Saturday 16 December 2023
When the tail wags the dog
A quote which fits climate change rhetoric very well comes from Willard Van Orman Quine. It illustrates why so much climate rhetoric appears to be more akin to following a script than the questioning hesitancy of rational analysis. Why it seems closer to doctrinal language than a sceptical search for better explanations.
Prediction is in effect the conjectural anticipation of further sensory evidence for a foregone conclusion. When a prediction comes out wrong, what we have is a divergent and troublesome sensory stimulation that tends to inhibit that once foregone conclusion, and so to extinguish the sentence-to-sentence conditionings that led to the prediction. Thus it is that theories wither when their predictions fail.
In an extreme case, the theory may consist in such firmly conditioned connections between sentences that it withstands the failure of a prediction or two. We find ourselves excusing the failure of prediction as a mistake in observation or a result of unexplained interference. The tail thus comes, in an extremity, to wag the dog.
Willard Van Orman Quine - Word and Object (1960)
Yes there is such a thing as sentence-to-sentence conditioning, we see it in daily life, in the media and in all the sentence-to-sentence trickery of political rhetoric. We also see such firmly conditioned connections between sentences that it withstands the failure of a prediction or two. Or three, or four…
It isn’t an expression of belief we see when climate protesters block the road. Neither is it an expression of belief when we hear ministers talking nonsense about Net Zero. It is sentence-to-sentence conditioning, far more sinister than the occasional nudge from the Nudge Unit. We are governed via our language.
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5 comments:
A Nineteen Eighty Four quote again:
"'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Something that has been exposed by the Large Language Model version of artificial intelligence. We are accustomed to think intelligence is about a facility for rationality, logic, and symbol processing. The early attempts at AI assumed that if solving puzzles and doing difficult sums was a intelligent then computers were well on the way. (After all their creators were good at that sort of thing and they were reckoned to be pretty intelligent.) But it turned out the hard things were easy and the easy things hard — a child of six could do what a computer could not. There is any amout of literature from the late 1940s on telling us that a computer will never be able to compose a sonnet etc. Now, with LLMs we discover that if only you have enough artificial neurons you can string words together very, very plausibly. So, maybe we are not so clever as we think we are, just good,very very good, a babbling away and giving it meaning.
"When a prediction comes out wrong, what we have is a divergent and troublesome sensory stimulation that tends to inhibit that once foregone conclusion..."
I'm reminded again of your picture of the drought-resistant garden that was planted as a model for us all to follow.
“Prediction is in effect the conjectural anticipation of further sensory evidence for a foregone conclusion.”
Absolutely, AKH … and confirmation bias.
DJ - I've often thought that schools should teach something about manipulative language with Newspeak as their example. Not just propaganda, but restrictions on social discourse.
djc - that's how I look at it, AI is very good at generating plausible language from what is already known or at least accepted, but that's what we do too. The disturbing aspect is that it isn't necessary for us to do any more than that, especially if the consequences of doing more are negative.
Sam - that drought-resistant garden has now gone, a troublesome sensory stimulation being that it didn't do very well in the wet. They are still banging on about climate change though. We may need some more troublesome sensory stimulation for that one.
James - and if confirmation doesn't turn up this year it will definitely turn up next year.
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