Smart (part 2) - a way with words

In part 1, I started exploring why the myriad articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI) leave me feeling so frustrated. 

To start, I explored the abstract and contested concept of intelligence in humans, and then as applied to machines. I concluded that while so-called AI can do some gobsmackingly sophisticated and incredibly useful things, and can far surpass human capacities in specific functions, this isn’t what I would label intelligent. 

So, I worked out one major source of frustration for me is the lack of sophisticated understanding about intelligence in humans by those trying to create an artificial version of intelligence. Disconcertingly, computer science is building on the computational model¹ of human intelligence just as cognitive science is abandoning it!   

Despite my personal doubts, the latest AI-based chatbots appear to many users to be really quite smart. They communicate via voice or text, using language a lot like humans do. AI programmers are focusing their efforts on the ability of smart chat bots to interact with humans in natural language.  

Are the AI research scientists claiming that language makes machines intelligent? That sounds like Wordly Exploration territory!

Post truth (part 12) - reminders about words and truth

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. 

Source

Because we use words to make sense of the world, and because we need a stable sense of reality to function, we treat words as if they were objective, neutral and stable. We ignore that we use subjective, value-laden, abstract representations (words) to construct our sense of truth. We need both to be stable and solid - so we just assume they are. 

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. 

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.  

Post-truth (index) - grandma tours the house

This series began in November 2020 with my puzzlement about the word post-truth and what it reveals about the word truth. 

I had no idea then how hard it would be to explore these words. They are complex and difficult to write about. I am satisfied I've added some clarity to the thinking on this question.

However, I believe that if you can’t explain a complex idea to your grandmother, it could mean you may be hiding behind vagueness, abstract words and fuzzy concepts. 

So, this post takes my gran on a tour of the house construction metaphor for truth. 

It serves as a series index, lists what is planned, and acknowledges some areas that I really should go back to. 

That is, if gran doesn’t tell me that it’s all claptrap.

Post-truth (part 9) - camouflage for an old adversary

House Under Construction
Kazimir Malevich
Source 

The emergence of the word post-truth sparks a very old philosophical question - what is truth? 

I've now written over 20,000 words in 8 posts to attempt to explain how I see truth. (A full recap and a contents page are coming.) 

My exploration has focused on how humanity pictures the concept of truth. I contend that our most common image - the metaphor of the tortuous journey to an absolute objective truth as a destination (out there) - is part of problem in thinking clearly about truth and post-truth. 

In this series, I have presented a new metaphor that is a better fit with humanity's relationship with truth - the house construction metaphor. The metaphor represents the shared process of constructing and maintaining the house - our sense of truth - and also the vulnerabilities inherent in any project that involves a lot of people. 

The house construction metaphor illustrates that truth is personal, provisional, and socially constructed by humans, and that is not only okay, it is inevitable. Our concept of truth, as I see it, is the outcome of our human needs. 

So, how does the new metaphor help in understanding post-truth? 

Post truth (part 8) - persuasion or propaganda

In the last post, I explored the motivations of those involved in the social agreement for truth, with a focus on how marketing and lobbying work to influence that agreement for their own aims. 

While this influence can be sinister, my main point was that we are rather cavalier about overt manipulation of truth, even as it infiltrates our minds and shapes our actions. The strategies of marketing and lobbying reveal so much about the social construction of truth. 

And yet, still we prefer to think about truth as objective and absolute, and advertising as inconsequential or irrelevant to truth. Many disagree, including the insightful Daniel Boorstin. 

This series began in November 2020 with my puzzlement about the word post-truth and what it means about the word truth. I had no idea then how hard it would be to explore these concepts.

In parts 1 and 2, I pointed out that the false journey metaphor for truth has allowed the emergence of post-truth to be laughed off as a problem of some 'stupid', misinformed or misguided individuals, or decried as the lies of narcissistic or sociopathic political figures to stay in power. 'Objective truth still exists', we say to ourselves: 'They are just wrong'. 

I don't feel so disdainful. I speculated in that post that post-truth is a symptom of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign to control truth. But I didn't really understand how anyone could succeed in controlling truth. 

To explore this idea, I created a new metaphor, the house construction metaphor for truth. 

In this post I use the house metaphor to think about propaganda, the final word to explore before I can come back to where I started and ponder what we mean by truth and post-truth.

Post truth (part 7) - revealing our relationship to truth

In the previous six posts in this series, I have described humanity's relationship to truth through the house construction metaphor. (The series starts here.)

Now, we can begin to explore the various contests of truth. These arise partly from our poor understanding of the human construction and relationship to truth, and our prevailing but misleading journey metaphor for truth.

In this post, I am exploring the motivations of those involved in the social agreement for truth, including those who would like to influence that agreement for their own benefit. 

