Is language even symbolic, bro?
Humanistic interpretability
December 19, 2024 — December 19, 2024
I am wondering to what extent language is used to convey symbolic information at all. Here I mean symbolic in the mathematical sense. To what extent is language conveying pure, surface-level propositional information? When I say “there is a lion across the river”, am I simply transferring a symbolic representation of the world to you, regarding the presence of specific large felines?
On one hand, this is a hilariously nerdy question to ask; who but a mathematician could think that language is about symbolic information transfer? And yet we often assume this is how our words are received; Who among us has not been fazed by failing to persuade someone in an argument by presenting them with facts?
Parallel to constructive rationalism, simulacra.
1 We behave as if we think language is symbolic
We think we can win arguments with information.
Think also of Aumann’s agreement theorem, which suggests that rational agents with common knowledge of each other’s beliefs should not agree to disagree.
We ask people to do things for us and think that once we have said the thing it will be done. But is that how we actually learn to do the thing? Setting up a person to remember to always do the thing at the right time is still non-trivial numbers of steps away from just telling them to do the thing.
2 We behave as if we think language is not symbolic
Buddhist texts often work performatively, aiming to enact a transformation in the reader’s perspective or consciousness.
2.1 1. Propositional vs. Transformational Communication
- Propositional communication refers to conveying explicit content, ideas, or arguments that are symbolically encoded and decoded.
- Transformational communication, on the other hand, emphasizes the process of internal transformation through engagement, often without explicit logical structure. It focuses on how the interaction shapes the reader’s state or being, rather than transferring discrete ideas.
2.2 2. Informational vs. Performative Language
- Informational language is about encoding and transmitting data or concepts.
- Performative language, as introduced by J.L. Austin in speech act theory, suggests that language can “do” something rather than just convey information. Buddhist texts often work performatively, aiming to enact a transformation in the reader’s perspective or consciousness.
2.3 3. Cognitive vs. Experiential Modes
- Cognitive modes treat texts as tools for intellectual comprehension and symbolic manipulation.
- Experiential modes treat the text
Henry Farrell on Mercier and Sperber:
First — that reasoning has not evolved in the ways that we think it has — as a process of ratiocination that is intended independently to figure out the world. Instead, it has evolved as a social capacity — as a means to justify ourselves to others. We want something to be so, and we use our reasoning capacity to figure out plausible-seeming reasons to convince others that it should be so. However (and this is the main topic of a more recent book by Hugo (Mercier 2020)), together with our capacity to generate plausible-sounding rationales, we have a decent capacity to detect when others are bullshitting us. In combination, these mean that we are more likely to be closer to the truth when we are trying to figure out why others may be wrong, than when we are trying to figure out why we ourselves are right. … We need negative criticisms from others since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves, without them being pointed out to us.