Construction of Meaning (2)

In the previous post I was considering the construction of meaning as a conscious effort. And there is no question that we need to dedicate our efforts to constructing good meaning that is useful to our work. But it is worth recognizing that this construction of meaning is something that will occur: it is how we think.

The following quotation is taken from the Preface to Mark Turner's The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language:
"The literary mind is the fundamental mind. Although cognitive science is associated with mechanical technologies like robots and computer instruments that seem unliterary, the central issues for cognitive science are in fact the issues of the literary mind.
"Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories. The mental scope of story is magnified by projection--one story helps us make sense of another. The projection of one story onto another is parable, a basic cognitive principle that shows up everywhere,...
"Parable is the root of the human mind--of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly even of speaking."
The italics are Turner's; the boldface is my emphasis. I happen to find the book convincing, but then it fits well within the rubric of philosophy that I adopted studying with George Lakoff and Eve Sweetser at Berkeley. Lakoff and Turner co-wrote a book (More Than Cool Reason), so it is not surprising that the views fit together.
Whether you accept the premise or not is a matter of your research and study. But if we do accept this premise, what does it mean in terms of creating meaning? On one level it means that when faced with a phenomenon, we will create a story to explain it. Whether that story relies on God, or some group of gods, or simple random mechanical fate, or some highly detailed chemical process, it is still a story. How do we explain wine? We could explain it as the hand of a god touching the juice, or we could explain it in terms of fermentation processes that can be explained in great detail in chemical terms. How do we explain human creativity? Is that being touched by a god, or muse, or is it having a certain set of genes and a certain history? Or is it the effect of some unnatural stimulant?

That's really what our knowledge is: a bunch of stories about how things used to work, and how we expect them to work in the future. What is quantum physics but an attempt to make stories that explain incredibly detailed phenomena? When Newton proposed his mechanics, we had a detailed story of how the world worked. Einstein's relativity changed that story, but matched it fairly well in many respects. Einstein's relativity and the development of atomic theory began to tell us stories about atoms. I still remember some of those stories from high school science: when the salt (NaCl) is put into the water, the Na and Cl separate into ions. That's high school chemistry. But it's nothing more than a story.

We will construct meaning automatically and unconsciously. But we should also seek to construct meaning consciously. It is a place for the imagination. One wants to consider even those things that seem unlikely, and then test them. Once upon a time it seemed unlikely to most people that the earth revolved around the sun. Sherlock Holmes declared it impossible that anyone had gone through the door, but obviously for H.G. Wells it would not be impossible for a person to walk down a passage unobserved, and any number of technological possibilities could explain a door being opened without a key. As academics, of course, we don't want to tell stories that are so far from the realm of the discourse that we wouldn't be accepted, but we do want to use our imaginations to think about the different stories that are consistent with the questions we asked and the results we received. And for that matter, we just want to be able to imagine different stories that could explain a phenomenon of interest, because that consideration of different possibilities is the place where we generate the hypotheses that we can test.

Construction of Meaning

The answer may just leap out at us from the tables and graphs of evidence. We may find it somewhere in the pages of transcripts.

But whether you believe that meaning is something that exists out there in the world, or whether you believe that meaning is something that only exists when there is a thinking being thinking about it, meaning is something that will only emerge through a constructive process.
If a pattern is not immediately apparent in a set of data, that doesn't mean that the pattern is not there. The pattern may only become visible through a process of rearranging and reviewing the data many different times and many different ways. And this process of rearranging and reviewing the data requires mental effort to create different possible explanations.

Sherlock Holmes said to Watson: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, HOWEVER IMPROBABLE, must be the truth?" What is hidden here is that the construction of the improbable theory is no simple task. Holmes continues: "We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. Whence, then, did he come?" Whence the other alternatives? We must look at the world--look at the crime scene, if you will, and look for other possibilities. These do not simply jump out at us in an obvious fashion--we have to seek explanations--stories that explain the data that we see. That explanation may be partially generated through looking at other sources, but there is a large element of this that is the individual imagination--the attempt to construct a hypothesis that fits the data at hand.

