Geek Etymology
I never thought about why a macro is called a “macro”. It doesn’t make sense. What does largeness have anything to do with macros?
“Macro” appeared at the very dawn of computing, when people programmed in microcode. To make life easier, they abstracted microcode into /macro/code, which is a just a sequence of microcode.
From there, the word “macro” is used to mean any sequence of repeated commands (or repeated syntax), far separated from its original etymological partner, leaving us confused as to what “macro” could possibly mean.
I made that up. But you can quote me anyway.
Beautiful Happiness
{sec [Monster Trucks are Beautiful] [
Beauty is important to me. I never knew how to defend my sense of beauty, except with a childish tantrum, "This is my sense of beauty, and if you disagree with me, you are an idiot". At the same time that I find certain objects beautiful, the image of a monster truck leaping over flatten cars imposes itself upon my mind.
I am forced to remember that there are people who sincerely find /that/ beautiful. I am not just saying monster trucks can be entertaining. More than entertaining, they can be, to some people, genuinely beautiful.
This realization is distressing. If Beauty can mean monster trucks to some people, does it mean my sense of Beauty is as stupid as theirs?
What can we say about competing senses of beauty?
On the one hand, is a hopeless aesthetic relativism, that their beauty is as legitimate as mine. On the other, equally unpalatable, is to give up the sense of beauty altogether, and in so doing, I can avoid attributing the label "Beauty" upon monster trucks. But at the same time, I lose my ability to say that the things I hold dear are beautiful.
If we cannot judge one sense of beauty better than another, it seems that either beauty is arbitrary, or that it doesn't exist.
]}
{sec [Apples and Oranges] [
Of course, no real aesthete would be happy with this state of the affair. It can't be that Beauty is only in the eyes of the beholders.
So some people are inclined to reduce the notion of beauty into a quip. One common thing we hear is that beauty is what's left after you've taken away everything ugly.
I sympathize with this view. And it is one sense of beauty I seize upon. There /is/ perfection to be found in taking away everything unnecessary. But it is only one sense.
It leaves us puzzled when we stand in awe in front of La Sagrada Família. Here is a monstrous sense of beauty, to which we add and add. Here is no simple elegance, but a ornate piety that demands every last bit of your attention be filled with Holy Iconographies.
If we learn anything from the innumerable recipes for beauty, it is that even if there might be criteria for its recognition and production, there's no one sense of it.
That there are different senses of beauty is perhaps no reason to despair. We can say a cup of tea is beautiful in its calm ordinariness, and the highway system is beautiful in its bustling liveliness. But there need not be a unifying principle behind different visions of beauty.
Just as we should be glad that we can fall in love with different kinds of people, we should be glad that there are different Gardens of Eden. The paradise may be flowing with milk and honey, or filled with steamy, wet sex.
]}
{sec [Beautiful Happinesses] [
Alain de Botton's book, "The Architecture of Happiness", contains the most lucid discussion of Beauty I ever read. De Botton is not one disposed to facile characterizations. Rather than reducing Beauty to a set of axioms, de Botton recognizes the full complexity of it, and takes you on a journey.
Beauty, according to de Botton, is a perspective. It is the cumulation of personal values you hold dear. There's no judgement of beauty, except in the context of everything else that you stand for. Whether you subscribe to the scientific asceticism of the modernists, or the ornate piety of the medievalists, depends on your belief in the ideal way of living. How you imagine a good life decides your sense of beauty.
Beauty, is your vision of happiness. Hence the title of his book.
{q [
The building we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worthwhile-- which refer, that is, whether through their materials, shapes, or colours, to such legendarily positive qualities as friendliness, kindness, subtlety, strength and intelligence. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of a good life are intertwined. We seek associations of peace in our bedrooms, metaphors for generosity and harmony in our chairs, and an air of honesty and forthrightness in our taps. We can be moved by a column that meets a roof with grace, by worn stone steps that hint at wisdom and by a Georgian doorway that demonstrates playfulness and courtesy in its fanlight window.
]}
By casting Beauty in terms of human values, we can discuss the merits of arts just as we can any other human qualities of frugality, stinginess; splendor, vanity; serenity, apathy; power, cruelty. De Botton, alluding to Stendhal, highlights the rich varieties of Beauty.
{q [
But because Stendhal was sensitive to the complexity of our requirements for happiness, he wisely refrained from specifying any particular type of beauty. As individuals we may, after all, find vanity no less attractive than graciousness, or aggression as intriguing as respect. Through his use of the capacious word "happiness", Stendhal allowed for the wide range of goals which people have pursued. Understanding that mankind would always be conflicted about its visual tastes as about its ethical ones, he noted, "There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness."
]}
Even though we should be glad that there are different visions of beauty we can submerge in, there are other visions we can, and should, hate. We can say that because we prefer quiet reflection over glitz and pomposity, so even acknowledging that Paris Hilton and monster trucks are in some ways beautiful to some people, we can still say they are stupid.
]}
{sec [Ugliness All Around] [
I love what de Botton says about artistic objects that they are small instances of (our sense of) perfections in a fundamentally uncaring, flawed world. We can't change the world (much) for the better, but at least, we can find a good armchair to sink into.
