Foghorns, mist and grammar

But if each of us can see only our own segment of blackly shining asphalt, how can we extrapolate that to a common picture of the world to share with our fellow travellers? We need signposts, foghorns, landmarks, lighthouses – a map, in short – by which we can navigate the terrain.

Some like Steven Pinker see evidence for a lingua franca: a common grammar shared by all human languages which is pre-wired by evolution into the cognitive faculties all human beings. On this view language – and therefore the particular rendition of the universe it affords – is as much a product of our biology as our arms or eyes, and through the office of this grammar there is a universal means of perceiving the world. In other words, after all, there is a single common map by which we do orient ourselves and avoid colliding with each other, and by reference to which all uncertainties and misunderstandings can be resolved.

It is courtesy of just this innate universal grammar that we can “shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision”.

As we pass the 200^th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, one might remark in the margin at the huge variety of social, political and philosophical literature which claims Darwin’s intellectual antecedence. Some might see this as evidence of the rude health in which Darwin’s Dangerous Idea finds itself a couple of centuries on – universal acid indeed, as Daniel Dennett termed it. Others might wonder whether such universal acidity is symptomatic of weakness in Darwin’s programme: a theory which can be all things to all people ends up being nothing to anyone; there’s a point where flexibility needed for multiple applications tips into ambiguity and incoherence.

For me, Pinker’s account or universal grammar, Darwin-certified or not, leaves something out. Even if it were sufficiently, exquisitely, precise as to permit only a single literal interpretation for a given statement (as far as I can tell, it isn’t), there would still be an infinite universe of possible figurative interpretations of the same statement, and grammar – the rules for constructing meanings from words – cannot help us with our vocabulary. When Lou Reed tells us, at the end of his exquisitely miserable single Perfect Day, “You’re going to reap just what you sow”, grammar is no help in determining whether or not he was talking about gardening, and whether it really was a “perfect day”, or perhaps there was just a little bit of irony interlaced. 

But – and here’s the thing – the ambiguity conferred by the possibility of metaphor is not an obstacle only for our poets and novelists. Exactly the same ambiguity, the susceptibility to figurative meaning, infests every statement, however strictly empirical or even mathematical. Indeed, that was the very problem with Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, so deftly exposed by Goedel. This is significant, because it suggests there is no difference between literature and science might not be as ontological as scientists tend to suppose.

So how are we meant to identify each time, from the infinite set of possible meanings, the right one? Like any natural language, English is no more and no less than a formal logical system, like Mathematics. In these technologically revolutionary times we are confronted, as never before, by the fact that English is a numeric system: Every character can in theory be and, for the purpose of electronic processing of data, is assigned its own digit – the ASCII code. A computer can only understand text by reducing it to numbers.

And in the same way that a mathematical system is, English is (non-viciously) circular (you can only validly define an English expression in terms of other English expressions: evidence: the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, a document which defines and explains the set of “every word in the English language” wholly in terms of words taken from that very same set).

Ultimately, the meanings we hang on the intricate latticework of words we create each day comes from beyond the formal set of symbols which comprise the English language. “Meaning in the world” when we apply our own respective vocabularies to the formal symbols in the language. Notwithstanding the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the set of formal symbols in practical use in any single person’s language will almost certainly be unique, and the precise meanings which that person assigns to that set of symbols, being completely functional on that person’s individual life history, definitely will be.

Einstein, Newton, Markopolos and Madoff - and what they teach us

Imagine Albert Einstein lived not at the beginning of the twentieth century, but in the early Eighteenth Century. Imagine he was an Austrian patent clerk without any scientific credentials or standing, but nonetheless had managed to devise and publish his theory of relativity, exactly as it was finally published, only in 1730, just 43 years after Newton originally published his Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. At this time classical mechanics (of the Force = Mass x Acceleration variety) was widely accepted and was a perfectly well functioning, pragmatic, simple account of celestial (and every day) mechanics).
Let’s say Einstein had correctly anticipated, in broad-brush terms, all the supporting scientific development which would be needed for Relativity to be a coherent scientific, well formed and operational thesis.


Now, in those circumstances as they were: an unknown Austrian clerk pitting himself against a man who was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and President of the Royal Society, and whose theory of mechanics appeared to work perfectly well, what is more – would Einstein’s theory would have gained any currency in the scientific community?
Allow that Einstein might have argued for this theory on the grounds that, at extremely high velocities, the supposed relations between acceleration, mass and force would not hold up: that, at the limit, classical mechanics was wrong.
I contend that Einstein’s theory would have been rejected for certain (for all we know such a theory was proposed, but hasn’t survived the ensuing centuries). Here are some of the reasons that would have been given for rejection:

• You have no credentials. You’re a crackpot. You’re quesrtioning one of the greatest scientific minds in the history of the western intellectual tradition. Go away, get properly credentialised as a scientist (by studying the works of people like Isaac Newton), and then see if you still agree with your deluded theory.
  
