Theses

Unsorted theses on various topics. Mostly undercooked.

No Word for x in My Language

One of the most persistently frustrating phrases used amongst indigenous peoples of the West is something to the effect of: "There's no word for profit in our language." Other frequent candidates are words like sell, sovereignty, or ownership. Such sentiments are usually expressed to paint difference between indigenous ways of life and Western, typically capitalist, systems. The notion implicit to such talk is that these concepts are so foreign to indigenous peoples that they are simply incapable of describing them.

It is often second-language speakers whom I hear making these sorts of comments. It is typically those who have an early conversational fluency in their own language, which equips them with sufficient confidence to make bold claims about the fundamental differences of cultural cognition. Usually, this sort of person speaks only English fluently, was raised in a Western paradigm, and aside from English speaks only his own particular indigenous language with any degree of proficiency. To a certain extent, the resulting attitude is to be expected. Learning another language is, for many, the first access to a different way of thinking about the world. It is natural that the significant affect of that experience becomes extrapolated into somewhat grander anthropological theories. Moreover, it is especially to be expected amongst those of a certain political persuasion, or those reacting against marginalisation by aggressively asserting indigenous identity.

However, this tendency reflects a broader trend regarding the essentialising of indigenous difference with, I argue, counterproductive results. Central to the issue is the framing of lexical differences in terms of absence. The trouble is that, in asserting indigenous cultures innocent of Western vices, it follows that those same cultures may lack certain virtues. An example is the popular notion that Māori lacks an original word for the term kiss. The term in common usage, kihi, is a direct transliteration from English kiss, and has taken on the same meaning as the English term. If we accept this notion, are we then to believe that, prior to the adoption of the term kihi, Māori did not have any way whatsoever to express the meaning of a kiss? There are many accounts of kissing—or something that looked to Europeans like kissing—in traditional Māori society. To say “there is no word for kiss in our language” gives the impression that a) the act of intimate kissing was unthinkable to Māori and, more dangerously, b) Māori did not have intimacy. Thus, an apparently simple claim of a lexical lack does in fact serve to reinforce colonial prejudices about indigenous capacity for romance.

To understand this, it is necessary to realise that saying “there was no Māori word for kiss” connotes to the layman an absence of all the factors that go along with kissing; love, intimacy, tenderness, etc. This in turn serves to reinforce narratives of Māori savagery and insensitivity. Not allowing a people the capacity for love, as you, an outsider, understand it, is to permit that people only a diminished humanity—to see them as less than human. Such concepts or capacities do not even need to be particularly ethical, or emotional; I wouldn’t like to be told by an English speaker that I am utterly incapable of understanding a complex term like laparoscopic appendectomy or collateralised debt obligation merely because I speak Māori. It would be considered racist, and rightly so, for a Westerner to say that the cultural and mythological connotations of the word finance are incomprehensible to a person from a culture that traditionally practices a gift economy.

Assertion of indigenous semantic exclusivity can also lead to absurd and supernatural claims of the Sapir-Whorf kind. Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied the Hopi language under the guidance of Edward Sapir in the 1950s, concluded, largely because of an imperfect understanding of the different Hopi ways of talking about time, that the Hopi fundamentally did not experience (or worse, were incapable of experiencing) time in the same way as Europeans. This strain of argument, especially as it relates to temporality, seems particularly attractive to social media new-age types; crystals, vibrations, etc—not to mention some indigenous people who, disconnected from the lore and cosmology of their culture, adopt hippie caricatures of other indigenous cultures and nonsensically map them onto their own. One will occasionally see Māori on TikTok talking about how our ancestors “knew about sacred vibrations”, or similarly absurd, imported concepts. The argument, often based on specious linguistic evidence, is ever: if you can’t talk about it, you don’t experience it! These sorts of conceptions imagine indigenous peoples as something akin to magical, time-travelling elves; as the four-dimensional squid-things in the film Arrival (2016). It is not a comparison, I believe, that does indigenous people credit. If there is another iwi (I reckon Ngāpuhi) that knows the secret of time travel, we’re yet to hear about it down in Ngāti Toa!

Sapir and Whorf's theories of extreme linguistic relativity were shown to be wrong in the 1980s. Whorf had misunderstood the Hopi language, and had not appreciated its subtleties or its strategies for expressing temporal statements that might, in English, require fewer words, or more straightforward language. The linguist Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated that, far from having no concept or experience of time, the Hopi speak about time in terms of a spatial progression centred around the self, moving from past to the future. Despite some lingering academic debate about the exact nature of Hopi time, most linguists agree that the Hopi, like all other known human cultures, speak about time with spatial metaphor, the particular style of which differing somewhat from culture to culture. The communication of the same temporal concepts between cultures, it must be said, merely requires a little skilled translation.

