Abductive Aspects of Interpretation

Under the assumption that a text has an architecture, that architecture is accessible only though abduction. The proof then becomes the pudding, because the role that the pieces play just so in the text validates the structure in the reconstruction. 

In the emplotment of historical texts, the facts play multiple roles in the discourse with the audience. They provide points of stability through agreement ("The Normans conquered England in 1066") or they teach novel facts and interpretations (whose novelty is of course dependent on the level of expertise of the readers). The whole point of offering yet another emplotment is to correct the existing ones, and that requires either new facts or new interpretations (and preferably both). 

Writers therefore have a model of the questions and the lack of information that the readers have and they write toward that model: to answer the questions and to supply the information that will make the readers agree with their architecture. 

Perhaps it is too much to say that each text creates a language for a special purpose (or a domain-specific language, to use that technical term), but probably each discipline and sub-discipline does. And that functions both as short-hand (writing takes time even with word processors) and as a model for thinking about the right types of problems.

We would like it to be the case that the architecture and its realisation using the facts and the interpretative fragments is mechanically verifiable. That makes it easier for the writer to adjust the whole without breaking the parts, to experiment with attitudes and stances, and to adjudicate if choices in one place amount to consistent stances in other parts. 

What is decidedly necessary is a way to rule out alternates and make clear why they are being rejected. This is part of dealing with the questions and the expectations of the audience. Didn't Odo of Bayeux commission the tapestry to suck up to his half-brother that he had insulted by siding with his enemies? Well, no, and here is why. That is the function of the precedent and the literature review.

This is also useful because it allows rerunning the narrative, if we think of it as a conceptual program, at a later point in time with altered insights. If the dating shifts, if the source becomes discredited, then we can see what that means for the remainder of the argument. Perhaps this is then no longer the stance of X, who may no longer be able to participate in the argument; but it may approximate the stance that X could have taken, as best as we know, given the new information. 

The drawback of all of this is of course that the abductive process repeats and re-occurs at the various levels of the interpretation, whether it be the text as a whole, the individual claims, the specific meaning of the words used, or the scripts employed to make progress on the problems. 

The problem is also that we primarily wish to rule out narratives, but the number of wrong narratives is of course too large to manage properly. So we need succinct ways of explaining plausible candidate narratives that we can then rule out equally succinctly, as a representational problem. 

Brittany had Arthur's Back

Read along with me in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain to understand what the idea behind the Chapter IX is (p.149). So why does Geoffrey of Monmouth even care about the Saxons? He is of Brittany stock, his ancestors came in with the Norman invasion, and is now settled around the castle of Monmouth in the Welsh border marches. When the actual invasion happened and Harold was killed at Hastings, the Welsh did not care; we can show that from the contemporary chronicles. The Welsh were much more interested ins sorting out internally their overlordship and focused on the contacts with Ireland.

My first claim is that, for Geoffrey (a name from Brittany, btw), the Saxons are the Anglo-Saxons that the Normans vanquished. Here he is basically inverting the narrative. It's not the Bretons and Normans who are the invaders, it is the Saxons who came to English Isles from Germany and conquered large swaths. While the second part is true (and showing that part in detail), the first part is not really the case. But that's the idea behind the detailed description of the Saxon battles. So first Colgrin gets defeated at the River Douglas (together with the Scots and the Picts, already old enemies by now of the Norman and Breton overlords) (p.150), and then gets bottled up in York. The rescue team under Baldulph with his six thousand men gets trounced by the duke of Cornwall and an army half the size. Duke Chelderic comes with six hundred ships to help the Saxons in York.

Now Arthur is short of men, so he calls for help. And from whence? Brittany! Arthur's nephew Hoel, son of the King of the Armorican Bretons, shows up with 15,000 men. I don't think for a moment that Geoffrey had any sources stating how many men anyone really had, but I think it is fair to assume that the numbers are interesting in their qualitative sense of comparisons. 15k is more than 6k; that's the punch line here. Arthur is getting big help from Brittany. That's the memo.

I also think it key that Hoel is the nephew of Arthur. Sure, kinship is the only place from which help can come, but the emphasis is on the nephew, not on his father Dubricius, Arthur's brother-in-law. With an eye toward the evil nephew, Mordred, later on, that sets up an interesting tension.

