It's not necessary to think about words all the time, but sometimes it is essential.
Over the last two posts (parts 10 and 11), I explored how words are representations of our experience of reality, and yet we treat them as part of the things they represent. We also tend to assume that if a word exists, a 'thing' for that word must also exist, even if the word represents an idea (like freedom) rather than a thing.
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This false assumption is brilliant and productive. With it, we create and share amazing knowledge, technology, literature, and much more with words.
However, it is foolhardy to forget entirely that we make such an assumption. It dulls our awareness to the deliberate destruction of words as a way to supplant the social construction of truth.
Further developing the house construction metaphor for truth, in the previous post I added handmade unfired bricks to build with. They are a metaphor for our human tendency to treat words as objective and solid things, despite being subjective and abstract representations. With these solid - yet easily damaged and eroded - bricks we build our floor of facts and our walls of explanatory stories. The house feels snug and safe.
We forget all about words and the social construction of truth. Luckily a whole pile of people is ready to remind us.
Crafting 'non-word' representations of reality and truth
Those who craft representations of human experience without using words - including the cartographer, the visual artist, the choreographer and the technical illustrator for the physical sciences - highlight the central role of representations in constructing our sense of truth.
Those who make maps
We tend to think that maps¹ show us the physical world; we interpret the drawings in the sand, on paper or on the screen as revealing 'reality'.
See the animation on Twitter |
But as representations, maps are necessarily subjective. Cartographers consider maps as a 'human-subjective product' or a communication device distorted by human subjectivity. In making a map, a cartographer has to decide what to pay attention to, what to prioritise, what to ignore, etc., all subjective decisions. Maps have played a role in propaganda. As representations, they inevitably involve distortions of the human experience of reality.
Maps represent the physical world much like words represent our experience of the world. Words help us 'map' our physical and social experiences, by representing borders, topographical features, safe places, perils and ways to understand our place in reality.
If Google Maps takes us to a dead-end street, we recognise the map is wrong. However, when we end up in strife with words, we don't necessarily make the same conclusion.
This is captured in Korzybski's famous dictum about making errors with words: 'the map is not the territory'. When we forget that words are representations, we forget that the explanatory stories we tell ourselves are not objective reality.
Those who create visual arts
Art of all types exposes and challenges our construction of truth: who and what we pay attention to, what motivates how we interpret 'facts' about the world, who we leave out of the 'building process'. Art can highlight what and who we've ignored in the way we understand the world.
Read the story of Little Amal art work here |
Working without words - the building blocks of our sense of truth - the visual arts can often challenge our many unacknowledged assumptions. They can point to the assumptions, values and ideas that we forget are loaded into our words. Engaging with the visual arts can be reveal more about our shared experience of reality where more words may simply muddy the story.
The visual arts constantly remind us of the social construction process and the vulnerability of the sense of truth that we build.
The most powerful art illuminates the manipulation or attempts at control of truth.
Those who craft with human movement
Another non-word form of representation reality involves crafting with dance and puppeteering.
Without using words, the movement of the body (or the puppet) through simulated experiences of the world can evoke shared human perspectives, cut through barriers created by words (e.g. us versus them), and challenge our firm grip on our sense of truth.
Watch this video with the sound off first, so the song lyrics don't influence your interpretation of the choreography. Then re-watch with the sound to see just how effectively the dance communicated an aspect of the human experience. Click here if it does not play.
To me, this dance speaks of interactions and situations where agency and control over what happens in your life is taken from you. Powerfully, you don't need to know what specific experience of loss is involved.
Using human movement to explore our experience of reality illuminates the various strengths and pitfalls in using words in the social construction of truth.
Those who probe and illustrate reality
We are familiar with images of many things we've never seen, for example, DNA or the entire Milky Way. While we think we know what these things look like, what we have seen are artists' representations of non-visible and often collated information.
For DNA, we 'know' it has the shape of a double helix, not because anyone has seen it, but because that is the only shape that can explain the indirect pattern of diffraction from the X-ray crystallography. The X-ray image is generated by averaging scatter patterns, not taking a 'picture' of DNA. It looks amazing, but we have way more yet to learn about what DNA looks like within a cell.