Average - typical, conforming and invisible

It seems a lot of us suffer from FOBA: the fear of being average. This being Wordly Explorations, I wondered if the word average itself was part of the problem.

In part 1 of Average, I explored how people use and misuse the concept of average from statistics. I started with the statistics meanings of average - a single number (score) to represent a group, and normal - a particular pattern of the spread of different numbers/scores of a population. Two useful concepts for specific uses.

However, while the word average retains the 'authority of maths' in everyday use, it slides to mean normal (as in not abnormal), mediocre, and moral. It is mis-used to mean normal as in 'how we should all be'. This can cause considerable grief. 

That explains some of the sloppy word use that sits behind FOBA.  

In this post, I am exploring how the word average, used to mean normal, ends up meaning boring… and there's more grief as well.

Post-truth (part 6) - the building code for truth

Unlike the dictionary definition provided in part 1, this series has shown that the human relationship to truth involves much more than simply finding information that accords with fact or reality.  

Despite this, we are extremely reluctant to accept that truth is a social agreement using explanatory stories shaped by our cognitive biases and our deep need to believe that makes us feel safe. 

Everything in our being wishes that truth were absolute and objective. Otherwise, it raises a very uncomfortable question. 

If truth is not objective and absolute, is it completely arbitrary, disconnected from facts, even delusional?  

Does accepting that truth is socially constructed also mean accepting that 'facts' don't matter? How can we possibly agree that truth may not accurately reflect reality, when we have deep psychological needs for certainty and understanding how the world works? If we let go of our absolutes and our certainty, what will we hold onto for safety? 

Distress at the idea of truth as a social agreement is the result of a false dichotomy. We wrongly assume that the opposite of an absolute and objective 'real truth' is an arbitrary and delusional 'unreal truth'. But it's much more complicated than this misleading dichotomy. 

A more useful question to ask is what (usually) stops an individual from making up their own arbitrary explanatory story and calling that truth? 

The answer is that the social agreement on truth is tightly controlled and very real. 

Average - normal, mediocre and moral

Do you suffer from FOBA: a fear of being average?

FOBA, sometimes FOBO (fear of being ordinary), seems to be pretty common (here, here, here and here). If you suffer from a fear of being average at least some of the time, then you probably are … um… average.   

When I read the word average in articles about FOBA, I see several other meanings lurking behind it.

To me, fear of being average appears to be a modern condition caused not by illness or injustice, but by sloppy word use. Sloppy enough to cover a fear of something else entirely.

In this post, I focus on average when it is used and misused to mean normal, and in part 2 I'm going to explore average used to mean boring. 

Post-truth (part 5) - from hmmm? to ah-ha!

This post builds on the ideas explored in the previous Post truth posts: part 1 - a false metaphor, part 2 - a metaphor that fits, part 3 - reviewing the project brief and part 4 - tell me a story. 

In part 4, I described how the walls of the metaphoric house of truth are constructed. The metaphoric walls represent our interwoven explanatory stories, shared and reinforced by lots of people throughout life. Our explanatory stories run constantly under our thinking, most often without our awareness. It's hard for us to pull out any single 'story', think critically about our understanding of the world, or notice if some stories have only a tenuous link to 'facts' about reality (the metaphorical floor). 

But we don't really want to anyway; why take a wrecking ball to the walls of our own house? We like living there!

In the last post, I suggested that our shared explanatory stories meet fundamental human needs in a way that facts cannot. Those needs include our need to understand 'cause and effect' so we can do things, out need to belong and share a sense of reality with others, and our need to feel safe. 

Here's an idea: truth is the status that we give to the explanatory stories that meet these human needs. 

'Whoa!?!' you say. 'Don't facts count for anything? Doesn't being right or accurate matter? Can I just call any random idea truth if it 'feels' good then?'

Very important questions. To begin to answer them, in this post I'm looking into the nature of our relationship to truth, how truth meets fundamental human needs.

I want to explore how truth makes us feel.

Post-truth (part 4) - tell me a story

Welcome to part 4 of the Post-truth series. Well done for staying the course! 

The aim of this series is to explore humanity's relationship to truth from a new perspective. I want to explore what's behind the numerous contests of truth through concepts including objectivity, subjectivity, relativity, the boundaries to what we can know, the place of untruth in all its guises, and the concept of post-truth. 

No rest in the construction of truth!

"Part 4?!" you might be thinking. Is truth really such a massive topic? Is truth really that complicated to write about? These questions remind me of the deep appeal of the journey metaphor for truth. It suggests that when we find it, truth will be simple and pure and absolute. We will KNOW. Then we can rest. 

But that's one of the many problems with the journey metaphor: truth just isn't simple and pure and absolute. 