Over the next three chapters (3-6; p.151-154), Arthur and his men defeat the Saxons. They first trap them in the wood of Celion, whereupon the Saxons promise to leave for Germany, but turn around and come back, breaking their oaths. Hoel gets sick, which weakens the king's army for dramatic effect and making the upcoming victory even more of a sign that Arthur, as the oath-keeper, is trouncing infidels. In case anyone misses it, the prayer of the bishop of Lincoln and Arthur's speech spell it out (Chapter 4, p.151f). 

Arthur puts on his famous weapons, including the shield Priewen on which Mary is painted. This is a reference to an old Welsh legend that Arthur carried the Mother of God into battle, either on his shoulder or on his shield (a one letter permutation in Welsh.

It has been suggested that Arthur’s carrying the two religious burdens on his shoulders is an error for on his shield, through written confusion between ysgwyd (‘shield’) and ysgwydd (‘shoulder’), words often associated in early poetry (iscuit and iscuid in Old Welsh spelling). (Padel, p. 16)

The ensuring battle at Badon is one of the earliest battle attested for Arthur in the Welsh sources, as taking place on a mountain, and having Arthur kill 960 men (Padel, p.16f), but the particular way in which Geoffrey describes it smacks of Hastings, for my taste (p.153). For good measure, Goffrey halves the number of dead killed by "Caliburn" from "the Isle of Avallon", to 470 men. Those fleeing Saxons regroup under Chedric but are surrounded and Chedric killed at the Isle of Thanet (p.154).

With the Saxons out of the way, Geoffrey can now turn to iterating through the remaining typical enemies of the Norman and Britton occupiers of England. They are all squashed and conquered: the Scots and the Picts (p.155); Ireland, Iceland, Gothland and the Orkneys (p.158); Norway, Dacia (i.e. modern Romania and parts of Bulgaria!), Aquitaine and Gaul, including taking Paris from the (Byzantine Emperor) Leo (p.160). 

Concurrently, Arthur restores the pre-Saxon state of politics in England, including the Duke Lot as rule of the duchy of Londonesia. This man's ancestors hail from royal blood, and he married Arthur's sister "during the time of Aurelius Ambrosius", and fathered Walgan and Modred. Guinevere is called Guanhumara, also of Roman descent, and becomes Arthur's wife (p.157).

In this position, Arthur can summon the subdued lords to Camelot, which is called City of Legions in Goeffrey (p.161), for Arthur's coronation. The list of whose-who that answer his call (p.162) basically covers most of then-known Western Europe. Of the invited, Brittany's child Hoel manages to bag the largest description:

... Hoel, duke of the Armorican Britons, and his nobility, who came with such a train of mules, horses, and rich furniture, as it is difficult to describe. (p.163)

Even here the claim of lineage is spelled out by Geoffrey:

For the Britons still observed the ancient custom of Troy, by which  the men and women used to celebrate their festivals apart. (p.164)

The festivities are going well when the general of the Romans, Lucius Tiberius, challenges Arthur to submit to Roman rule (p.165) by paying the missing tribute due to Rome since Julius Caesar.  Arthur and his vassals retreat to counsel, and Arthur reminds them of his lineage's claims (p.166). As the reader suspects, Lucius has it all backwards. Arthur is kinsmen with both Emperor Constantine, son of Helena (p.167) and of Maximus, who

... both wore the crown of Britain, [and] gained the imperial throne of Rome. (p.167)

In fact, as Arthur slyly points out,

Do you not, therefore, think, that we ought to demand tribute of the Romans? (p.167)

Unsurprisingly, it is his kinsman Hoel that get's to go first.

As soon as he [i.e. Arthur, RCK] had done speaking to this effect, Hoel, king of the Armorican Britons, who had the precedence of the rest, made answer in these words." (p.167) 

Hoel is in agreement and reminds them of the Sibylline prophecies,

... which expressly declare, that hte Roman empire shall be obtained by three persons, natives of Britain. The oracle is fulfilled in two of them, since it is manifest ... that those two celebrated princes, Belinus and Constantine, governed the Roman empire; and now you are the third to whom this supreme dignity is promised. (p.168)

Hoel throws in ten thousand men, about 2/3 what he sent when Arthur was calling for help against the Saxons, but there you go. Only the King of Albania, also gets to give a speech (p.169), offering two thousand horse plus foot soldiers. The others are lumped together but their numbers are conveniently summed up: 183,200 horse and foot in number "not easily fall[ing] under" (p.170).