For the Milky Way, all the pictures that depict our galaxy are either artists' impressions or pictures (based on collated radio and light wave information) of other spiral galaxies. Fair enough: no one has been outside of our galaxy to take an image of the whole Milky Way! Recently (2019), key assumptions in the artists' representations were questioned by new information; each avenue of research adds information and clarity to the picture, but it remains a representation.
So, we don't really know what DNA or the Milky Way look like; what we see are representations. These are very useful, communicate some information, but can be misleading if scientists working in those areas forget they are subjective representations of reality.
Most of the rest of us think we know reality because we've seen those representations²; not unlike how we assume words reveal reality, and our sense of truth.
Exploring, recording and sharing reality
Those who use words to explore reality - including writers, comedians, historians and journalists - develop refined skills in using these representations to construct truth.
Those who write about the world of others
Those who tell stories and write fiction, opinion, poetry, etc., craft with words to shine a light on the experiences of people otherwise hidden from us, from perspectives outside our own. The written art forms take us into the inner worlds of others, using words as representations to capture the controlled chaos of living.
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Literature provides nuance, contradiction and complexity to challenge our confidence that we know reality, that our personal version of truth is the 'real truth'. The storyteller constantly reminds us the world is beyond simple comprehension, full of numerous claims and parts and experiences, replete with contradictions and sometimes irreconcilable conflicts amongst the perspectives we each have on the world. In the process of creating 'new realities' into which the reader or listener ventures, the writer or storyteller explores understandings of the world, affirming some and challenging others.
Literature highlights how our understanding of the world depends on our context and experience, and is thus socially constructed, and how our desire for a single, simple and coherent picture of reality is a search for certainty rather than truth.
Those who make us laugh with words
Source: First Dog on the Moon |
At their best, comedians and cartoonists 'punch up' at the many lies and distortions of words used by those in power to manipulate or control the rest of us.
Do read the full First Dog on the Moon cartoon. I chose it because the wallaby builds a house of lies, not unlike constructing a house of truth.
Those who write non-fiction
Others who reveal the power and pitfalls of words as representations are historians, social commentators, journalists and other non-fiction writers ³. Those reading their words expect these professional writers will provide facts about reality.
Only in the last few decades has the illusion of objectivity in history, social commentary, and journalism has been cast aside, so that subjective representation and the specific perspectives are understood to be expected. But their words continue to significantly influence our sense of reality.
As the podcast 'You're wrong about' shows, our sense of truth based on the writing of historians, commentators, journalists, etc., is at best partial, regularly a bit flawed, and often quite wrong. But very firm, nevertheless.
Those who write non-fiction show us the amazing potential and terrible power that words have in our sense of truth.
Being left out of the construction of truth
Those excluded by words
People may be more alert to words as subjective and loaded representations when they find themselves excluded by those words.
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Since the time of middle English (roughly 1200), English speaking societies have contended that the word man includes both men and women, but women knew from their own experience that it most definitely did not. For example, when writing 'all men are created equal', the US constitutional framers did not mean 'men' to include women. The use of the word man to represent 'human' evokes a view of reality where men are dominant and primary, and women are subordinate and irrelevant most of the time.
It is no surprise that those who would consider this word a misrepresentation would be those it excludes, i.e. women.
Those excluded from interpreting reality
Some people are more aware of the social construction of truth, through being forced to observing it from outside.
In the past, Western societies based social conventions and explanatory stories on what they considered a widespread consensus about the nature of reality. But that consensus was built by excluding anyone not middle-class, male and white. That's a lot of people whose perspectives, understanding of the world, experience and interpretation of reality, etc., was kept out of the explanatory stories Western society tells itself as part of constructing truth.
Some pine nowadays for the golden era of truth (was it before post-truth?). But that 'era' was only possible because those in power imposed their version of truth as the single and correct version.
Those written out of the metaphoric building code
Earlier in the series, I highlighted the importance of the metaphoric building code - the shared rules about how to construct truth.
In the 1960s, post-modernism highlighted that the building code for truth was controlled by western, upper-middle class, white men. Post-modernism challenged the declaration of an absolute and external truth by this small group, countering that one's sense of truth was relative to who, when and where you were in the world.
Through highlighting that truth is constructed by those permitted into the process by the building code for truth, the post-modernists were arguing that more people and more views should be allowed in. Using this perspective, various groups have protested the processes or power structures that exclude them. At their core, feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic and anti-capitalist movements all push those controlling the building code for truth to allow them to participate.
