Loose connections (a principled take)

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. -- Virginia Woolf

(This quote occupies a rather prominent place in the chambers of my mind; my interests coincide fairly well with the category of "things that are attached to life at all four corners.")

Michael Dummett has died; I was convinced I had blogged about him but I can't find the post. He was an interesting character -- analytic philosopher, Tarot expert, and more -- but I knew him primarily through a 1975 essay on "The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic" that was in a book of philosophy-of-math readings. It appealed very strongly to me because Dummett's views ratified my biased belief that all the interesting problems in analytic philosophy could be restated as problems in the philosophy of mathematics. A few highlights (I realize that this is old hat for a lot of people, but it was my first exposure to late Wittgenstein -- late W. is a difficult writer and I needed someone to Dummett down for me): here he is describing the sort of theory of meaning an intuitionist could hold --

A model of meaning is a model of understanding, i.e. a representation of what it is that is known when an individual knows the meaning. Now knowledge of the meaning of a particular symbol or expression is frequently verbalisable knowledge, that is, knowledge which consists in the ability to state the rules in accordance with which the expression or symbol is used or the way in which it may be replaced by an equivalent expression or sequence of symbols. But to suppose that, in general, a knowledge of meaning consisted in verbalisable knowledge would involve an infinite regress: if a grasp of the meaning of an expression consisted, in general, in the ability to state its meaning, then it would be impossible for anyone to learn a language who was not already equipped with a fairly extensive language. Hence that knowledge which, in general, constitutes the understanding of the language of mathematics must be implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge cannot, however, meaningfully be ascribed to someone unless it is possible to say in what the manifestation of that knowledge consists: there must be an observable difference between the behaviour or capacities of someone who is said to have that knowledge and someone who is said to lack it. Hence it follows, once more, that a grasp of the meaning of a mathematical statement must, in general, consist of a capacity to use that statement in a certain way, or to respond in a certain way to its use by others.

This essay was the first thing I'd read pointing out the similarity between Quine's philosophy of language and Hilbert's chronologically earlier -- earlier, btw, than Woolf -- philosophy of mathematics (both "holistic" in some sense -- see below -- and both of which must be rejected, as Dummett argues, by the "intuitionist" view).

it is not that a statement or even a theory has, as it were, a primal meaning which then gets modified by the interconnections that are established with other statements and other theories; rather, its meaning simply consists in the place which it occupies in the complicated network which constitutes the totality of our linguistic practices. [...] Frequently such a holistic view. is modified to the extent of admitting a class of observation statements which can be regarded as more or less directly registering our immediate experience, and hence as each carrying a determinate individual content. These observation statements lie, in Quine’s famous image of language, at the periphery of the articulated structure formed by all the sentences of our language, where alone experience impinges. [...]

For Hilbert, a definite individual content, according to which they may be individually judged as correct or incorrect, may legitimately be ascribed only to a very narrow range of statements of elementary number theory [sg. Hilbert was talking about operations like addition of integers etc. which one can "verify" with reference to collections of carrots, sticks, and the like]:  these correspond to the observation statements of the holistic conception of language. All other statements of mathematics are devoid of such a content, and serve only as auxiliaries, though psychologically indispensable auxiliaries, to the recognition as correct of the finitistic statements which alone are individually meaningful.

(The connection with Virginia Woolf should be obvious.) Dummett goes on to suggest that if one rejects this sort of holistic view -- for which there are various reasons, Godel's incompleteness theorems not least among them -- one might find a path to a revisionist theory of meaning. I'm not going to bother with the argument here, interesting as it is (some of it also amusingly echoes his prescriptivist views on grammar in Grammar and Style (1993)); just one more amusing snippet:

The [conventional notion of mathematical truth] does not provide for inflections of tense or mood of the predicate ‘is true’: it has been introduced only as a predicate as devoid of tense as are all ordinary mathematical predicates; but its role in our language does not reveal why such inflections of tense or even of mood should be forbidden.

Finally I should mention that the Hilbert-Woolf-Quine metaphor comes up rather widely in discussions of mathematics; not just its validity but its value, as in this remark of Michael Atiyah's (quoted by Gowers, who is explicitly a Hilbertian formalist, though Atiyah probably isn't):

the ultimate justi cation for doing mathematics is intimately related with its overall unity. If we grant that, on purely utilitarian grounds, mathematics justi es itself by some of its applications, then the whole of mathematics acquires a rationale provided it remains a connected whole. 

(I have always tended to hold something approaching this view about physics, but it is far less popular in the physics community -- partly because the appeal to direct applications is easier, partly because a fair number of physicists believe it is obvious that new theories supersede old ones rather than adding to them, a view that I have never been in complete sympathy with.)

