aback when they are damaged, eroded, misused, used against us, and no longer work to represent a shared sense of reality.  

The rough handmade clay bricks also 'fits' within the house construction metaphor in the following ways:

• Words are made by humans - we 'squash' them into shapes we want to use just like the clay bricks
• Words always 'carry' a frame of reference of a broader social context - just like handmade bricks 'carry' or incorporate the local context, social traditions and available materials
• Words are small units that make something bigger and more useful - enough clay bricks and you can build a wall
• Words need to be chosen and assembled in the right way to represent something meaningful - bricks likewise must be chosen and assembled with the right methods to create something robust and lasting. 

It's possible to look at an individual word (or brick) but we don't tend to. We integrate them - unexamined - into our explanatory stories, and into the construction of our house of truth. We don't reflect on how individual words can shape our truth.

Our words are part of an elaborate architecture of language developed by people we've never met. This architecture brings forth a sense of reality through which we see and describe the world. 

See what I did there?! I created a representation (a metaphor) of a brick for a representation (a word) of a concept or thing. 

There truly is no end to this abstraction. Talk about loopy!

Words are what we have with which to construct truth

In every aspect of building our sense of truth, words and language play a part. Words influence what we notice and pay attention to, what we think is important, how we interrogate and make sense of the world, how we think about our experiences and other people, how we construct explanatory stories and a coherent sense of meaning, even how we perceive and defend our truth against threats. 

Despite the centrality of words and language in our construction of truth, very few of us remain alert to how words - representations of things and concepts - simultaneously unlock and constrain our understanding of the world. 

This is the inescapable nature of representation; it is not a matter of improving words or changing humans. But we could be more alert to when it does really matter.

We use words - subjective, constantly-shape shifting, and loaded with values, assumptions and biases representations - as building materials to construct truth. What could possibly go wrong?

As you can anticipate, no doubt, quite a lot. 

Footnotes

1. To communicate and share our understanding of the world, we also use facial expression, proximity to others, etc., etc., but words are the most important tool in our relentless drive to make sense of the world. In terms of making and sharing meaning, it's not a competition between words and non-words. However, words have the benefit of being easier to talk about than the meaning of e.g. a specific dance move.
2. A gross simplification, which I hope my readers who are linguists will forgive.
3. Letters represent sounds very roughly and very often inconsistently, but that is not the point here.
4. The primacy of the spoken or written word has been the topic of extensive debate, which I won't be joining, because, to paraphrase it, 'which form of symbolic unit is best?' is a ludicrous question. This debate is really about which form is more appropriate to analyse, but that is about measurement. From my point of view, the written representation of the spoken is irrelevant in understanding how representation works. 
5. I'd love to know more about non-Western ideas about representation, but there are only 24 hours in a day. So that's the limit of my perspective. 
6. I would prefer 'de-structuralism' as it is de = anti the concepts of structuralism, not just post = after structuralism, but it seems 'post' was the prevailing prefix of the day.
7. It is dangerous when it is used by those seeking power who want to impose their own 'reality' and push back against any requirement for some sort of reality-based community as the basis of truth. 
8. I'm not engaged with the rest of General Semantics, but this diagram is helpful without his many broader and refining concepts.
9. A podcast is a digital broadcast made available on the Internet. The word “podcast” is derived from “pod” as in Apple's iPod, the popular portable audio player, and “cast” from “broadcast”, meaning “to transmit for general or public use.” 

Images, used under Creative Commons Licenses

• Mudbrick house by David Stanley https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidstanleytravel/2114818218 [CC BY]
• Fish swim, birds fly, people talk snipped from The Language Nerds FB page [no source]
• This is Water extract made by the author from text from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College sourced at https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace 
• My favourite cup photo by the author
• Definition of a word from Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/word 
• Pictograms as words from https://www.cricksoft.com/uk/clicker-communicator/ipad
• Detail from Stealers Wheel album cover from https://vinylreviews.com/album/stealers-wheel/#gallery-2
• Quote by Aristotle about word meanings https://classicalwisdom.com/philosophy/aristotle/the-illogic-of-contradiction-metaphysics-by-aristotle/ [no use information]
• Post-structuralism saying made by the author based on presentation at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a2dLVx8THA&ab_channel=ChristopherBolton
• Structural differential diagram adapted by the author from a diagram by Marino108LFS https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83005425 [CC BY-SA]
• Walter Lippmann quote made by the author from text at https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/08/04/walter-lippmann-public-opinion-stereotypes
• Do kids today even understand why a podcast is called a podcast? snipped from social media [no source]
• Ludwig Wittgenstein quote made by the author from text at https://lithub.com/how-the-war-made-wittgenstein-the-philosopher-he-was/
• Every word is a bundle snipped from social media [no source]
• Handmade clay bricks by Randall Niles https://flickr.com/photos/randall_niles/5075375173 [CC BY-NC]
• Different representations are what we have to work with VHV.RS https://www.vhv.rs/download/hxhhwxJ_sharing-ideas-png-transparent-png/ [free use]