Unfortunately, instead of acknowledging their control of the building code kept a lot of people out of the construction of truth, those whose power would be challenged by any change have instead highjacked the concepts of relativism as a tool to destroy agreement on how we agree on reality. (More next post.)
Studying the human tools of constructing truth
I have touched on this group throughout the series, so will comment here only briefly.
Those who study words and language (as discussed in part 10) quickly come to realise the slippery nature of words in constructing a picture of reality and of truth. Linguists and sociologists study what we do with words to encapsulate ideas, persuade others to accept our ideas, set the 'rules' of logic, and how we assume that words give us knowledge of reality.
Those who study human perception, neurology, thinking and psychology constantly expose the foibles and limits of our tools for constructing a sense of reality, from our organs of perception, our biases in thinking, and our tendency to choose what feels safe and is known. Despite how much these professions reveal about the nature and extent of our restricted perception, our flawed interpretation, and our biased thinking (remember the 200 plus thinking errors in part 4), we continue to think we absolutely do know reality directly through observation.
Solomon Asch study |
Those who study how we behave when our sense of truth is destroyed highlight our emotional attachment to it, our distress when this is revealed to be wrong, and the ability of humans to reduce the discomfort of a mismatch between what we see and what we believe (cognitive dissonance) by simply ignoring what we see. Solomon Asch’s classic 1956 study showed we can disregard the evidence of our own eyes when we think everyone else believes something else. Asch asked participants in a small group to judge which of three numbered lines was the same length as the target line. However, only one person was a real participant, the others were 'stooges' instructed to sometimes give the same, patently wrong answer before the subject of the experiment answered. The result: about a third of the time subjects went along with the majority view, though it was clearly wrong. Participants believed the majority must be right, despite what they could see.
Those who study the Epistemology (knowing and knowledge) and the use of Logic (reasoning and truth) - the philosophers - reveal how deluded we are to assume that words are a direct link to reality. These areas of philosophy are impossible to summarise here, but they suggest that perhaps we should all grip our personal sense of truth a little less fiercely. (More next post.)
Manipulating truth to achieve profit and power
Despite our attachment to the idea of an objective truth, lots of people understand all too well that controlling truth is a means to controlling other people. Those who study, profiteer from, compete via, and engage in controlling truth all starkly remind us of the role of words in its social construction.
Those who study power structures in human societies understand the link between words as subjective and slippery representations, the intentions with which they are used, and the importance of appealing explanatory stories to make claims for power. Those who study the subordination of colonised people, minorities, women, children, and others explore how this is facilitated through 'controlling the narrative' - what people are told is going on - a narrative which justifies the maltreatment of other humans.
Those who are experts in manipulating truth to make a profit take advantage of the subjective nature of words. Part 7 explained how advertisers and political lobbyists consciously manipulate people's sense of truth to making a profit. Analysis of marketing and lobbying strategies lays bare the vulnerability of the social construction of truth.
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Which brings us to the final group - those who deliberately destroy words. The propagandist knows that as abstract representations of our experience of reality words can be used and abused to construct various versions of truth.
Propagandists know that the truth can be controlled through a handful of fairly simple strategies, beginning with the destruction of shared meaning of words.
The control of truth starts with words
In part 8, I defined propaganda as the supplanting of the social construction of truth by a single person as the source of truth.
George Orwell famously said, “Political chaos is connected with the decay of language”.
A powerful propaganda strategy involves damaging the meaning of words so that the process of shared meaning making is constantly undermined, and uncertainty is heightened. It also hides the propagandists' real aims.See David Marr's example (text box) of damaging and denaturing words to hide the actions of those in power.
Hannah Arendt uses the term de-factualization to describe an early stage in a propaganda campaign of deliberate destruction of shared word meanings and damaging our sense that 'facts' are based on our experience of reality. In damaging a key aspect of the social construction of truth, propagandists turn words into weapons against the people they seek to control and against those who try to oppose them.
After WWII, German writers felt the need to repair their language, decayed and destroyed by Nazi propaganda. They understood that words were powerful in constructing reality, regaining a shared sense of truth, and that new words needed to be built, just as country needed to be rebuilt. A new form of literature emerged: trummerliteratur - rubble literature. It served to anchor words closer to bare reality, without unnecessary or even evaluative information.