What is school history for?

Richard J. Evans writes in the LRB about the Tories' attempt to make school history less critical, more "narrative"-based, and generally more old-fashioned:

The demand, really, is for a celebratory history: how otherwise could it serve as the cement of national identity? Sample exam questions proposed by the Better History group for the new curriculum have included: ‘Why did Nelson and Wellington become national heroes?’; ‘What liberties did English people enjoy by the end of the 17th century that they hadn’t had at the start?’; and ‘How dangerous was the Spanish Armada?’ – the examinee, it’s presumed, isn’t going to answer from the point of view of the Spanish. 

There are two lines of objection to this, both with considerable force, one minor and one less so. The minor  one is that it'd all be white-people-centric and thus wrong for a diverse society. The proposed alternatives could be either (a) teach people of different ethnic groups different celebratory histories, (b) teach everyone a fairly diverse history. (a) is, I think, rightly horrifying to many people, and anyway defeats the purpose of creating a "cement"; (b) is a sensible (within-these-parameters) but not radical fix, which would have the incidental advantage of distinguishing Cameron from the more off-putting Little England types.

The major objection is that celebratory history is intrinsically a bad, stultifying, sort of thing that leaves people incompetent to analyze texts later in life:

Even more calamitous is the prospect of history teaching in the schools confining itself to the transmission and regurgitation of ‘facts’. [...] When I started teaching history at university in the 1970s, many first-year students were incapable of critical reading of this kind. (I ran into trouble with one class when I began to point out the problems in the arguments put forward by one of the books I had set them to read. ‘Why did you make us read it,’ one of them complained, ‘if you don’t agree with it?’) Better history teaching in schools changed all that, but now Gove wants to abandon these skills all over again. Better History declares that ‘it is by the acquisition and use of historical knowledge that historians are primarily judged’ – but in reality that only makes a Mastermind contestant.

It is possible to teach actual skills only if history is taught in depth, and that means a focus on a limited number of specialised topics. 

At some level I'm very sympathetic to all of this, but it is both muddled and blinkered to think of school history as being about the training of future academic historians. Evans distinguishes, near the end of his article, between history and "memory," but it is not obvious to me that history-the-academic-discipline is what should be taught at the high-school level. After all, what does society lose if people like Evans have to teach kids how to question sources -- yes, it's a waste of their time, but in this case they'd probably be better at it than the average schoolteacher. Is it that one should train kids to be anti-authoritarian because "this makes them better citizens" etc.? If so, then the Tories should, almost by definition, object to the idea; besides, it would surely be easier to teach "critical thinking" in a class about contemporary issues...

I am beset here by a basic ambivalence about what school should be for, beyond literacy, numeracy, and related survival skills. It takes people much longer to grow up than it does to become literate; what -- other than socializing -- is one to do with the rest of the time? One line of thought is to focus on what kids are good at, maybe beef up the math curriculum ("teh Chinese are invading!"), teach more foreign languages, etc. but there is only so much that one is ever going to use and it seems hard (though possible with some backing from neuroscience) to justify teaching explicitly useless skills. Another line of thought is to have everybody acquire an agreed-upon set of references and symbols, preferably reasonably rich and ambiguous, that can then be used in various kinds of civic and artistic discourse. This is perhaps roughly what's implied by teaching history as memory -- it's like doing the Greek myths, but with that frisson of fact... and, of course, with the right place names.

Evans's article strongly reminded me of Gordon Wood's criticism of Jill Lepore's book about the Tea Party, which is that she was unreasonably dismissive of memory as opposed to history. (I'll note in passing that I enjoyed Wood's book The Purpose of the Past on the whole.) Here is Bernard Bailyn, quoted by Wood on the slave trade:

the memory of the slave trade is not distant; it cannot be reduced to an alien context; and it is not a critical, rational reconstruction. It is for us, in this society, a living and immediate, if vicarious, experience. It is buried in our consciousness and shapes our view of the world. Its sites, its symbols, its clues lie all about us.

This is particularly relevant, and dangerous, in America, where the past's shadows are large and proximate. Memory is a political project, which is why it appeals to Gove and Cameron; but these partial, allegorical readings of the past are the only reason we care about what happened. To the extent that this is true, I wonder if it wouldn't be worthwhile to try and move the emblems as far away from the present as possible, to lower the temperature and have the myths be more mythical, and their literal truth less important for practical purposes. If liberalism and conservatism centered around alternative readings of the Metamorphoses rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, perhaps we'd have a saner public discourse?

Addendum Wood's article "Conspiracy and the paranoid style: Causality and deceit in the eighteenth century" has one of the best subtitles ever.