We recognize the unfortunate imperfections, but are embolden by /our/ own little corners of the world. This is a sensible pluralistic happiness, without the danger of ideological fanaticism. We recognize the impossibility, and the injustice, of imposing our vision of happiness upon others. Perhaps we don't want to recreate the world in our own image, as Lenin, Hitler, Mao wanted to.
We should learn to be satisfied with our small pieces of perfections, and let others enjoy theirs (even to our own distress). Yet Beauty in the small is hard to appreciate. How can we take seriously something so local, circumstantial, ephemeral, irrelevant, and useless?
It is not easy to appreciate Beauty in all its human frailties. We don't like the idea that things we hold dear will pass away. As such, we are irresistibly drawn to claims of Beauty as divine, encompassing, universal, or absolute.
With our eyes set so high, we become angry, because we think that the world failed to meet up to our ideal. Here is a beautiful brick house in the midst of urban slum. But rather than being invigorated by its humble beauty, we curse at the urban sprawl. We shake our fists at the cardboard boxes that are choking everything else out.
Why is everything so ugly? We ask.
Yet we forget...
In the midst of so much ugliness is something beautiful.
To realize that beauty is the exception, and still be glad in what there is of it, requires an emotional maturity. De Botton says,
{q [
...after coming up against some of the sterner setbacks which bedevil emotional and political life, we may well arrive at a more charitable assessment of the significance of beauty-- of islands of perfection, in which we can find an echo of an ideal which we once hoped to lay a permanent claim to. Life may have to show itself to us in some of its authentically tragic colours before we can begin to grow properly visually responsive to its subtler offerings, whether in the form of a tapestry or a Corinthian column, a slate tile or a lamp. It tends not to be young couples in love who stop to admire a weathered brick wall or the descent of a banister towards a hallway, a disregard of such circumscribed beauty being a corollary of an optimistic belief in the possibility of attaining a more visceral, definitive variety of happiness.
]}
I am hopelessly ideological. And I strain for that “visceral, definitive variety of happiness”. Yes. With unbounded vision of greatness, how can I be satisfied with a chair? But it hurts me with so much disappointment, resentment, and intolerance. I wish I can find some of that emotional maturity in me. De Botton goes on,
{q [
We may need to have made an indelible mark on our lives, to have married the wrong person, pursued an unfulfilling career into middle age or lost a loved one before architecture can being to have any perceptible impact on us, for when we speak of being 'moved' by a building, we allude to a bitter-sweet feeling of contrast between the noble qualities written into a structure and the sadder wider reality within which we know them to exist. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that happiness it hints at is the exception.
]}
Having read it many times, it still sends a chill down my spine.
]}
{sec [Lisp] [
Lisp is beautiful.
And I wondered what this says about what my cherished values are, and what my vision of happiness is.
I don't want to argue that Lisp is powerful. Either you /believe/ it, or you don't. If you have to ask, then you don't know, and most likely, can't know. It's like Jazz.
So let me just say, Lisp is beautiful. I'll even agree with you that Lisp is more or less useless, and that you can do amazing work in (oh noes!) Java or Perl. But Lisp is beautiful in ways Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, C, whatever, never can be.
How is Lisp beautiful? The convention wisdom seems to be that of the major lisp dialects, Scheme, Common Lisp, and Emacs Lisp, Scheme is the most beautiful, but (arguably) not as practical as Common Lisp. And Emacs Lisp is just plain ugly with its 1970 backwardness.
Nikodemus Siivola (I don't even know who he is!) compares Scheme and Common Lisp, that,
{q [
Schemer: "Buddha is small, clean, and serious."
Lispnik: "Buddha is big, has hairy armpits, and laughs."
]}
This embodies the belief that the beauty of Lisp has something to do with its minimalism. The fact that a meta-interpreter for Lisp can be printed on half a page, and is “the kernel of all languages”, is taken to be the grounding claim of Lispy power, and by implication, beauty.
So those seeking beauty asks how to get maximum power out of minimal parts. Scheme’s modus operandi is to see how far lambda can take you. And Paul Graham’s Arc is about finding the smallest set of axioms, and the shortest path, to a practical Lisp.
This vision of Lisp is that of a crystalline consistency extending outward. Lisp all the way in, and Lisp all the way out. This /is/ a pleasing vision of elegance and simplicity. We are heartened, because despite the riotous complexity, we know that deep in the core, it’s all but half a page.
With this sense of Lispy beauty, I profess my love for it whenever I can, and feel sad that the whole world is not Lisp.
]}
{sec [Ugly Lisp is Beautiful] [
Recently, I realized that Lisp is beautiful to me in another way. A way that resonates with my vision of happiness, and reflects better who I am.
It is a vision of hope.
I admire Scheme, but I don't feel like there's anything I can do for Scheme. It is perfect in its own ways. Same goes with Haskell, with its imposing austerity, I can only fall on my knees in awe. But again, there's not much I can do for Haskell. It is perfect.
What I've found, is that hope feeds on imperfections. For me, the dominant sense of beauty arising from Emacs rests on the fact that that it is so ugly! It is so ugly, you can't help it but to do something about it.
And you can! This is incredibly empowering.
The imperfections are there to challenge you. Imperfections are not braced with a stoic resignation of "what is, is". Imperfections ask you to be better. Even as you are tortured by the particular stupidities of a Lisp system (CL, Emacs, Smalltalk, Erlang), if you have a vision of something better, you go ahead and do it!
