Semantic Leakiness
Mar 18th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 12 Comments |
At the moment I don’t remember how it came up . . . no, wait, I do . . . . The Wife was saying something about her friend being a socialist and I said, “The National Socialist Workers’ Party was socialist.”
(Actually, it was more complicated than that. But that’s as much detail as you need to know to make sense of what follows.)
We then got into an argument about whether I had called socialists Nazis. I said I hadn’t. And, speaking logically, I was right. Examine the Venn Diagram, and you’ll see. I had merely pointed out that the Nazis were a subset of socialists.
I eventually forced The Wife to refine her claim to, “You associated socialism and naziism.” And that led me to realize something.
I was logically correct but semantically wrong. The “Nazi” circle in my Venn Diagram was semantically leaky. It (semantically) tainted the entire “socialist” circle even if it was (logically) self-contained. And I was using it to taint the socialist circle (even if I wanted to avoid admitting that this was what I was intending to do).
I mention this because I hear, from time to time, that men think logically and women think emotionally. I don’t know where this idea comes from, but I’ve even heard a fellow female philosopher say it.
Anyway, if there’s a distinction (speaking hypothetically; please don’t yell at me!), it may be between logic and semantics, not between logic and emotion. In other words, we men may be denser when it comes to realizing what we actually mean by what we say. We may have the tendency to hide behind the rules of logic and ignore the rules of semantics.
Which means, if there’s a distinction (speaking hypothetically; please don’t yell at me!), it may not be between “rational, rule-governed discourse” and “irrational, ruleless blathering.” The world of “meanings” (the realm of semantics) has rules, and those rules can be discerned and utilized.
(In fact, Husserl’s Logical Investigations are an attempt to show just what the rules of meaning are. He thinks logic, in a sense, is semantics.)
So there’s hope for male-female communication.
And I like the term, “Semantic Leakiness.”
#1) When you say “I don’t know where this idea comes from, but I’ve even heard a fellow female philosopher say it.” Is it logically or semantically implied that you, Micah, are in fact a female?
;)
#2) What a fascinating connection, that awareness of semantics seems to imply an awareness of the emotional connections and meanings.
I wonder if a stretch to relate all this to the priority of existence vs essence… At the bare minimum I’d make the argument (I think) that the semantic/stereotypically female/emotional side of things is more concerned with the overarching context while the logical/sterteotypically male/rational side of things seems to operate on the assumption that principles can determine things even without the specifics being known. In some sense there’s a modern/postmodern debate in here but I think maybe this aspect of the debate goes back at least as far as Aristotle vs. Plato.
#1) Whoops. Grammar mistake. No actual meaning behind it, but it definitely indicates that I was meaning myself as a female. *grin*
#2) Thanks :-) What you’re saying sounds highly interesting, but I must admit I’m not able to follow it at the moment. Perhaps you could expand upon it a bit for me?
I always get nervous when folks with more philsophical background than me start nicely asking me to expand on my thoughts. Usually they end up looking like Socrates and I end up looking like those countless doofuses (doofi?) in his dialouges who suddenly discover their ideas don’t hold at all…
Nonetheless, let me give it a try.
There is one way of approaching the world that I’d identify as modern, Platonic, male, logical-rational. This way of approaching the world views principles as prior to experience. It assumes that words have absolute definitions and we can decide things in the abstract. I call it Platonic because some formulations of his theory of forms seem to cast them as overaching ideas. I call it modern (as opposed to post modern) because it progresses via logic, creates heirarchies, and is interested in distilling abstractions.
When you pointed out that Nazis were socialist you were engaging in a definitional sort-of move. Your statement is almost a tautology, I think. There is this class of beliefs, called socialism. One member of that class, one specific flavor is Nazism. Therefore, Nazis are socialists.
There is this other way of approaching the world. I’d identify it as Aristolean, feminist, post modern, semantic-focused. Aristotle seemed wasn’t afraid of abstractions but he begin with the specifics and operated from them rather than beginning in generalities.
Feminist because well… I don’t know why it is. But it is. It emphasizes the context of discourse. The why’s and the who’s as much as the whats. Post modern because it’s a both/and way of looking at things. (As opposed to an either/or way of looking at things)The modern view works digitally: either X is part of the definition of Y or it is not. The post modern view says that the categories are squishier. Y might be sort-of associated with X. It might kind-of be part of the definition.
Within this way of approaching the world, somebody is entitled to know why you’d state that the Nazis are socialists. Whether or not it’s definitionally true might be important. But why it’s mentioned at that juncture is also important. Somebody might cry ‘foul’ not because this claim isn’t true; they might cry ‘foul’ because making the claim prejudices one against socialism as a whole.
Does this make sense or should I prepare myself for a Socratic disection?
Dissection. Aristotle was neither feminist nor post-modernist nor semantic-focused. Which isn’t to say there isn’t something to your theory, though. I only object to where you’re placing Aristotle within it.
Okay, I gotcha.
The usual opposition between Plato and Aristotle is seen in the “School of Athens” by Raphael. Plato pointing up, Aristotle gesturing as if to say we should remain grounded.
So I see what you’re saying, even though Mr. Stevens is no doubt right that Aristotle wouldn’t like to be associated with postmodernism or squishiness (what a great word! “Squishiness.” And my Firefox spell-check even recognizes it. Awesome).
In other words, your Plato-Aristotle opposition is pedagogically helpful, in this context (along with Mr. Steven’s qualification).
*grin* So much fun!
Thanks for the explication (another fun word)!
[...] Those two may be logically equivalent, but they are semantically different. [...]
[...] reasoning involves a kind of Venn Diagrams approach, like my discussion of “semantic leakiness”: the circles tend to be leaky, and if you puncture one by having it intersect another, [...]
[...] On the tension between logic and semantics, see my post on semantic leakiness. [...]
Squishiness. As a linguist, I find interesting articles by John Robert Ross who introduced the term “squishiness” to linguistics. I tried to search the web for his first article on noun squishiness, but I can’t find it. I it think appeared in some ephemeral literature like a technical report. (I like the term “ephemera,” a technical term that librarians use to mean “our search tools won’t help us to find it.”) However, two conference presentations do find their way onto the web. The first generalizes to other categories besides nouns:
Ross, John R. 1972. Endstation Hauptwort: The category squish. In P. M. Peranteau, J. N. Levi, and G. C. Phares, eds., Papers from the eighth regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, pp 316–328. Chicago.
The second sharpens his definition for nouns:
Ross, John Robert. 1973. A fake NP squish. In Charles-James N. Bailey and Roger W. Shuy, eds, New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English. pp 96-140. Washington: Georgetown University Press.
*laugh* Squishiness? What a great word to introduce into academico-theoretic contexts (where you use terms like “academic0-theoretic). Thanks for the references!
This all seems so cogno-intellectual to me!
[...] to have my little laugh at Obama and lump him in with stupid celebrities all at the same time. (Semantic leakiness [...]