"Rotting oranges, used tissues and odd socks"

Maybe Empson and Auden are my favorite literary personalities because I can "identify" (dread word!) with their lifestyles. For instance, here is Frank Kermode reviewing a biography of Empson:

His victims were usually confident that his habits in controversy were in some measure aspects of a more general eccentricity: the strangled, oddly inflected voice or voices, the peculiar beard, the use of drink to lubricate all argument, to get something started. [...] Money worries in the final years required him to spend time at American universities, teaching, lecturing, and reinforcing his reputation for bizarre or clownish behaviour. A colleague at Penn State notes that ‘he went back at night to a place full of rotting oranges, used tissues and odd socks’, and records that ‘he once, for some minutes, watched my neighbour’s door lamp through my telescope, thinking it Mars.’ Dining with Marshall McLuhan, ‘I thought I had to explain to him that he was worshipping the devil, being a Roman Catholic. It was at his own dinner table, but the ladies had gone for their pee, so it wasn’t really rude.’ On a visit to Harvard he was ‘truculent and contradictory’ towards Richards.

There is something heartening about all the drunkenness and especially the squalor. (Remember the Auden martini?) Both W.E. and W.H.A. had Robert Lowell as a gleeful describer of their living habits; Kermode quotes Lowell on Empson:

Not that conditions in their Hampstead house were very different from those of the Sheffield ‘burrow’ – they were described by Robert Lowell as having ‘a weird, sordid nobility’

And there is a wonderful passage in one of Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop -- collected in Words in Air, which btw is a must-read, but is in storage like most of my other books -- on Auden's Manhattan parties. (I find it interesting how much more natural it seems for nobility to be sordid than to be, say, hygienic: is it that we associate the aristocracy with decline or that we associate it with antiquity, which is automatically dirty [1]?  Empson is very "gentry" -- the legend has pushed this angle, referring to him as a squire etc. And isn't there a thing about bad teeth as well?)

I went back to the Kermode articles because Empson's been "in the news" lately, at least to the extent that my feed represents "the news" -- first of all there was that Michael Wood article on True Grit:

If traditional pastoral often idealises the simple life, it never quite chases the shadows of cruelty and corruption away, and what William Empson called the trick of simplification was always the thing. The mode kept remembering what it was ostensibly getting rid of.

The "trick of simplification" is a notion I'd like to associate with Empson's prehistory as a mathematician though I'm not sure this is right; certainly the Pastoral book is preoccupied with a kind of structural question that lends itself to "modeling," and I have sometimes wondered whether what one does as a theoretical physicist isn't related to pastoral in the sense that, instead of attacking a complex and idiosyncratic problem directly, one takes an entirely different, heavily simplified, and more "conventional" situation, treats it, and points out that the relations between certain entities in the original problem and the (asserted-to-be) analogous ones in the simplified one are -- unexpectedly as it were -- the same [2]. Mathematics is in this telling the individual or collective unconscious; it has many of the right properties for this role, and I suppose one can think of complex things like the weather as perversions of some submerged mathematical inclination. Of course none of this is useful as an account because there is no moral significance to the complexity of nature.

And then there was an article on "six types of clarity" that Marina sent me in response to my saying that something was an ambiguity of the second kind. ("I like it that you clarify which kind of ambiguity you're talking about." Admittedly an odd thing to do, but I do think Empson's types 1, 2, and 4 describe specific effects for which I don't know of any other terminology.) It's a very nice article and has some insightful things to say about an issue I blogged about sometime ago re "primitive" poetry. Of which more later.

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[1] One is tempted to assume an association between messiness and vitality, but this falls apart after say the 17th century. The Rochester character in The Man of Mode doesn't use deodorant but is irresistible -- the expected pattern -- but generally the bourgeoisie and esp. the nonconformists are (a) on the rise, (b) not notably filthy, (c) not irresistible, at least qua bourgeoisie, (d) [possibly] breeding like rabbits. (Not sure about (d) in popular perception. Might be projecting backwards from the Mormons. Not sure either how far northern accents would stand in for filthiness -- the Chatterley line of reasoning, though gamekeepers were not bourgeois.) There's something odd about the fact that neatness is perceived as a diminishing virtue, even as far back as Johnson's comparison of Dryden and Pope. I suppose this is all linked in some tenuous way to the dissociation-of-sensibility thesis and the idea that poetry has never come to terms with modern life, has never found the right things poetical, etc.

[2] There are some areas, like string theory, to which this paradigm doesn't evidently apply. One probably wants to think of the Standard Model as the idiosyncratic, complicated system that is being simplified. But there isn't really a notion of "universality" there as there is elsewhere, so this isn't a natural description.