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.