The saying that if you don't like it, you can change it, is more often than not, moot, as far as open source is concerned. I am unhappy with KDE, but there's simply no way I am going to do anything about it. But within Lisp, the power in your hand to create a paradise is not an empty promise.
With Lisp, you know perfection is a few macros away. Even if you can't reach perfection, you can inch toward it, or at least, make life a little more comfortable in one particular instance, so life as a whole becomes bearable.
What Lisp is, then, is a trust in you, the lisp programmer, to create a better world. Even though the world fundamentally sucks, there's hope in changing the tiny bit surrounding you for the better, at least for the duration while you are here.
This is my vision of happiness, and my youthful optimism.
]}
Bullshit Ahead
DON’T BOTHER!
* Womanese
When a woman says “no”, does she mean yes? Or if she says “yes”, does she mean no? Or maybe “maybe” means yes, “yes” means no, “no” means maybe. How do you find out what she REALLY means? A sensible man reasonably jaded might answer, “believe what she does, not what she says.” This simple idea is the starting point of Donald Davidson’s theory of meaning.
Now, a theory of meaning is meant to explain what it means to “mean” something. This sounds like a philosopher’s verbal game, a dog chasing its own tail. You might think, “of course! ‘this’ means this, we all know how this works– end of discussion, let’s move on to real life.” And this is a reasonable response to any hard-to-crack philosophical nut.
But if you want to know how to understand womanese, or more generally, how we understand each other, Davidson’s theory of meaning offers a method (or at least, a story).
* Theory of Meaning
Paradoxically, in a theory of meaning, we can’t talk about meaning! We can’t say something like:
A means B because [of some good reason].
It might seem that “because [of some good reason]” explains why A means B, but a person may persist in asking, “ok, /because/ [of some good reason], A means B, but what does it mean for A to /mean/ B because of the reason given?” And so on ad infinitum. A naive theory of meaning like this reminds us of the Turtle Theory of Cosmology: why, of course! It’s turtles all the way down!
Clearly we need some finesse.
Davidson’s theory of meaning doesn’t talk about meaning. His strategy is this: let’s think about what a theory of meaning should explain, and once we have a clear idea what we want, we’ll come up with a theory that’s not a theory of meaning, but something that works just as well.
So what do we want out of a theory of meaning?
As alluded in the introduction, we want the theory of meaning to help explain how we understand each other. This wish suggests a theory of interpretation. When your better half says, “you don’t have to buy me anything expensive for my birthday,” her words mean something, but what does she REALLY intend to say by that utterance? A theory of interpretation needs to go beyond the mere words, and include the speaker, the occasion, and the listener in the picture.
When she says, “no, I am not mad at you,” the theory of interpretation may tell us that she intends to say, “you heartless bastard!” and we need a way to test if this is actually the case. So, being men of science, we want the theory to be empirical. The theory should make assertions that we can test.
Sounds good. But Davidson wants more! He wants, furthermore,
1) A formal theory, and
2) the theory be complete.
We should note at this point that Davidson is a formalist. A formalist, for the purpose of our discussion, is a fellow who thinks that 2+2=4 and has the audacity to say YOU ought to think so too– causing liver problems in underground men everywhere.
The essential characteristic of a formalist approach is its reliance on logical analysis. The formalists argue that much of philosophical controversies have as their root cause a confusion in language. If philosophical discussions are conducted in a more precise language (i.e. with the help of a formal logic system), we can better get to the real issues of philosophy, rather than constantly tripping ourselves over by accidental linguistic puzzles. Bertrand Russell is one of the founding fathers of this modern analytical (logical) approach, he says:
[I] am persuaded that common speech is full of vagueness and inaccuracy, and that any attempt to be precise and accurate requires modification of common speech both as regards vocabulary and as regards syntax. Everybody admits that physics and chemistry and medicine each require a language which is not that of everyday life. I fail to see why philosophy, alone, should be forbidden to make a similar approach towards precision and accuracy.
Just as scientists require experiments to support an hypothesis, (some) philosophers require a logic system to support an argument. This is a commitment to methodology, not a doctrine of how the world is (for the most part).
So Davidson, being a good formalist, requires his theory to be amenable to formal logical analysis. He doesn’t want spooky metaphysics, where “meanings” exists in some magical Platonic Space or Fregean Realm. Be a real man, he says, and use logic.
The second formal requirement of completeness is meant to deal with the infinite inventiveness of human speech. A theory invented yesterday may be able to capture by (brute force) the meaning of everything said before, but today somebody would say something new. Davidson requires his theory to offer an explanation for any of the infinite potential utterances. The completeness requirement is intimately related to the concept of logical entailment, to be explained later.
In summary, we want an empirical testable theory of interpretation that is amenable to logical analysis, and is powerful enough to explain everything that had been and ever would be said. To accomplish all these goals, Davidson proposes the use of a Theory of Truth.
* T with Tarski
The notion of truth is the theoretical camel that carries the bulk of Davidson’s theory. As luck would have it, truth had all been figured out by Alfred Tarski! In Tarski’s 1933 paper, “Pojęcie prawdy w językach nauk dedukcyjnych” (you can say that to impress your friends), he showed how to define truth in a formal system without mentioning truth. A definition of truth following the Tarskian recipe is known as “Convention T”. Davidson’s theory is based on Convention T, but with a twist.