• Your theory is hopelessly complicated, counter-intuitive, and involves the absurd requirement that we reject the constancy of space and time, and instead agree on the constancy of the speed of light. It fails, utterly, the principle of Occam’s Razor.
  
• There is simply no need for this theory. Mr. Newton’s existing theory is perfectly adequate for our needs.
  

Of course, this is speculation, and probably idle speculation. But were we to know the answer, we would have a real insight into how science – or any community of experts – works.
Recently there has been a fascinating example of just such a situation, not in the annals of science, but in the arcane and highly specialised world of fund management.


Bernard Madoff was little known outside the New York investment community before late 2008. Nonetheless, before that time he was one of the most respected and successful senior members of the New York financial community – itself the most sophisticated gathering of financial experts anywhere in the world. He chaired the Nasdaq stock exchange, at one stage was the largest market maker on it, and ran a hedge fund for 48 years, which he grew from a $5,000 investment in 1960 to a portfolio, of of 2008, with something like $50 billion under management.
His firm, Madoff Securities LLC, was the largest single hedge fund on the planet. Amongst his clients were some of the most storied names in international finance, including Fairfield Greenwich, Banco Santander and HSBC, each of whom invested more than a billion dollars. Madoff’s returns over serveral years were consistent, regular, and immensely impressive: They averaged 12-13 per cent, after fees, every year.


Yet, as we all now know, Bernard Madoff was running a giant, fraudulent Ponzi Scheme. The returns, the positions he purported to be invested in and the cashflows were all fictional. To the best of anyone’s knowledge now, it seems Madoff was using the continuing stream of new customer investments to pay returns to existing customers.


Now, with the benefit of hindsight, commentators say Madoff’s claims are laughable; his supposed returns preposterous: they defied known laws of mathematics as much as economics given the strategy he purported to pursue.


We can only stare bewildered into vacant space wondering how an industry apparently based on the very principle of excellent management of just this sort of risk, where self-interested individuals with literally hundreds of million dollars of their own (and their clients’) money at stake, can have possibly let this happen. We do know that it did, and that is that.
So let’s consider the 17^th Century Einstein scenario. What would have happened if, say three years ago, the appropriate regulatory authorities were warned, in minute detail, that the only possible explanation for Bernard Madoff’s returns were that he was fraudulent? If the equivalent of our anonymous patent clerk from Austria set out in a single, clear, concise and compelling document, entitled “The World’s Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud”. Imagine if that 15 page document alleged that it was highly likely that Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme”, and outlined nearly 30 “red flags” correctly predicting analysis existing publicly available evidence that was only consistent with insider trading or a Ponzi Scheme.

Now this is far more striking than the evidence Einstein could have hoped to level against Newton. What would have been the likelihood of the Securities and Exchange Commission acting on that information. Again, I would say – admittedly, with the benefit of hindsight – it would be low. I say wit the benefit of hindsight because that’s exactly what someone did do – an options trader by the name of Harry Markopolos, in November 2005. You can see his document for yourself online, and now he's published a book about it. The SEC took absolutely no action.

This isn’t offered in indictment of securities regulation in the United States (not by me, at any rate; Markopoulos feels differently)  – almost the contrary. What I think this speaks to is the limitations of rational argument – the same limitations apply not just in finance and politics, but also in science and academia. These collective self-delusions don’t only arise in the absence of free debate contrary, but more or less in spite of it, and in almost any intellectual field: science, sociology, politics, ethics, finance, sport – all are susceptible to mass delusion.

This ought to tell us something about how we collectively think about things. Our claim to rationality seems not to be as robust as we might like it to be. With irony, we wonder, is our belief in our own rationality itself a product of mass delusion?

Truth and reconciliation

Yet common sense and our intellectual tradition tells us we are. The fundamentally religious and the die-hard atheists may agree about very little, but one thing they do agree on is that there’s a best description of The World Out There – an intellectual programme which has primacy over the others, and has earned the label “the truth” over all competing accounts. What they disagree about is which of them has it.

