Research - in praise of the prefix 're-'

Along with widespread distrust in authority, experts and professionals, we see the very common suggestion (or sometimes taunt) online to ‘do your own research’.

I know several people who have 'done their own research' - spending three or four years of their lives working extremely hard on a specific question to earn a PhD. Having watched just how difficult it is, and how they had to put the rest of their life on hold, I don't really want to 'do my own research'.

So, why is it so commonly suggested? And why is it so often accompanied by poor spelling and insults?

Unless… perhaps they don't really mean 'research.'

Tea - with sympathetic adjectives

Tea is the most consumed drink in the world after water.

It's my preferred beverage. Each day, I have about 6 of the estimated 18–20 billion cups of tea consumed around the world. My personal motto is if in doubt, make tea.

From the 1800s, Australians adopted the British penchant for a cup of tea for all occasions and the philosophy that a cup of tea can make things better, at least while you are sipping the steaming brew. (The recent Australian trend to adopt American habits means that coffee has taken over as number one hot beverage, but it sadly lacks any equivalent philosophy. This 2016 poll found the most common drinks in Australia are water, milk, hot coffee, and then tea.)

Tea is so much a part of our days that it turns up in various sayings, and much has been written about how to make tea properly. 

I’ve noticed something else while recently experiencing a series of minor problems escalating to a natural disaster. The adjectives we use to describe a cup of tea hold a secret code for human connection and sympathy.

The @ sign - my symbolic resistance

By guest explorer: Fred Shivvin

Language is dynamic and constantly changing, that is what makes it powerful.

 

But when our language changes - the word meaning, the punctuation, grammar, usage rules, spelling, and more - we often don't like it. Many of us resist many of these changes, and some sticklers never give in.

But for most of us, slowly, gradually, insidiously, the unwelcome changes slip into how we talk and write. The shift happens without our awareness, until one day we find ourselves using the word form, sentence structure, punctuation, etc., that we had resisted in the past.

We don't often recognise our shift to acceptance, we don't remember how long we resisted, we don't often even notice we've stopped fighting language change. And if we do, we might shrug an acknowledgment, and then get on with life and language.

But there's one change I resisted for exactly 27 years and 9 months. Until last week, to be precise.

Cynical - the easy way out

It's that time again in Australia - the time we're not officially in an election but, yeah, we sure are in an election. We can tell by the politicians' behaviour: the clearing of decks, the salves to lobby groups, the announcements, the special funds for 'special' electorates. 

One of the words I hear a lot around election time is cynical. We're told the 'voters are cynical' and wary of political promises, but equally we hear that some politicians undertake actions as 'cynical attempts to win votes'. And we turn off. 

That makes me wonder: where does cynicism reside? 

Is it in me - in the way I interpret other people's behaviour as negative? Or is it in other people - in the way they think they can treat me, can buy me off? If I describe a politician's actions as cynical, just who is the cynic? Is it a type of judgement or is it a more general 'lens' through which a person sees the world? 

Welcome to the first Wordly Explorations for 2022. I will return to truth soon, but the universe keeps flinging things at me that don't allow much writing time, and not enough for a challenging topic like truth. 

Words - inexhaustible explorations

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I love these words from Albus Dumbledore (from Michael Gambon's Deathly Hallows: Part 2).

To me, words truly do seem an inexhaustible source of magic, wondering and exploration. 

In contrast, I am entirely exhaustible. My writing plans have been swamped with other things and my energy and time are finite. 

Post-truth and truth have been way bigger explorations that I anticipated (and will ever attempt again - please remind me!) The end of the year has arrived well before I have explored all I wanted to about these two words. Still to come are two posts on the fit, usefulness, awareness and need for the house construction metaphor for truth, which will explore what we might be able to do with a better metaphor.

But, next year, after some R&R. 

Wordly Explorations will pick up again in February 2022, covid-willing.

 

Post-truth (part 13) - lead up the garden path by a metaphor

I've now been exploring the house construction metaphor for truth for a year. It's a long time since I declared the journey metaphor for truth was false and misleading.

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My interest in the truth was piqued by the word post-truth. Post means 'after' - which seems odd. Because the journey metaphor tells us we're on a torturous journey, heading toward truth (eventually), what does it mean to be in a time or place after truth? Are we lost; did we miss our truth destination somehow?

As I wrote in part 8, post-truth is a dangerous cover word for propaganda. But how does propaganda fit in the journey metaphor? What about lies, illusions, gaslighting, beliefs and wrong beliefs, delusions, mistaken memory, how do they all fit in the journey metaphor?

Our sense of truth is fundamentally important to us as individuals and as a society. Despite turning away from religion and toward science as our key source of truth, humanity's desire for truth remains tied to our needs for belonging, agency, safety, meaning and certainty.

So, how we think about truth is extremely important.

A critical question remains: is our metaphor for truth really that important? How does the journey metaphor influence how we think about truth, the varieties of 'non'-truth, and post-truth? 

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. 

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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.