To understand Convention T, let’s first consider what Aristotle has to say about what is true, here I quote Tarski quoting Aristotle:
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.
Probably the most confusing sentence made up of only monosyllabic words. Convention T is meant to capture this classical/intuitive sense of what it is be true. Pared down to the bone: what is “true” is true, what is “false” is false. Note the quotation marks used to enclose “true” and “false”, a big (important) fuss will be made of them soon. Without further ado, Convention T:
(T): “S” is true iff S.
Where S is a sentence, and “S” is the quotation of that sentence. “iff” means “if and only if”, which is known as the “biconditional”. “A iff B” signifies a relationship between A and B, such that if A is true, so is B, and if B is true so is A. In other words, A and B have precisely the same truth value (“true” or “false”).
Convention T is not one single statement, but a template. An example of T might be:
“She loves me” is true iff she loves me.
Or:
“She hates me” is true iff she hates me.
Which seems underwhelming, if not outright vacuous. To see why this isn’t another verbal game, it should first be noted that there are /two languages/ involved in (T). One language (the meta-language) is saying something about anther language (the object-language). Convention T “exists” in the meta-language. But why can’t we just define (T) in the object-language so it talks about itself? Because Tarski says you can’t. The problem is with the liar’s paradox (one among many other paradoxen):
(I): I am not true.
The self-conscious sentence (I) is talking about itself, and if we substitute it into (T) to get a truth biconditional, we get:
(!I): I am not true is true iff I am not true.
A sentence suffering existential crisis. Tarski proved that to avoid this breed of paradoxen, we require that the object-language doesn’t contain its own definition of truth, and that the meta-language with which we define (T) must be essentially richer than the object-language. Take Tarski’s word for it.
So now we’ve seen that a meta-language is required to talk about the object-language. What is the use of (T), if it only says the obvious? Two answers:
1) (T) relates pairs of things in the meta-language, and
2) The meta-language entails (T).
The first point highlights, again, the fact that the meta-language is talking about the object-language. In the meta-language, “S” is true iff S is saying something to the effect of, “There’s this thing ‘S’ in the object-language I am describing, this thing is true precisely when S.” In other words, “S” and S are unrelated things except by the truth biconditional. The truth value of S is tightly linked with whether “S” is true. This assertion of relatedness makes an instance of (T) non-trivial.
The second point about “entailment” is that a (formal) meta-language by its very concoction guarantees that every instance of (T) belongs to the body of truth that is implied by the language. A formal language is like a record player designed specifically to play one single record of truth. You turn the formal language on, and its machinery churns to playback an infinite stream of true assertions. This fatalistic churning gives the sense of entailment: the stream of true assertions is predetermined by design. This explains the sense in which the (T) of object-language A “exists” in meta-language B. The design of B entails (T).
The upshot of (T) is such that for EVERY true sentence in the object-language, the meta-language shows us EXACTLY the condition under which it is true. The nitpickers among you would have noticed that the word “true” appears in (T). This isn’t a problem, because Tarski showed how to explicitly describe the condition under which ‘is true’ applies to “S”. In essence, (T) becomes:
(T) “S” [satisfies a logical property] iff S
Thus Tarski’s (T) gives a definition for truth that doesn’t presuppose truth, and (arguably) preserve the intuition of truth. Thanks to him, we can now talk about truth without blushing.
Pause for a moment to contemplate the cosmic significance of (T).
………
……
…
* Truth is Meaning
Remember that Davidson wants a theory of meaning that doesn’t talk about meaning. We’ve just seen that Tarski gives a theory of truth that doesn’t talk about truth, so what Davidson can do is to figure out a way to build a theory of meaning out of a theory of truth.
To reiterate, we are looking for an empirically testable theory of meaning that is amenable to logical analysis, and is powerful enough to explain everything that had been and ever would be said. We’ll see how a theory of meaning does all these.
A very important point worth emphasizing is that a theory of meaning/truth is about a particular language. We are not talking about Truth in the sense that what God says is the Truth, or what your girlfriend says is the Truth. In our discussion, “true” is a property we associate with sentences in a language. A particular theory of truth is relativized to one particular language. Our goal is to see, in general, what any theory of meaning/truth would be like for any language of interest.
So how do we get meaning out of truth? Davidson thinks that truth IS meaning. This may seem an odd proposal. When pressed, I might say to my hypothetical girlfriend: “no, your butt doesn’t look fat in that jean.” What I say means something, but it certainly isn’t true (sorry!). Snide remarks aside, to see why meaning is truth, we should remember that the Tarskian notion of truth is a /relation/ between two sentences. In Davidson’s usage, (T) is:
(T) s is true iff p
where s is the sentence in the object-language under investigation, and p another sentence in the meta-language that tells us exactly how s is true. Suppose I have a theory of meaning for womanese, I might be able explain the above example this way:
(W) “Your butt doesn’t look fat” is true iff I love you.