After the deliberate destruction, a deliberate rebuilding.
We need to pay attention to words
In summary, numerous people remind us that truth is social constructed, most effectively grounded in what we can know about reality and with the involvement of many people in the process. Numerous people highlight the conundrum of using words to represent our experience of reality and sense of truth - word can be both productive and destructive.Unsurprisingly, these people are often attacked by those in power and those who want to control our sense of truth. The devaluing the arts, literature and academia, and the denaturing history and journalism, etc., ensures their reminders are not heard by many.
Novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch said, 'The quality of a civilisation depends upon its ability to discern and reveal truth, and this depends upon the scope and purity of its language. Any dictator attempts to degrade the language because this is a way to mystify. And many of the quasi-automatic operations of capitalist industrial society tend also toward mystification and the blunting of verbal precision.'
Words simultaneously unlock and constrain our understanding of the world. Because they are subjective representations, words are perfect for manipulation. Their flexibility and evocative power makes them useful for recording facts and sharing explanatory stories about the world. It also makes them easy to degrade and blunt by those who want to control truth.
Source: Susan Sontag |
We forget that words are subjective representations; we forget that words are inevitably loaded with values, assumptions and beliefs. We think 'our' words are stable, neutral and right, and 'theirs' are just wrong. Unfortunately, we cannot resist the deliberate destruction of words if we are not alert to the specific version of reality a word evokes, unless we pay attention to words and to the world.
Despite the numerous reminders of the vagaries of words as representations and the social construction of truth, we continue to engage in a search for an objective, external, absolute, 'out there' truth.
Truth is such a powerful human need and 'the journey to truth' is such a powerful metaphor.
Footnotes
- By 'map', I mean anything from local track drawings to computer assisted cartography. Possibly less so now in the era of following minute by minute directions that do not require any sense of orientation, but historically maps have been a central part of many people's sense of 'where they are. Maybe now that google maps can send us into dead-end streets, we might be more aware of the disconnect between 'maps' and the territory they represent.
- Likewise, those who represent our social experiences and personal relationships with diagrams and other visual 'language' forms are making subjective decisions at every stage, particularly what to include and what to leave out. Read about this at Spurious - graphic propaganda. But too often we treat all these visual representations as if they were objective images of reality.
- Well at least those who adhere the principles of their professions.
- James Baldwin quote made by the author with text from https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/08/20/james-baldwin-the-creative-process/
- Animating the Mercator projection to the true size of each country in relation to all the others. Neil Kaye on Twitter @neilrkaye Oct 12, 2018 https://twitter.com/neilrkaye/status/1050740679008296967
- Little Amal by Travel between the pages https://travelbetweenthepages.com/2020/10/11/the-walk/ [CC BY-NC-ND]
- Dance choreographed by Larkin Poynton, Danced by Chibi Unitychoreography at https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=BD-z8ZqVpP8
- DNA Image credit: AS Rose et al (2018) found at https://www.forbes.com/sites/evaamsen/2019/04/25/what-does-dna-look-like-after-66-years-were-still-learning-more/?sh=20fda468536b and Milky Way Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R found at https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/our-milky-way-gets-a-makeover-artist-concept [Public domain]
- The beginning of wisdom Susan Sontag quote made by the author from text at https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/30/susan-sontag-writing-storytelling-at-the-same-time/
- First Dog on the Moon cartoon extract from full toon at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/12/once-upon-a-time-there-was-a-wallaby-who-lied
- Ursula Le Guin quote made by the author with text from https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/10/17/ursula-k-le-guin-gender/
- Solomon Asch stimulus material by Saul McLeod https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Psychology-asch-1951.png via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY]
- Theirs and ours cartoon. Tom Gauld on Twitter @tomgauld Mar 1, 2015 https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888 [With attribution]
- David Marr quote created by the author from text at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/26/this-governments-grubby-language-on-afghanistan-refugees-shows-were-reliving-tampa-times
- Earth without art is just 'eh' snipped from social media [No source]
- Love Words by Susan Sontag from The Marginalian https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/30/susan-sontag-writing-storytelling-at-the-same-time/
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