Modes of language: Sparking good work together

Once you persuade your students to read, do they think critically about what they read?

Cameron Summers has written "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anything: A Sketch of a Philosophy of Language" (October 2, 2024). Summers says that students should:

"question things that they find written down. This is an important development: to think critically about something, you need to suspend yourself in the space between believing 'this is true' and 'this is untrue' — you must sort the good information from the bad by testing it and thinking about it and verifying it. Many of my students seem to come into the classroom thinking, 'Well, it wouldn’t be written down if it isn’t true/good/worthwhile, would it?'"

However, "being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter."

"So much of our discourse in this (and increasingly, it feels, every election cycle) is about pointing out gaffs from the other side — about how the former President denied climate change but built sea walls to protect his golf courses, that sort of thing. As if the mere fact of this contradiction is somehow material.

This is partially what allowed them to succeed in the 2016 election. The emphasis was on the fact that the other side was a grotesque mockery, rather than a credible threat. As liberals often do, they reduced things to aesthetics.

Now, a lot of people are talking about how think tanks attached to the party of “small government” and “states’ rights” is putting forward a plan for national controls on abortion and other reproductive healthcare. The contradiction here doesn’t matter to them, and pointing out their hypocrisy is just going to allow them to retain their advantage, because no one actually cares about that."

Three modes of language: Factual, instrumental, social

"We’re all explicitly taught to use language" in a "factual" mode, Summers says, which means we first try to understand information and root out our contradictory beliefs, and then we try to commmunicate it truthfully and clearly so others can know what we know.

But there's an "instrumental" mode too. This mode tends to generate contradictions.

The Instrumental Mode is not concerned with the horizontal(ish) transfer of information, but with the hierarchic imposition of will. You say things not to inform, but to achieve a particular end goal. In this stance, language is a tool that you use to achieve a material end result.

As such, contradiction serves the same purpose as exhaust, noise, and waste heat do for a combustion engine: it makes it clear that the apparatus is working as desired, it makes it obvious that it’s doing its job. As such, pointing out the contradiction is sort of like telling someone revving a muscle car, “That’s very loud and you’re putting out a lot of smoke.”

It’s not going to have the desired effect. You think you mentioned a problem; they think you’re describing the cool thing that they’re doing: only one of you is any closer to your goal."

The instrumental mode can be authoritarian. It can be modeled after a parent–child hierarchy. This "creates a hierarchic relationship where the speaker claims they know better than the listener. What becomes upsetting about the whole thing is when the listener repeats what is heard, creating a sort of linguistic pyramid scheme where the one receiving the repeated message is two steps removed from the one who supposedly knows best."

But this effect isn't really avoidable by retreating to a supposedly "factual" mode, as there's no way to entirely avoid norms.

"Even in the most informative utterance, there is the implicit message you should care about this. In answering a stranger’s request for help, there is the message that we should help each other.

Every utterance is, at least implicitly, a statement of belief about how the world works.

Language also has a "social" mode in which we try to connect to each other.

"My belief is that every composition or utterance has all three of these uses in different proportions. There’s always going to be an effort to make the other person do something, there’s always going to be an effort to make a connection, and there’s always going to be an attempt to give the other party some information that they don’t currently have."

As I interpret it

Communication, including "storytelling" of various sorts, always has these dimensions:

Here are the facts I'm aware of. I'd like to connect with you. Let's get something done together.

We should care about how we find out the truth, create knowledge, and experience the consequences thereof

In pointing out that what we call Generative AI is just a tool for bullshitting, Damien P. Williams said:

“The idea here isn’t to say that there’s some perfect capital-O, capital-T Objective Truth that Google Bard must actually adhere to, that GPT must adhere to, must reflect in the world. It is rather to say that when we uncritically make use of these [generative AI] tools, what we are doing is we are muddying the process of generating knowledge together. We are embodying and empowering a system which does not, in any way, shape or form, care about what is true or what is factual. Does not care about the impacts of providing non-factual, non-true knowledge. Does not care about the impacts of not going through the process of trying to understand what knowledge values and beliefs mean to each other. ... They do not care about truth. They do not care about fact. They are, in fact, bullshit engines.” (38:40–39:32, 39:48–39:55)

ICYMI: our latest @leftanchor.bsky.social ep we are talking the philosophy of bullshit as applied to Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance www.leftanchor.com/e/the-bs-epi...

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— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) October 1, 2024 at 1:42 PM

Both Summers and Williams, as well as the podcast discussion, refer to Harry Frankfurt's definition of bullshit.