In this case, the sentence “I love you” in the meta-language is a necessary and sufficient condition for “your butt doesn’t look fat” to be true in the object-language. I, as a competent user of womanese, know that the two sentences are related in this way, and this knowledge allows me to “understand” the meaning of the language so I say the right thing. This demonstrates how meaning is given by relating one sentence to another (one in object-language, another in meta-language), and also the dictum “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.
Therefore, for Davidson, the understanding of the meaning of a language is closely related its competent use, and competent use of the language is reducible to knowing the truth biconditionals that relate sentences to their respective truth conditions (i.e. (T)). Davidson makes this point explicit:
The definition works by giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of every sentence, and to give truth conditions is a way of giving the meaning of a sentence. To know the semantic concept of truth for a language is to know what it is for a sentence–any sentence– to be true, and this amounts, in one good sense we can give to the phrase, to understanding the language.
Now, we know that a theory of meaning is a theory truth, a natural question to ask is how do we come up with such a theory? An instance of (T) is a relation between two sentences: one in the object-language to be explained, and another in the meta-language doing the explaining. What is it that allows us to come up with such a pairing for two sentences? To this question, Davidson gives a fundamentally different answer than the one Tarski offers. Tarski’s motivation for defining (T) is to describe formal languages (those used in logic and mathematics), but Davidson’s motivation for the use of (T) is to provide an empirically testable theory for natural languages as used in day-to-day lives. Let’s look at (T) closely:
(T) s is true iff p
Tarski says that s and p are translations of each other. For Tarski, the important theoretical work is to figure out what “is true” is supposed to be. Given a biconditional,
“2+2=4″ is true iff 2+2=4
It’s obvious that the two sentences are translations of each other, so the biconditional as a whole ought to be vacuously true, for if one sentence is true, how can the translation of that sentence fail to be true? Thus, to say anything useful with (T), Tarski needs to figure out how to define “is true” precisely in logical terms, so that this definition tells us /why/ two sentences are translations of each other.
Unfortunately, implicit in the idea of translation, is a notion of meaning. s and p are translations of each other if they mean the same thing. But translation is acceptable in Tarski’s case because he’s dealing with formal languages. Between two formal languages, translation can be done on a purely syntactic basis (e.g. “2″ in arabic numeral to “II” in roman numeral to “10″ in binary). For real languages, however, we can’t know by inspecting the text that “your butt doesn’t look fat” is translated into “I love you”. To make that translation, we need to have known the meanings of the two sentences, but their meanings are what we are trying to explain.
Since in dealing with a natural language, we don’t know beforehand that s and p are translations of each other, so in order to show that s and p indeed are related, we need to assume some notion of truth (i.e. “is true”) to establish a (T). But in doing so, are we not trading one evil for another? We’ve got rid of meaning by saying it’s just a biconditional relating two sentences. But to establish that relation, we’ve introduced a notion of truth– a strategy that is not obviously better.
Fortunately though, the assumption Davidson is making here is a very specific one, that of “is true” as a property belonging to a sentence. The property “is true” is also empirically easy to test. Suppose we want to know if s and p should be related to each other in a (T), we can go around asking people if they agree that s “is true”, then we check their answers with our own understanding of p. If the two agree, we are justified to put them together in a (T), and thus explaining s by p. We can establish instances of (T)s this way. The whole body of such truth assertions gives a theory of general truth in the meta-language we use to conduct our study.
Despite this difference in assumptions, Davidson and Tarski both end up with the same theory of truth. Davidson chooses to assume a primitive notion of sentences “being true” for language users. The belief of among language users that a sentence “is true” is the foundation of Davidson’s theory of meaning, and this simple belief is presumed to be empirically testable. This assumption, as we will see in a later section, plays a pivotal role in Davidson’s theory of interpretation.
** Holism
In our discussion so far an instance of (T) relates a sentence s to another sentence p, and that’s all– no further constraint is placed on the pair s and p. This allows us to propose a faux instance of (T) like:
“Roses are red and violets are blue”
is true iff
My heart would forever be with you.
Although “roses are red and violets are blue” is true, it has nothing to do with the fact that my heart will forever be with [a precious someone], which just so happens to be true as well. To say in this case that the latter gives the meaning of the former seems a sign of failure in Davidson’s theory. And Davidson would agree! Upon first reflection, it doesn’t seem like there’s any way to exclude biconditionals of this kind, since they only require the related sentences to share truth values, yet this sharing can be accidental or by fiat.
To allay this suspicion, we need to take a step back and see how the the theory of truth works for the understanding of a language as a whole. One formal requirement for a theory of truth is that it relates EVERY sentence s in a language with its truth condition p. This is accomplished by the meta-language such that it entails the collection of (T)s necessary to explain the object-language completely. The collection of (T)s must not contradict each other. The entire body of truth asserted must be self-consistent. The immediate consequence of this strict consistency is holism, that a sentence doesn’t have an isolated truth of its own; it stands in relation with the collective truth of all sentences in the language. On this note, Davidson denies that we can talk about meaning for a sentence:
If sentences depend for their meaning on their structure, and we understand the meaning of each item in the structure only as an abstraction from the totality of sentences in which it features, then we can give the meaning of any sentence only by giving the meaning of every sentence in the language… only in the context of the language does a sentence have meaning.