They would agree this “truth bearing” account will be intuitively apprehended by any reflective intelligent being regardless of culture, biology and language, or heredity. It trumps all competing explanations, settles all arguments and, as such transcends the particular idiom in which it is expressed: (and hence such a truth is referred to as a transcendental truth).

Yet something seems to be awry: for if, with Ogden Nash, we’re incarcerated in our cells of padded bone, unable with certainty to parse each other’s communications, then it is a bit optimistic to expect to recognise transcendental truth when we see it. Anecdotal (and quite unscientific) evidence, in the shape of ongoing, insoluble disputes between just such reflective, intelligent beings (evolutionary biologists can’t agree even with each other, let alone with archbishops) suggests to me that the idea of transcendental truth isn’t without its own practical problems. Why do we have political, ethical and sociological debates at all, let alone intractable ones, if all the answers are obvious? Steven Pinker remarks at the opening of his celebrated book The Language Instinct:

As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision.

Pinker seems to me to put the cart before the horse. It is implausible that every nuance does carry every time. Since we can’t see inside each other’s cells of padded bone, we can only deduce what’s going on in there from output: words, gestures, intonation, and it’s our dilemma to decide when a narrowing of the eyes denotes irritation and when it means nothing more than forgotten sunglasses. There is never enough information to be sure.

To “shape events with exquisite precision” implies that, somewhere between my padded skull and yours, there is such precision, that one interpretation of our communication (an interpretation being the reduction down to a simple, expressible proposition of an infinitely complex set of utterances, gestures, background context and dependent circumstances) is correct over all others. That, upon a dispute, those of sufficiently pedantic disposition could, by appeal to science and reason (no doubt dispensed by a panel of linguists) to authoritatively settle the matter.

But how? With reference to what? What could possibly serve as such an eternal measure by which our conversation can be judged (and if there were such a standard, how would we recognise it and what would be its point?) When one allows for metaphorical and figurative interpretations, any statement has an unlimited number of potential meanings. There is no external standard of interpretation to which we can reliably appeal.

It is our own, lonely human dilemma to settle on the best one: the one we find to be the most useful to help us through our situation, stuck like the eternal motorists, hauling the black future towards us behind purblind wipers, as in Louis MacNiece’s The Wiper:

Through purblind night the wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
On the screen; we shudder on
And hardly hold the road
All we can see a segment
Of blackly shining asphalt
With the wiper moving across it
Clearing, blurring, clearing.

My green and your green

You may recall, once upon a time, wondering whether your experience of the colours, shapes, sounds and smells of the world was the same everyone else’s. Perhaps your picture of the world was completely unique. After all, how would you ever know it wasn’t?

You could compare what you knew as “green” with a me, but that wouldn’t help: even if we agreed that, yes, that patch of grass is green – even if we were more specific: a bleached out sort of lime green, since it’d been trapped under a brick for a week – we still could not know we were having the same experience. Your green might have been different from mine: what you saw as green I might, if I saw it, see as maroon. For all I know, you may even perceive colours as smells or sounds, but so long as we couldn’t directly share each other’s sensations, we would remain none the wiser. Richard Dawkins sums it up nicely:

Perceived hues – what philosophers call qualia – have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinctions that are especially salient to the animal concerned.

I imagine most of us have, at one point in their lives, been through that thought process, and most resolve it in the same way. While we can’t really be sure, we just shrug our shoulders and suppose we must perceive the same things the same way – for how else could we understand each other?

A few years ago, I came across a poem by Ogden Nash – unusually for him, a serious poem, entitled Listen ...:

There is a knocking in the skull,
An endless silent shout
Of something beating on a wall,
And crying, “Let me out!”

That solitary prisoner
Will never hear reply.
No comrade in eternity
Can hear the frantic cry.

No heart can share the terror
That haunts his monstrous dark.
The light that filters through the chinks
No other eye can mark.

When flesh is linked with eager flesh,
And words run warm and full,
I think that he is loneliest then,
The captive in the skull.

Caught in a mesh of living veins,
In cell of padded bone,
He loneliest is when he pretends
That he is not alone.

We’d free the incarcerate race of man
That such a doom endures
Could only you unlock my skull,
Or I creep into yours.

To me, this poem, reflects on this very dilemma. We are social animals. We have evolved to communicate and co-operate yet, deep down, we never quite know whether experiences we take to be common really are. We never know for sure that our sentences are understood exactly the way we mean them, with every subtle and unspoken nuance conveyed. Nor do we ever know we understand, they way they’re meant to be, other people’s sentences.

We remain incarcerated in our own skulls, hoping against the doom, but never knowing, that we’re getting through.