To some extent we can maybe see how this is a sort of gestalt experience: when we see four dots arranged in a square, we can see the whole square--we see the dots as related. With our data, the gestalt image may not jump out until we have created the right framework to appear: we must do constructive work in our minds just to create situations in which gestalts can appear.

But we may also want to see this as a process of creating a fiction of sorts. We look at our work as a whole as telling a coherent story--or at least that's a common expectation for a dissertation. If we practice the creation of different fictions--of alternative explanations or alternate hypotheses--we may find that some of these fictions will serve us well when we find that our data works with the hypothesis and the hypothesis has useful suggestions for future research and theoretical development.

Broken Record

I know that I repeat myself a lot. I'm working through the same ideas again and again, trying to find the best way to approach those same idea. This blog, I think, tends to run through the same set of ideas again and again. Partly that's because I keep meeting new writers who have the same old problems.

I was thinking about broken records. When a 33.3rpm phonograph recording is broken, there's enough in one groove (about 1.8 seconds) to state an entire phrase that is then repeated over and over. With a compact disc (digital) the skips are usually for such a brief time period that only a sound or a syllable is repeated. So I guess the phrase "sounding like a broken record" will drop out of language--or at least will change its meaning. ("broken record" can also refer to a Guinness-book-of type record, I guess--maybe it will take some meaning like that.)

Well, that's a digression. Anyway, I think that as a writer, you can't be afraid to repeat yourself and you can't be afraid to try again. If you don't say it right the first time, you need to work at it to get it right the next time. I keep trying.

I suppose I have something of a hope that if I say the same thing enough times I'll get bored of saying and find something else to say (rather than just going silent).

Off the subject: as I wrote I was listening to a random mix of music and Townes Van Zandt's song "To Live is To Fly" came on with this line:
"It don't pay too much to think about the things you leave behind."
This is a piece of philosophical wisdom that I work on a lot. I believe in it; it's not so easy to practice, however.

Writing is a Choice (2)

You have to be willing to make mistakes. You have to be willing to put something out there that won't be loved by others. And you have to be willing to put something out there that you may not even like yourself. So much of writing is just the willingness to get it wrong--the willingness to get it wrong and to try again.

I didn't really plan my day today and suddenly I find that if I do want to post today, I need to squeeze in a quickie before I go out. To be able to do that, I have to choose to make the time--even if it is only a ten or fifteen minute stretch in which I can write just a few lines while I wait for my friend. It's really easy to say "I don't have enough time to write something good." The truth, though, is that you can write something good in a short time--and even more importantly, if you practice writing regularly, and you choose to risk mistake or rejection, and you choose to make the time, then you will make the best possible progress in your writing practice.

201st post

I just noticed that last night's post was my 200th. That seems like a pretty big number to me. It reminds me of how things start to add up over the course of regular practice. I have never, I think, spent more than an hour working up a post. But at the end of the day I have a lot of writing to show for it. Yeah, some of it is lame. And yeah, it is generally not structured well. And yeah, it's a whole different thing writing blog posts than writing a dissertation. But still, as you work on it, the product and the project adds up.

I actually have been working on a book about writing projects--Dave's Directions for Inditing a Delightful Dissertation is the working title--...well, not really, or at least it had not been prior to this moment when I made that up. It actually has a slight absurdity that I enjoy. "A Delightful Dissertation." Perhaps a little over the top. It sounds like the name of some turn-of-the-20th century patent medicine or traveling show. And this regular blogging has mostly been helpful. Some days the blog seems to interfere, and others the book project interferes with the blog. But more the former than the latter because it's so much easier to work on the project for which you have low expectations. This is why it's a lot easier to send e-mail to a friend than it is to write your dissertation.