The “structure” Davidson is alluding to here is the answer to the puzzle that it seems we would need an infinite theory of truth in order to account for the infinite inventiveness of language. But of course, a language user doesn’t have an infinite brain to hold an infinite theory. To say there’s a “structure” for a sentence Davidson is making two claims, 1) a sentence can be broken down into smaller sentences, and 2) there’s a correct way to break down a sentence. We should concern ourselves only with the first claim. The idea is very simple, that sub-sentences are related in a certain way to give the meaning of the whole sentence. Consider:
If you love me, then you will take out the garbage.
This sentence has two parts, “you love me” and “you will take out the garbage”. The parts are related by “If…then…” to give the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The way language allows us to build large sentences from the composition of smaller sentences is essential for its rich expressivity. The compositionality of language grants us infinite possibilities, while demanding only a finite inventory of linguistic items.
Thus we can see that compositionality and holism are interlocking ideas that conspire to give the total truth. Truth must remain consistent in the context of this pervasive interconnectedness, therefore it’s highly unlikely a theory of truth could contain individual nonsense while maintaining the consistency of the whole truth.
At this point, though, we hear the underground man laughing, “Ha Ha Ha!! I won’t agree with your Truth! The Crystal Palace you have built will come crashing down because I have a bad liver!” We will now see how Davidson answers the underground man.
* Radical Interpretation
Language is an incredibly complex phenomenon, and every trite conversation a miracle. The blessing (and curse) of a natural language is that it’s full of delightful (and appalling) ambiguities. Yet a formal language is so precise, even to the point of sterility. What good is an impersonal formal language in explaining something so intrinsically human? How do we fit a natural language to the “Procrustean bed” of a formal language?
Tarski devised Convention T for the purpose of defining truth in logic and mathematics; he had no intention, and no fantasy, of Convention T extending to the domain of daily lives. In fact, Tarski thinks that any such attempt is technically impossible. He says (quoting Davidson quoting Tarski),
The concept of truth (as well as other semantical concepts) when applied to colloquial language in conjunction with the normal laws of logic leads inevitably to confusions and contradictions.
Is our goal of explaining, with a theory of truth, how we understand each other a doomed fantasy? Davidson argues otherwise. But nevermind Tarski saying it’s impossible, and nevermind Davidson saying it’s possible with vigorous hand-waving– what is essential to Davidson’s innovation is the idea of truth as meaning. A formal system to that effect, if possible, is just icing on the cake.
I’ve mentioned in passing that the primitive notion of a language user believing a sentence is true is the empirical foundation upon which Davidson’s theory of interpretation rests. We’ll see how this works.
We want to know how the puffs of air people exchange can be understood as utterances. The problem of giving significance to utterances is shown with a simple example. Suppose she emits a stream of air vibrations,
Do you love me?
I can interpret it in many different ways,
Do you love me, I am so horny, let’s go make love. (I wish!)
Do you love me, I am cold, can you close the window?
Do you love me, I did something you won’t like.
Do you love me, fucktard?
What she is really saying depends on her mood and menstrual cycle. As Davidson makes it clear, interpreting an utterance requires the listener to know,
1) the meaning of the sentence, and
2) the intention/belief of the speaker.
But to know what the sentence means, I need to know what she intends to say, yet to know what she intends to say, I need need to know what the sentence means. A romantic catch-22. Davidson brings this conundrum in sharp focus by asking us to imagine a scenario where radical interpretation is needed, where we have no prior knowledge of a language, and no knowledge of the beliefs of the speaker we intend to interpret.
The problem is this: to successfully interpret an utterance, it’s necessary to rely on some knowledge of the beliefs, attitudes, and moods of a speaker. Yet the beliefs, attitudes, moods are so richly nuanced, it’s impossible to get to them except with an utterance. But in radical interpretation, we have neither. A theory of interpretation needs to account for meaning and belief at one fell swoop. How do we go about doing this?
In the heat of a controversy stemming from a stupid misunderstanding, your better half might lament, “we need to understand each other better,” by which she means, “you need to agree with me more often.” This is no mere feminine hubris. What she is pointing out is Davidson’s Principle of Charity. The Principle of Charity /requires/ us to make certain charitable assumptions about the speaker we intend to interpret,
Charity in interpreting the words and thoughts of others is unavoidable… we must maximize agreement… [and] we must maximize the self-consistency we attribute to [the alien].
Aliens? Just as well, after all, women are from Venus. There are two components in the Principle of Charity, the first of maximizing agreement with the world is an issue of Correspondence, and the second of maximizing self-consistency within the speaker’s beliefs is an issue of Coherence. For Davidson, the Principle of Charity is not only a rule of thumb that allow us to make guesses, but additionally a constraint that shapes the very structure of truth, and thus by implication, meaning.
I can hear the terrible gnashing of teeth from the chauvinist pigs among you. (What!? we are going to /pretend/ that women are coherent AND what they say have some bearing to reality? Never!!) What you, my dear friends, need to realize is how a theory of interpretation arise in tandem with a holistic theory of truth. Since meaning is tightly wound together with a consistent body of truth, the act of interpretation is equivalent to unearthing a consistent body of truth relativized to the speaker’s language and beliefs. Therefore, interpretation as a quest for truth presumes coherence and consistency, otherwise there’s no truth to quest for. This strong equivalence between truth, meaning, and interpretation is accentuated by an incredible claim that Davidson makes,
If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.
