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.

They only talk among themselves

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.

Willard Van Orman Quine - Word and Object (1960)


How to charlatans get round that one? By making sure that their predictions always nestle safely in the future. Their predictions never come out wrong and wither because the future they predict never quite arrives. It isn’t difficult to spot, we’ve known about it forever and we also know that people who do it are either charlatans or deluded or –

Or elites. Elites have always maintained a certain fondness for conjectural anticipation which somehow always comes down hard on the peasants.

Today, we weary peasants see celebrities and politicians making endless conjectural anticipations while promoting the climate game and more recently the pandemic game. Their sentence-to-sentence conditioning doesn’t wither when their predictions fail because they only talk among themselves. The sentence-to-sentence conditioning isn’t extinguished in the manner Quine described.

It isn’t stupidity or intransigence - they only talk among themselves.

An air of paradox

In the access of power which norms make possible there is an air of paradox, since we impoverish our continuum of symbols when we condense it about a finite array of norms.

Willard Van Orman Quine - Word and Object (1960)

Dry as dust but almost poetically concise. We could devise an aspect of it which is rather less dry and not at all poetic. For example, myths may become norms, especially with the furtive hand of government pushing them.

In the access of power which myths make possible there is an air of paradox, since we impoverish our language when we condense it about a finite array of myths.

As we navigate through life by avoiding surprises, we are attracted to myths. They hold out the promise of a world with fewer surprises. Naturally enough, elites foster certain myths for their own purposes - we call it politics.

Governments and political activists certainly do impoverish our language by condensing it about a finite array of myths. We see the effect when we consider the words man and woman. Watch Nicola Sturgeon struggle with the language of gender politics. Her language is impoverished.

We see it again when we consider the words climate and weather. The impoverishment becomes particularly clear when we see the myth as policy, as in Net Zero. Again, it is worth watching the proponents of Net Zero struggle with language - it’s impoverished. Not as impoverished as we'll be though.

The net is already woven

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The most contagious feelings, the clearest thoughts, of others are clear or contagious only because I can readily make them my own.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

A typically spooky observation by old George. Clarity is not merely useful for comprehension but contagious too. Clear ideas are often clear because they are in some sense familiar. They slip so easily past our dozing right of veto. When it comes to language, clarity and familiarity are intimately linked, often to our ultimate disadvantage.

Quine likened our ideas to a network which cannot easily be modified without risk of unravelling the whole shebang. So we make sure it stays intact because we must. One idea links to the next in chains of what we think of as reasoning even if the first link in the chain was forgotten long ago or never even noticed as it stitched itself into the network of our predilections and allegiances.

Which links to the forthcoming UK EU referendum because the EU is familiar and life outside isn't. In one form or another we’ve been members for decades so the net is already woven.

Was that always the plan? I don’t know, but any passably competent bureaucrat could easily have foreseen the political advantages.

Orwell was right

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Below is a quote from Quine, a single sentence with which you may agree, disagree or reserve judgement. To my mind the sentence is problematic for two reasons. The first is that if accepted as true, then it has a fundamental influence on one’s personal philosophy.

There are so-called logical connections, and there are so-called causal ones; but any such interconnections of sentences must finally be due to the conditioning of sentences as responses to sentences as stimuli.

Willard Van Orman Quine - Word and Object

The second problem is that Quine’s sentence is true.

Obviously that doesn’t mean everyone has to accept it as true. It is rooted in commonly observed human behaviour, but no doubt many people have other standpoints on which they prefer to secure their personal philosophy.

Yet from early childhood we develop mental causal networks where one sentence causes another to pop out of our repertoire of responses. We are trained to give normative responses in order to use language effectively, so naturally enough that is what we do for the rest of our lives.

Citizens of the monolithic and tightly controlled political culture envisaged by George Orwell in his novel 1984 find it difficult or impossible to stray beyond political norms because their repertoire of responses has been so ruthlessly limited by the regime.

Winston Smith only achieves a glimpse of what freedom might mean via his work on altering newspaper reports, his constant exposure to physical evidence that all available information is being made to conform to current political narratives.

Smith’s awareness that things have been different gives him a limited ability to see that there are alternatives to official narratives. Unfortunately for him, he only sees what may be a deliberately constructed alternative – Goldstein’s ideology of dissent.

Without Smith's exposure to physical evidence, we may assume he would never have strayed that far. Even without the full implementation of Newspeak, he would have had insufficient exposure to any standpoint beyond established political norms. He and his fellow citizens cannot think out of the box if the box is all there is.

So Orwell was right. In a monolithic totalitarian culture, Newspeak is not only possible, but may even be inevitable.

The ugliest moron in Nottingham

Suppose you visit Nottingham city centre, pick out any well-built young chap who is also a stranger and say to him:-

Strewth you must be the ugliest moron in Nottingham, why don’t you piss off and get some plastic surgery?

I’m guessing here, but I think the response would be an example of what philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine called the interanimation of sentences. In other words your sentence would animate another sentence from that well-built young chap, probably quite a short one. Your sentence would be a stimulus to his response.

Of course the response may also be physical, so nothing said here should be construed as advice.

Willard Van Orman Quine was one of the most interesting philosophers of the twentieth century. His phrase, interanimation of sentences is typically neat and easy to understand. It reflects how sentences generate other sentences, as if they stick together, one drawing out another, often in a fairly predictable sequence. It’s a common feature of Guardian comments.

So as well as responding to the physical world we respond to sentences too, which we all know but tend to forget as we pretend to be rational. We are animated by sentences and our animation is a matter of previous conditioning - or learning as we tend to call it.

We have the ability to write, say and think all kinds of things which we’d never actually come out with except in a context where their use is socially permitted or encouraged. Not even in Nottingham.

In other words, we have a vast repertoire of things we could say and a much more limited repertoire of things we are ever likely to say in any realistic context. Context, social pressures and previous conditioning decide which is which.

So most of what we could say remains unsaid forever.

Political correctness aims to keep things that way.