This communication, I argue, is the lesson from the failure of Sapir and Whorf. I know of no evidence that suggests that it is totally, utterly semantically impossible for any one language to express an idea that another can; given infinite phonemes, speaker identity, inflection, cosmological explication, tone, et cetera. The mere fact that one can discuss complex cultural concepts from indigenous societies using the English language is disproof of such theories. The danger of fetishising our own indigenous languages as fundamentally different and semantically firewalled from settler languages is the loss of access to our deep cultural knowledge and metaphysics. An indigenous person discovers these things when she learns the strategies within her language to talk about topics that are not intuitive to it. It is in the feeling of a language flexing, bending, and working hard to express something foreign that a tongue’s speaker truly learns its nature. Hence, fluent or native speakers of indigenous languages are less likely to say their language lacks a term. More often, one hears from such people: "It's hard to explain... it's kind of like ______, except with a sense of ______." The skill, profundity, and mastery of native speakers is apparent in their ability to communicate similarity, not difference. This, I believe, is the real treasure of an indigenous linguistic worldview.

If there is any kernel of truth in the claim that “there’s no word for x in my language”, it is that in some cultures, certain concepts are more proximate—but never unthinkable. What this state of affairs reveals is the sublime depth required for cross-cultural communication. To communicate collateralised debt obligation in exclusively Māori terms is a feat just as impressive as explaining manaakitanga in exclusively English terms. Moreover, there is in fact an original Māori word for kiss: namely ūngutu, a ‘firm meeting of lips’. In encountering this translation, an English speaker feels its depth and tenderness, and relates it to his own fond memories of a passionate kiss. As with so many things indigenous, relationality is the key to communication. To explain something on somebody else's terms usually involves exploiting the commonalities between you; leveraging shared understandings as a branching-off point to communicate ideas that might be less culturally proximate to the other person. Who are you to me? Who am I to you? How do we each think about this? Heoi anō, if there is an essential difference in indigenous thought, it is relationality in everything—especially in communication.

In Answer to the Question: Should We Use Speculative or Narrative Writing in Science?
I think this is basically a communications question.

If we're interrogating modes of writing as 'scientific' or not, the only matrix by which we should evaluate it is whether the writing itself adequately communicates a scientific idea. It is a question of pedagogy and communication.

In Māori culture, there is an idea of bringing someone to share your understanding of an idea not by imprinting the finished structure of the idea onto them, but instead planting the seed with them that will naturally grow into a mature, worked-out version of that understanding. You plant the seed rather than grafting the tree.

Narrative and storytelling has been long-recognised to be the possibly the most effective mode of communicating an idea; that's what politicians do it. I did it as a politician, all of my colleagues did it, advertisers do it, why the resistance from scientists?

The radical essence of this argument is that you can achieve truth by lies; to go even further, you could say that this is actually the process of all science communication!

I'm not an extremist, though; if we're going to be reflexive about epistemology, we should be reflexive about our chosen style of writing as well, and add the appropriate disclaimers to narrative writing. This making-obvious of bias is parallel to the question of the difference between historical fiction and archaeological writing: in both crafts, the writer makes a choice about what to select, to include or exclude, in order to artificially (i.e. as artifice) support her conclusions. Thus, the best I can do is suppose that the artifice of selection is more acknowleded in historical fiction, with the goal being maximal drama, whereas the artifice of selection is more mediated by ideology in archaeology, with the goal being stimulation of thought—the planting of the seed.

Transcendent Imagination
The most important faculty of the modern person is her ability to conceptualise “something else”. All our notions of progress, morality, belief, even linear time itself, spring from our ability to conceptualise things not as they are but as they could be. The ought, rather than the is. To lose this faculty would be the most dangerous single event that could happen in our society's consciousness; the same animus which drove my ancestors to venture out into the unknown with but the sea-birds and stars to guide them, which led others of them to cast off the shackles of dogmatism and build machines and institutions which ushered in modernity, could slip away from us in only a few generations.

The destruction of a possible future comes from the destruction of historical and cultural memory. To remember nothing is to believe in nothing—and to believe nothing else is possible.

In Answer to a Friend's Question: Who has a Better Theory of Mind? Left or Right?
I'll attack this by looking at people's internal explanations for others who hold different beliefs, because I think considering someone's capacity to see the world differently when that view seriously differs from one's own is a good indicator of one's capacity to conceptualise the internal world of another person. In answering this I'm considering the most common denominators. For the left-learners, it's someone between a bachelor-holding Western social democrat versus an old union mum. For the right-leaners, I'm going for someone between a tradie and a small business owner. Note for this answer I'm excluding progressive liberals, which is big decision, but because I think their theory of mind is sort of a weird mirror image of the right-wingers.