As already explained, the very willingness to attempt to interpret a speaker’s utterances is tantamount to making the tacit assumptions as /required/ by the Principle of Charity.
Armed with the Principle of Charity, we a ready to start our empirical quest for a theory of interpretation. The Principle of Charity tells us what kind of theory it is (a theory of truth), but we are still stymied as to where to start looking. We still need to cut the circular dependence between the beliefs of a speaker and linguistic meanings. We need an obvious kind of evidence that doesn’t beg the question of how we came to interpret it as evidence: we want something we can take at face value. Davidson proposes that the “accepting as true” of a sentence by a language user is an obvious evidence,
It is an attitude an interpreter may plausibly be taken to be able to identify before he can interpret, since he may know that a person intends to express a truth in uttering a sentence without having any idea /what/ truth.
Note, it is the interpreter that goes without any idea of /what/ truth, not the language user. Initially, the primitive evidence “accepting as true” is only sufficient to establish simple (T)s such as:
“yes” is true iff no.
“no” is true iff no.
“maybe” is true iff no.
“we need” is true iff she wants.
The crude theory so far still doesn’t tell us much about womanese, but it suffices to save us some embarrassment. As we broaden the theory by making more observation, and relating the sentences in womanese that are true to sentences that are true for us, we progressively achieve a better theory of interpretation. A better theory in turn allows us to make better observations (perhaps by asking questions). We don’t have a static theory of interpretation that works for all time, but a tentative theory in perpetual flux, incrementally built up, constantly refined and readjusted in light of new evidence.
This investigation is conducted under the auspice of the Principle of Charity, so as to ensure that the theory of interpretation provides an accurate parallel between the beliefs of the interpreter and the speaker, and that their beliefs correspond to the reality of the world. Referring to the holistic nature of truth, Davidson likens this process to adding brush-strokes to a painting. As we establish more and more truth relations, the total picture becomes more and more defined. No brush-stroke stands on its own; each one exists in the context of others, and adds more definiteness to its context.
A liberating (or unsavory, if you have a Platonic bent) conclusion is the multiplicity of Truth. Many theories of truth can explain equally well the same body of evidence. However, note that this is not a limit or shortcoming of method, but an intrinsic characteristic of the notion of Truth as relations between sentences. This multiplicity is known as the Indeterminacy of Truth. We should contrast this notion of indeterminacy to Deng Xiao Ping’s famous dictum, “no matter if it is a white cat or a black cat; as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.” Deng is making a value judgement: if it works, that’s good enough for him. However, the Indeterminacy of Truth is saying, if a theory accounts for the facts, it IS truth.
* Truthiness
We’re not talking about truth, we’re talking about something that seems like truth– the truth we want to exist.
–Stephen Colbert
Given indeterminacy, are we standing on loose sand? If my theory of truth is different from your theory of truth, does that mean there’s no way to say whether you or I is mistaken? Are we condemned to cheap and pervasive relativism? To answer these worries, Davidson gives a unified Theory of Knowledge, a natural outgrowth of his Theory of Meaning. Amazingly, we get a Theory of Truth and Meaning and Interpretation and Knowledge on the seemingly vacuous Convention T.
Traditionally, philosophy has distinguished three different types of knowledge. As a thinking being existing in the world and communicating with other beings, I have different degrees of certainty in what I know. The things “inside my skull” I seem to know directly. The world outside my brain I know indirectly through my senses. Finally, I can only infer, through a further level of indirection, the things inside another person’s skull.
I can affirm with Cartesian gusto that “I think therefore I am”, but it’s hard to resist the soft whispering of an idle skeptic: “maybe the world is only your imagination. Maybe those people walking around, talking, and smiling are zombies with no souls.”
Davidson resists the skeptics by denying any principled difference between the three types of knowledge. His denial isn’t a way of saying that the “differences” are mere illusions. The differences are real, Davidson assures us, and we can’t vaporize them into thin air by philosophical quibbles. Davidson wants to show that there is only one single method of knowledge acquisition. Furthermore, it should be evident why this method should give us three varieties (not “types”) of knowledge.
Davidson’s strategy is to argue how the three varieties of knowledge are mutually dependant. They stand together like the three musketeers– one for all, and all for one. None of which can stand by its own. This view reflects Davidson’s commitment to holism. My thoughts and beliefs, the facts of the world, and other people’s thoughts and beliefs together form an inseparable whole. Because one’s own thoughts and beliefs cannot stand on its own, skeptical denial of the world (or others’ thoughts and beliefs) results in the denial of one’s all thoughts and beliefs. A skeptics is placed in a vicious cycle where his doubting brings to doubt his very doubting.
But to attack the skeptical position with holism, Davidson needs to show how his Theory of Meaning is more than an attractive theory with extraordinary explanatory power; he needs to force it down the skeptic’s throat, by showing that the Theory of Meaning is /necessary/. To do this, Davidson makes one amazing claim:
1) There is no private thought.
Private thoughts are not those things you choose not to talk about (e.g. fetishes); they are things that you can’t talk about even if you wanted to. The question is whether there are “thoughts” you can’t talk about. Davidson takes the position that there aren’t. From claim 1), Davidson further characterizes thoughts:
2) It is necessary that a thought can be communicated.