My new house metaphor symbolises that truth is a complex and ongoing social construction process. It's tiring; there is no rest. 

At first, this might seem a much less appealing metaphor for truth. 

It might also feel like the ideas behind the house construction metaphor are not hanging together yet. That could be because my exploration is only about one-quarter of the way through!¹ 

However, if I can nail it (bad metaphor-related pun intended), I will explain soon how the better fit of the house construction metaphor for truth provides some big payoffs…

This post builds on the content explored in the previous Post truth posts: part 1 - a false metaphor, part 2 - a metaphor that fits, and part 3 - reviewing the project brief. 

We turn now to the exciting process of constructing truth. 

Post-truth (part 3) - reviewing the project brief

Truth is a massive topic and, as I said in part 1 of this series on post-truth, my writing comes after thousands (if not millions) of articles, comments, philosophical schools, books, memes, scientific debates, epistemological feuds, personal disagreements, psychological studies, ideological assertions and legal contests about truth. 

Click to enlarge

In part 1, I described how the dominant metaphor for truth – a journey to find truth – is a poor fit. Not just that, it creates problems for humanity’s relationship with truth. It stops us understanding what is happening with post-truth.

In part 2, I introduced a new metaphor - the construction of a house. I briefly outlined each of the components of the house: the ground (objective reality), the footings and foundations (our attempts to probe and understand reality), the floor (facts about reality as perceived and determined by humans), the walls (social consensus on truth) and the roof (psychological security of confidence in truth). 

I intended to follow this with a post explaining the metaphoric building processes (social agreement on truth) and the building code (social influences on these components and processes). Finally, I planned to get to a discussion about post-truth. 

I was aware I was skating rapidly over the details in the new metaphor and how I have selected from the extensive previous writing on truth. So quickly, I left too much out. Not surprisingly, it raised a few questions for readers.

This third post in the Post-truth series is a response to some of the questions. It seemed like a good time to go back to the metaphoric drawing board to revisit the project brief for the construction of truth. 

Post-truth (part 2) - we need a metaphor for truth that fits

In part 1 of Post-truth, I explored the dominant metaphor for truth: humanity on a long journey to a destination.

We use metaphors all the time to talk and think about the world.¹ A familiar metaphor is conventional ideas as 'inside the box' and new ideas as 'thinking outside the box'. There is no actual box, but the metaphoric box conveys complex concepts about creativity and originality. 

A good metaphor helps us think about the world. A bad metaphor can be misleading. 

A 'journey' is not a very good metaphor for truth. It doesn't fit well. In fact, I think it is misleading and, among other things, it blinds humanity to the early signs of emerging dictators and power-mongers. 

In this post, I introduce a new metaphor and a new way of thinking about truth. My goal is to incorporate the numerous contests of ideas about truth, e.g. objective versus relative, humanity's need to know truth, the boundaries to 'knowing', and the place of 'untruth' in all its guises.

This post introduces and explains the 'fit' of my new metaphor. In subsequent posts, I will explain how I see it can accommodate these conflicting ideas about truth.² 

I'm exploring old ideas but trying to think outside the box. 

Armed only with a new metaphor.

Post-truth (part 1) - revealing a false metaphor for truth

Truth is a word that captures the human mind and then blows that mind into little bits. 

Despite thousands of years of writing by philosophers, religious thinkers and scientists we really don't have firm grounding for the concept of truth. What do we mean by the word truth? How do we know what we know? Can we really know anything? What is reality; what is an hallucination? What is a fact; what is evidence? Who decides what is true? When it is okay to lie or should we never? All big questions. 

History, psychology and politics are full of argument about what we know - is what we think we know true, is it a selective and shared delusion, is it even a lie? Most of us have had conversations where agreement on the truth was impossible. 

We all hold a sense that what we know is true, until someone asks us how we can be so sure. It's a pretty difficult concept.

Despite this, most of us¹ seem to almost casually accept that truth exists… 

But maybe not for much longer. According to some, we are now in a post-truth era.  

Does this mean that we live in a time after truth? Has truth finished (and where are all those answers?) Or has it been discredited as a big joke? Do we each get to have our own truth now?  

More interestingly to me, how can we understand the word post-truth if we have such a shaky grasp on what the word truth means? 

A prelude to post-truth

Well, this post has been harder than usual to wrangle into shape.

The word I am currently exploring is post-truth and what it tells us about how we think about the word and concept truth. 

By 'we' I mean you and I (not so much philosophers or religious writers or scientists who write a lot about it!) So, I'm making some assumptions about how you think about truth. It may be wrong, but I have to.

As a prelude to the series, perhaps you could ponder how you think about this difficult concept. Then you will be ready to check and challenge my assumptions. 