I think at its most basic level, the way that both tendencies explain someone else's different thinking is by deficiency. For the left-leaner, deficiency in knowledge, for the right-leaners, deficiency in common sense. I think the moral judgement here is revealing; the left-leaner thinks that the tradie could gain correct beliefs with more education or life experience, whereas I'm not convinced the right-leaner allows so easily for improvement. Common sense is usually described as inherent, not learned, in contradistinction to 'book smarts'. You don't hear, for example, tradies saying "put the wokesters on the job site and they'll learn quickly", it's usually "put the wokesters on the job site and they'll be hopeless and suffer! haha".

There's a redemptive element to the left-leaner's belief, which is quite Marxist. Benjamin's big smackdown RKO 619 epic finisher to orthodox Marxism was identifying its cosmotechnical borrowing from redemptive Christian theology. Marxists inherently believe that the world can be redeemed in this life, by the destruction of inequality and the building of heaven on Earth. This redemptive kernel basically remains in all leftist thought, and even your garden-variety left-leaner will almost always believe that his ideological opponents can be reeducated and redeemed. At it's most extreme form, each of these ideologies builds camps; leftists build theirs for reeducation, right-wingers build theirs for extermination.

Conservative Christianity, by contrast, believes that humans are necessarily fallen and essentially tainted with original sin, and that redemption is only possible through Christ, at Judgement Day, after apocalypse. Note that "apocalypse" really has the sense of "revealing"; people's essential character is revealed, and they are judged accordingly, either redeemed, sent to purgatory, or (maybe, possibly) damned. There is no way to redemption except through Christ. It's controversial to say, but basically everyone in the West who hasn't consciously questioned where his beliefs come from and isn't a leftist probably has this belief. Christianity is still the absolute ontological underpinning of Western political thought for normies, and the right-wing hesitance to embrace redemption for their ideological opponents is due to this.

Coming to the San Quentin "prisoners' theory of mind" example, right-leaners are much more likely to believe that these people are essentially and irredeemably uncalibrated, i.e stupid, ESPECIALLY because they're sinful (they must be, because they're in prison, right?). Left-leaners, as inheritors of Marxist thought, think that the state institutions of man are inherently evil, and thus have more mental scope to consider that these people have the potential to be elevated to goodness and intelligence with the right person-building and person-repairing.

Therefore, I think leftists are better equipped with the mental models to understand that someone can be 'fixed', or 'improved', and therefore a broader capacity to understand how someone may change their cognition and view of the world from a starting point other than the observer's. Note that this all rests on an improvement narrative; and presumes that someone is necessarily wrong (not woke enough) for not sharing a particularly point of view.

My final, still-undercooked thesis is that the people who are most equipped for external theory-of-mind recognition is, maybe, liberals. Real liberals believe that every man carries his God under his hat, and tend towards idealism more than the materialism of Marxists or the zeal of Christians. They're the inheritors of the sceptical, rationalist tradition, and a necessary part of that is the allowance for the diversity of a chaotic universe. They have a general resistenace to metanarrative, aside from 'liberty' generally increasing over time, but no special allegiance to a given motor or teleology of history. I think, at the moment, that this translates to allowing more readily for different points of view, and for a conception of evil that involves people being misguided, not necessarily sinful or anti-historical.

I think the next question is whether a 'better' theory of mind is one with a logical conclusion of treating every individual as a free agent, and that discounts collective, normative pressures which might be simply playing out on the terrain of his mind rather than representing actual cognition. The other problem with mentalism in general is that it's kind of unfalsifiable, and creates chicken-and-egg scenarios like "Why did he draw that picture in blue? Because he wanted it to look that way." The question is ever: "Why did he want it to look that way?" Despite all this, that Leone (1982) article I sent you the other day does have some cool mentalist ideas at scale, which reconciles some of the issues with traditional mentalism by considering group 'grammars' for individual action.

I think the ultimate, probably unachieveable, best theory of mind is one that excavates the normative forces acting on a person's cognition, as imprinted on their biological equipment and capacity for complex thought in a number of given realms, and (importantly) predicts how they will respond to given stimuli. I'm still not sure what tradition of thought gets closest to this; Father Brown from team Conservative had a good crack at it last night with his scathing critique of Buddhism, but I have read basically zero psychoanalytic literature past Freud (no Jung, no Lacan, no Zizek) so I don't actually think I know enough to answer the question satisfactorily; except that, as it was posed, I would say left-wing.