Reading, writing and thinking
Posted By Marc on March 19, 2010
I am continually amazed at how “muddy” at lot of thinking is these days, and how this is reflected in a lot of the writing that I now read. I find myself yearning for the “Good Old Days”, which existed only in myth, where people would hold sensible conversations in their writing. Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety, but I have noticed a commonality in errors appearing with a greater frequency in the material I now read.
Confusing “facts” with assertions
One of the worst errors I have been seeing is a confusion between facts and assertions. With apologies to any two year olds reading this, but just because you want something to be so that does not make it so and, if you are writing for any group with a mental age above two, you had best realize it. Now, I am not talking about conceptual reification; that is another matter entirely. What I am talking about is the habit of stating that something is so multiple times and using those statements as a “proof” that it actually is so. Idiocy.
Now, I will be amongst the first to admit that “facts” do not exist in and of themselves; they are constructs of epistemological positionings. However, they get to be that way because they have shown to be useful, in a probabilistic sense, indicators of the presence of some pattern, process or item. In effect, “facts” are “facts” because their utility as indicators (“clues” if you will) has been tested of time and repeatedly shown to be associated with what people are actually looking for.
Choosing incorrect “facts”
A second error that I have seen cropping up a lot is the incorrect choice of facts to support specific arguments. While this may be related to the confusion of assertions with facts, it is most often associated with the mingling of epistemological stances and a confusion over what concept(s) are being looked for. Let me give you an example of this: if I and ten million people believe that the moon is made of blue cheese, then the existence of that belief is a fact (it is measurable by sensory means). It is not, however, an indicator of the make-up of the moon but, rather, of our beliefs about the moon. In other words, it is not a correct “fact” for the first case, but it is a correct “fact” for the second.
This type of error is quite common with people who are only capable of using “concrete” thinking; say ages 7-11 or so. Usually, people grow out of it, although it continues to be an ever present danger when we try and use new (to us) theoretical models and epistemological stances. There is, however, a nasty intellectual sinkhole into which people may sometimes fall, namely confusing a model with “reality” and, as a result, excluding even the potential of other stances. In its most common form, this leads to a form of fanaticism and rejection of alternate possibilities that, unless it is generally socially accepted, would be termed as a psychosis.
Talking / writing “past” people
This is a very tricky one, but crucial. It does not concern the accurate use of an epistemological stance (or stances) so much as it refers to the communication of the same to a particular audience. For me, it is exemplified by something my mother used to say every now and then when I was growing up: “for the sake of this argument, let us assume that black is white”.
This is a problem that I have had to work on for a long time now. as one of my friends, Paul, used to say about my writing: “It’s absolutely brilliant, and there’s just one thing I don’t understand…. everything from page 1 onwards!”. When we talk or write, we are attempting to communicate with some audience in mind. This has several implications:
- what is our intended audience’s epistemological stance(s)?
- what real world experiences can I use to ground my argument in their experience?
- what do they consider as “facts”?
This really isn’t a problem if you are a specialist writing for other specialists in the same field, but it does become a major problem when you are writing for people who are not specialists in that field. Indeed, this is one of the central problems in writing ethnographies since you are often trying to convey both how a group organizes itself to non-group members and how and why they construct their belief and meaning systems about that organization.
In many cases, it is possible to “bracket” what you communicate by situated definitions (let us assume that black is white), which is one of the reasons I tell my students that they need to define the terms they are using. Another very useful way of communicating to non-specialists is to lay out your epistemological assumptions as clearly as possible. So, for example, when I say “human rights don’t exist except as social constructs” (something that peeves a number of my colleagues!), I usually also say that they “exist” only in as much as they are a) agreed upon by a group of people and b) enforced; both being necessary conditions. One of my reasons for taking this tack is that many of the people I talk with operate as if human rights existed in and of themselves (a reification error).
A few concluding thoughts
There is a curious balance that is necessary between formal accuracy (e.g. not confusing facts and assertions, choosing the correct facts, etc.) and the requirements of your audience. This requirement has been hammered home to me this month in several of the things I have been reading and in the days I have spent on editing / correcting drafts (about 300 pages, single-spaced, in the first couple of weeks this month). Since the audiences were different for everything I was reading / editing, it was a very strange experience.
JWC on 
Daniel Gallant on 
MM on 
Mr. Xyz on 
Marc on
Very interesting for me as a writer. Appreciate your thoughts.
Hi Jim,
Thanks. I’d be interested in hearing about your own experiences. Do you see similar problems?
TMI
If a fact is simple and constructed of low density information that is only a few steps away from what we can check with our senses then we all have the same facts and agree on them and agree on the processes to manipulate them correctly.
What if our information storage and retrieval systems, external to ourselves, store more and more facts that are more and more dense informationally and are are further and further from what can be confirmed by our senses with a few simple steps? Is then the meaning of facts, meaning how we use facts, out of date and needs finer gradations to be communicated consistently or are our thought processes as taught by “education” out of date?