Do you think of truth as a set of objective facts, a principle, a collection of slippery contestable ideas, one interpretation among many? Who decides what the truth is? Why do you think humanity needs to know the truth? How have you felt when what you had believed to be true is shown to actually be false? How do you think about some of the strange and discredited ideas that people believed to be true in the past?  Despite the recent flurry around relativism and the current palaver about post-truth, do you nevertheless continue to think - or feel - that truth exists? 

What does the word truth mean to you? And given that, how does the word post-truth relate to that idea. If you had to think of an image or picture for humanity's relationship to truth, what might that image be? 

So many questions.

That's what I've been exploring and drawing, among too many other things to get this finished. I've changed direction several times, as the concept of truth seems to resist close scrutiny.  

Essentially, I have no answers to the many questions, but I have got a nice picture. And a new, improved, and more useful metaphor for truth.

Hopefully I can share it soon, if the world will permit.

Enough - when it means anything but

In part 1, I explored the reasons the word enough is spelled so weirdly, and traced over 1000 years of the history of the English language to do so. 

Source

In recent times, numerous attempts have been made to make English spelling more regular, less chaotic, but all have failed. Yes, there really was a group called the Speling Reform Asoshiasun. 

So enough continues to be spelled as enough. 

Spelling is one of the areas of language; it changes over time through popular use, but history shows it rarely does so through dictate and rule making. 

However, it's in popular use that the word enough gets totally weird. Enough might occasionally be spelled enuf, and we get it; but sometimes its meaning changes within a single sentence. And we get that too. That's why 'Enuf is enuf' makes sense.

The way we use words beyond their literal meaning can tell us so much about ourselves. 

What can we learn by exploring the word enough? 

The market - a solution to what? Part 2

In part 1, I explored the nature of 'the market'. The word is ubiquitous but often quite vague.

So far, I have clarified 'the market' is a process for allocating resources for humans. The economy is very complex, so some simplifying ideas are essential: 'the market' simplifies ideas about the world into 'things', 'ownership' and 'utility (use value)'. 

When an old meme is perfect. Source

Knowing that, I want to explore the idea of a 'market-based solution'. To the problem of ensuring enough apples and turnips to meet the food needs of people, it seems reasonable. But for the problem of ensuring clean air for people to breathe, I can't see that as a matter of 'things', 'ownership' and 'utility'. 

So how does the market provide a solution? To answer this, I need to delve into how 'the market' process functions and how it measures success and failure.

Now, a warning: this exploration involves some nerdy, abstract, and perplexingly vague economic words. My focus, however, is not economics jargon, but the ideas about the world that economics relies on to explain the way 'the market' works. 

Economics¹ can make you feel confused and lost, but my suspicion has always been that it is deliberately opaque. So, stay with me!

In fact, as you're about to read, it is downright strange and scary.

The market - a solution to what?

I've been thinking about the market lately. Not the local market where I buy fruit and vegetables, chat with the growers about conditions on the farm, see a few people I know, and maybe watch a busker.

See you there Mr Bean! Source

It's this market I hear endlessly about: the energy market needs major revamp; the chief executive has reassured the market; there is no true market for overland flow licences; an Australia-wide view of the aged care market; reform our broken housing market; the labor market added around 242,000 jobs for the month.

So many people seem enamoured with this amazing thing called the market and 'fixing the market' or 'finding a market solution' when we discuss numerous diverse aspects of our society - electricity supply, airline viability, water, aged-care, housing, finding a job. 

But just what is the market? It seems big and ubiquitous, but strangely vague. It's obviously not a place, like my local market. So, what kind of thing is it?

And what makes the market the solution to all sort of pressing social and environmental issues?

Coronavirus - a story of semantic boundaries

We know a lot more now about pandemics than we used to.

Sure, we'd heard of The Plague - the big one in terms of numbers of deaths and social impact back in the 1300s. We know surprisingly little about The Spanish flu despite its global devastation one hundred years ago. Maybe we saw reports on Ebola, HIV, MERS and SARS; but they happened somewhere else to other people. They were managed and stayed outside our immediate sphere of concern. 

See full infographic at Visual Capitalist

But we've been educated recently. 

This snippet of an infographic from Visual Capitalist with disturbing fluffy things as the number of deaths reminds us we have had pandemics and plagues for at least as long as we've recorded human history. (It's seriouly worth a look at the full infographic.)

Personally and socially, pandemics and plagues are devastating, politically they are exploitable crises, environmentally they are warning bells about humanity's disregard for other life forms, and existentially they refuse our preference to ignore our mortality. 

But semantically they are all over the place. 

The naming of pandemics, including the coronavirus, is an intriguing story.

It's a story of semantic boundaries (try singing it to the Brady Bunch theme).