Anyway, however limited the product may be--however limited in volume or in quantity--there is a growing body of work. And with it a growing ease in writing. And these are both things that I can look at and celebrate, just to appreciate my own effort. I have a habit of discounting those things that I do accomplish and focusing on my weaknesses. This is a psychological pattern that makes it easy to despair and stop working. But it's a pattern of focus--it's not destiny. By focusing on the positive of what I have accomplished, I can step into my next effort with greater enthusiasm and less fear. And my assessment of what I can accomplish is based on the actual output that I have--so I have some evidence on which to reflect.

I suppose that if I write enough posts it will be less interesting to mark the landmarks, but that's still a way in the future. Post number 300 will still feel like a landmark.

Writing is a choice

I was talking with a blocked writer and I suggested the possibility of getting writerly flow by practicing writing--by writing a little everyday. This is basically the premise of Bolker's Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. Just write--something, anything, abut your dissertation--even just write the problems you're having writing. Anything just so that you write a little. The idea is that by practicing your familiarity with the writing process improves, and thus your ease of writing improves. One is to write anything at all--even "I have nothing to write"--just to get into the habit of putting ideas on paper. There is no right or wrong in such a scheme--or at least no right and wrong with respect to what you've written. You can write anything.

When I suggested this to the writer I was working with she said "But what if I don't write anything?" Writing is a choice. It is hard to write specific things, but if you can write anything at all with no prejudice as to what is written and no judgment about what is written, then writing is a choice and nothing more.

You, the writer, must sit down to the project. And you must choose to write something. But if anything written is a success, then there is nothing but the choice as to whether you will put pen to paper.

Yes, you have to choose what to write, but if you're writing for the sake of writing and practicing writing then anything that you do write is right. If you can't think of anything else to write, you can always write "I can't think of anything to write." That's where it start--by writing anything at all, by recording your thoughts--whatever they are--on the page.

If you practice that and the process of writing becomes more familiar, you'll think of other things to write as you go. But you have to start by choosing to write.

Beyond Reason

I was wondering what to write about tonight.
Lacking any particular subject, I decided to write about an old favorite of mine, an essay by Jorge Luis Borges titled "Avatars of the Tortoise." The whole essay is maybe six pages long. I have it in a collection titled Labyrinths, translated by James E. Irby.

Many writers get caught in a sort of perfectionist trap: "I don't know enough," they cry. And then they flee to the library, or to the safety of someone else's writing. It's easy to feel like we don't know enough. There will always be something new to learn. As writers and researchers we need to be able to acknowledge this, so that instead of looking for perfect, complete explanations, we can finish our work.

"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others," opens the essay. "I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite." The famed paradox of Zeno of Elea of Achilles and the Tortoise provides the basis for the essay's name: Borges looks at various manifestations of paradoxes caused by the concept of infinity.

Of particular interest to academic writers is Borges's attention to Agrippa the skeptic, who "denies that anything can be proven, since every proof requires a previous proof," and "Sextus Empiricus [, who] argues in a parallel manner that definitions are in vain, since one will have to define each of the words used and then define the definition."
What does this say to the academic writer about wanting complete knowledge? It suggests that there is no utter certainty. We must start from something else. Bertrand Russell, recognizing this problem in his Philosophy of Logical Atomism says that we need to start our arguments from somewhere, and as we have no access to truth, we must start from something that is "undeniable." But, of course, in this day and age on what point of interest can we find no debate?

We must choose some place to start our argument. Ideally that is what we can use the literature review to do: we can position our fundamental premises in terms of the discourse of our field. What it means is that we make a choice of where to start rather than having some logical rule that determines where to start. And what this means is that if you, the author, face your blank page and say "I don't have enough knowledge to start," it is worth sitting back a moment and asking yourself "can the material I already have provide a strong foundation for my first draft?" If the answer is yes, start writing. The sooner you start writing, the sooner you will finish.