Stated negatively, 2) says that if you can’t communicate something, than it (whatever it is) isn’t a thought. Since thoughts are necessarily dependant on communication, they are possible only within a theory of interpretation. The relation of thoughts with communication gives us the holism that forces the skeptic into a vicious cycle. But the skeptic may try to hold onto “thoughts” not accounted for by a theory of interpretation, so as to avoid the holistic vicious cycle. This last foxhole is plugged by claim 1), that no thought is possible outside a theory of interpretation.
The denial of private thoughts has its origin in the writings of the notorious philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. I worked on several drafts to explain his denial of private language (from which Davidson extends to the denial of private thoughts), and none of them made any sense. So I’ll just admit I don’t understand the argument. The lesson Davidson makes out of the argument against private language is that some objective standard is required to judge the correct usage of a language. Since private “language” doesn’t have an objective standard, there’s no way for a speaker if the language is used correctly or not, so it’s nonsense calling it a language. The objective standard we need, of course, is a theory of interpretation. A holistic theory that integrates the thoughts and beliefs of a speech community with their common reality is as good an objective standard as one could ask for.
So we’ve dealt with skepticism. How does this answer help us to dispel relativism as well? Davidson’s insight is that in a communication (the only possible condition for thoughts), two persons have to interpret each other in reference to external facts shared by both. The Principle of Charity guarantees both the consistency of their beliefs, and the correspondence of their beliefs to external facts. The two persons and their shared reality form a triangle that ensures the theories of interpretation used by the two are largely compatible, or else communication would not be possible at all:
widespread agreement is the only possible background against which disputes and mistakes can be interpreted. Making sense of the utterances and behavior of others, even their most aberrant behavior, requires us to find a great deal of reason and truth in them. To see too much unreason on the part of others is simply to undermine our ability to understand what it is they are so unreasonable about. If the vast amount of agreement on plain matters that is assumed in communication escapes notice, it’s because the shared truths are too many and too dull to bear mentioning. What we want to talk about is what’s new, surprising, or disputed.
Although disagreement is possible, disagreement itself is a linguistic act, and has to occur through communication. Communication is possible only if the Principle of Charity is in effect, giving us a large foundation of agreement to base our disagreement on.
The last thing we have to explain is why it is that certain knowledge of myself seems more directly accessible than knowledge of the world, or knowledge of others. In a communication, the burden of interpretation is on the interpreter. It is the interpreter’s job to relate my utterance to some truth condition. As a speaker, I don’t need to engage in any intensive investigation to establish a relation between my utterance with its meaning. My utterance is related to precisely that utterance. When I say, “I love you”, I simply mean I love you. My interpretation of my own utterance stops there. But to my object of adoration, she has to relate that utterance to meaning while taking into consideration complicating factors such as whether I’ve taken the garbage out as promised. This difference between the the roles of speaker and interpreter in the Theory of interpretation explains why first person knowledge seems directly accessible.
As promised, Davidson doesn’t make the difference go away, but offers an explanation why there is a difference.
* Epilogue
Davidson writes philosophy like Wagner wrote operas: nothing less than everything is ever at stake.
–Jerry Fodor
While reading Davidson, I lost count of how many times I’ve scrawled in the text margin, “Thus Spoke The Rabid Formalist”. I had no sympathy for Davidson at all. But through the writing of this essay, I’ve come to appreciate Davidson. Though this is likely a massive case of cognitive dissonance resolution.
Davidson is a systematic philosopher. He doesn’t deal with individual puzzles as they arise. Rather, he considers the philosophical problems out there and comes up with a system of first principles to deal with all the problems. Davidson isn’t satisfied with particular technical answers to particular technical questions. Davidson’s answers to problems may seem fantastic and unbelievable when considered separately, but when taken together, the answers give us a worldview.
Academic philosophy in North America is predominantly Analytical Philosophy, which takes analysis and language seriously (Too seriously?). This self-conscious obsession with language quickly degenerates to something that seems like a meaningless verbal game. So called philosophical “problems” or “controversies” mere inventions of professional word crunchers. What’s the point?
What analytical (academic) philosophy does for me, I think, is the making precise of concepts I had always taken for granted. Philosophy asks questions I didn’t know I had. It makes distinctions I didn’t know existed, and qualifications where I didn’t know was needed.
People like you and me ask questions, then philosophers ask questions about the questions. They make distinctions on the distinctions. Generalization contradicted, contradiction explained, and the explanation contradicted. Commentaries made. Commentaries made on the commentaries. It goes on. Forever. One has to stop– somewhere.
Wittgenstein thinks of philosophy as therapy. Our thinking (in language) is fraught with confusions and nonsense. When we are embroiled in endless confusion, philosophy as therapy should point out the error, so we can get on with life.
… The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to.– The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question.
— Wittgenstein [Philosophical Investigations #133]
* References
Davidson, Donald
Belief and the Basis of Meaning
First Person Authority
Radical Interpretation
Three Varieties of Knowledge
Truth and Meaning
Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tarski-truth/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/
Tarski, Alfred
The Semantic Conception of Truth
Stern, David G.
Wittgenstein on Mind and Language
The Men’s Guide to What Women Really Mean By…
http://wilk4.com/humor/humorm238.htm