Are our brains designed for a simple world one or two steps removed from sensory validation – the lion is over there. As opposed to – lions are predators that must be protected or they will disappear when African societies stabilize their economies and use the lion’s land because they have better access to food, water and education as children and as a result human populations probably will expand at a rate moderated by war, disease, natural disaster which all require different mitigation such . . . . .. Which facts are more true than others and how do we manage them all at the same time with brains that can only really have one though process at a time? (Whew TLS – “too long sentences!”)
Just a thought.
Really good point! The distance between a “fact” and our sense is crucial. One of the reasons why I tend to shy away from using the word “true” is that there are too many ascriptions to it. It may be “true” that the lion is there, it may be “true” that the lion may eat you, etc. It does get one into the infamous infinity problem that Goedel worked on….
One of my favorite TV shows is “Lie To Me.” Of course this may not be true.
If I can look it up on Wikipedia and find the correlating facts I can keep thinking about the lion and make sure he doesn’t eat me. Or does that mean that the immediate sensible problem is more true than the abstract about how you count the number of lions?
Hahahaha, just having some fun mixing Goedel with the real world.
My #1 son is the musician and writer. He wants to believe that we humans will never decode how the brain creates the mind and what the operational construct is in that. From this very sentence you can infer my view that it is only a matter of time until we unlock that door.
Thanks for the interesting thoughts for the day.
Hi Marc:
I used to be pretty good at committing things to memory, here is something I read over 20 years ago, and I am sure I am fairly close. I do not remember where he said it, but Nietzsche once wrote:
People imagine that there are only facts. Wrong! It is precisely the facts that do not exist, only interpretations.
“what real world experiences can I use to ground my argument in their experience?”
A good question. I’ve seen a few painful instances in which it was clearly considered, but to disastrous effect. The individuals chose experiences that the audience could relate to, but the speakers could not. Specifically, each instance was a civilian with little knowledge of the military, attempting to use a military analogy.
Hi Schmedlap,
Having been in that position, I can empathize . If you are stuck in that type of a position, it’s always a good idea to have at least listened to some of the stories people who have the actual experience tell – you know, the “No shit, there I was…” type. The gain, it’s always a good idea to try and learn as much as you can about your audience before hand and, at the same time, be prepared to laugh at yourself when some analogy you use falls flat
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Hi Marc.
I just found your blog (H/T Schmedlap). This thread is similar to what I am trying to convey with our MDMP (Military Decision Making Process). Particularly when one starts working in a wicked, ill-structured, or undefined problem (i.e. almost any political/human endeavor), planners often hand-wave or bypass the facts and assumptions. This mistake can be costly.
Instead, in my world, those facts and assumptions are driven through intelligence collection and analysis (General Area Survey, Reconnaissance, and Surveillance).
On a side note, I’m still trying to sort out how this knowledge differs between the theorist (social scientist) and the practisioner (military). For instance, as we discussed earlier, an anthropologist (in theory) is supposed to observe and understand a society’s culture, norms, values, and beliefs while “doing no harm.” On the other hand, when we intervene as a military, we are attempting to change the society’s culture, norms, values, and beliefs. IMO, this distiction seems important.
v/r
Mike
Hi Mike, great to see you here .
Let me just make a short comment on the theoretician (social scientist) vs. practitioner (military) note. All too often, IMO, we (Anthropologists / Social Scientists) classify some entire range of action as “Bad”, so “obviously” we should have nothing to do with it. This shows up clearly in the lackm of debate and common understanding of what “Harm” means in a context of ethics. “Harm”, at least in the discursive tradition I grew up in, is not the same as “hurt”, and “critical analysis” should not be a synonym for “you hurt my feelings! Wah, wah wah!”.
I truly believe that many social scientists have lost that intimate connection both with lived reality and with a transcendent ideal that characterized Boaz. We seem to have forgotten that Boaz held “science” (actually, the Baconian ideal of a via negativa form of science) as a transcendent ideal, and that one of our “missions” as scientists and Anthropologists was to come as close to ultimate “truth” as we could, always knowing that we would fail. As scientists, at least according to my reading of Boaz, we were required to produce our best understanding of “Truth” based on what we actually observed and saw. A critical component of that lay in our own, personal development and throwing away of preconceptions. Like the military, we were supposed to take what we observed, analyze it, and come to our best “solution”; and, if that meant attacking an institution, a power broker, or whatever, we had a moral imperative to do so.
I truly believe that we (Social Scientists) have lost that ideal in general and, in loosing it, we have become ethically bankrupt. I can think of only one person in the anti-military crowd who has held to this ideal, Max Forte and, while I disagree with a lot of what he has to say, at least he thinks things through. On the flip side, most of the military crowd I know does meet this ideal and, I suspect, part of the reason is that it is lives on the line – something that Anthropologists don;t have to deal with most of the time – that is the key difference.
All of this is a round-about way of getting at your last comment: most of the military folks I know want to make people’s lives “better”. That may be based on screwed up assumptions of what “better” means, but I have only met one person who didn’t want to do so out of the hundreds of military folks I know.
Marc,
Was going to send you an e-mail with a new post that might amuse. But there is no e-mail button on your sight.
Anyways: http://shootyoureyeout.net/?p=785
MM
Mike,
Really like the post!