Lucius also musters his army from the east (which includes Spain, ruled by king Alifantinam?), and since Hoel is coming with Arthur (he promised his personal presence, p.168) and Walgan as well (p.175), Mordred and Guinevere (p.171). Before Arthur has time to defeat the Romans, he must best a Spanish giant who stole Helena, the niece of Hoel (p.172) and carried her off to the top of Mont St Michel---a Breton concern apparently that explains Helena's tomb (the lady does not survive the rescue), which Hoel built as a mausoleum (p.175). 

At this point Geoffrey of Monmouth begins the drawn-description of the battles of Arthur's host against the Roman army; this we shall save for another time.

Literature Cited

Padel, Oliver James. Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Writers of Wales), University of Wales Press. 

Modeling the under-determination

The most important change that we need to make in talking about historiographical interpretation is that we know what is true. We do not know what is true, what really happened, and similar.

At the same time, we have to insist that some interpretations are false. As Umberto Eco pointed out long ago, if no interpretation is false, then every text is the same text, and there is only one text. The phone book of Vienna from 1973 is the same thing as Lenin's writings. If we cannot reject an interpretation, then there is no way to differentiate them, and it is all the same.

That combination of there being no true one answer but many wrong answers must strike many people as strange because most people know that not-true is false and not-false is true. Due to this symmetry that setup is then confusing.

The first point to make then is that this switch from true to false using negation only works in the case of a complete disjunction. We already said that we want to assume that not all texts are the same text, so we have at least two interpretations. So if the competing interpretations A and B are up for discussion, and we can show not-A, then the disjunction allows us to conclude B. So if two people Alice and Bea are locked in a room with a hard piece of candy, and the candy is gone, and we can prove that Alice did not eat it, then Bea must have eaten it. 

For most historical events, however, this strategy fails because the disjunction of interpretations remains open. As David Hume pointed out in Dialogs concerning Natural Religion, some of these either-or arguments suffer from a lack of alternatives or become far from clear when other alternatives are considered (famously, that the world might be like a plant). The most obvious present day case is the restricted alternative between evolution and intelligent design, where the problems of evolution only can imply an affirmation of intelligent design if there are no competing interpretations.

So for the first measure of approximation, historiography cannot show what the true narrative is, only that there are false narratives because the disjunction of interpretations is not complete. Notice that psychologically, this may still be a problem, because a very large number of competing interpretations is almost an attack on conceptual resources, an interpretative denial-of-service strategy.

The next question then becomes however, how to show that an interpretation is false. Suppose that our hard candy contains a substance that some people have allergic reactions to. Suppose further that Alice has in the past shown allergic reactions. Then we can mount an argument that either Alice would have had an allergic reaction or that Alice did not eat the hard candy. Very quickly the devil shows itself in all the details as the tree of dependence and justification begins to extend downward into the minutiae of cellular biology, chemistry, and medicine of human food allergies. And that is just the natural science side of the problem. There are also other events that are historical in that chain, that have the same disjunction of interpretations intervening between the chemical processes, say, and the conclusions that we wish to draw for adjudicating between A and B. Perhaps Alice's prior episode was misdiagnosed; perhaps the reaction was caused by another allergenic substance; perhaps the evidence for that episode is suspect (Alice's grandmother told her, because Alice was too young at the time to remember herself). 

However to resolve the conundrum of the interpretative process, what should be clear though is that we need to be ready to accommodate a shift in the truth value of our supports at any point in time. Precisely because the supports of the sub-theories might shift with any new piece of evidence; precisely because none of these matters are monotonic in the logical sense of the word---truth maintenance as part of the ongoing process of rejustification in the face of discovery becomes paramount. 

David Reich and the effect of DNA research on Archeology

In his 2018 book, David Reich makes an important point when talking about the origins of the Indo-European language:

By tracing possible migration paths and ruling out others, ancient DNA has ended a decades old stalemate in the controversy regarding the origins of Indo-European languages.  

This is then the contribution that the DNA gene tracing can make. First, it can identify possible scenarios because of the markers. At the same time it also shows some paths to be impossible. 

In the particular case of the Indo-European languages, DNA analysis of ancient skeletons turned out to be lucky; the paths that Reich et al were able to rule out (prune in the search space view of the problem) axed all paths for a specific theory.

Notice that this does not say what happened. Reich and colleagues can say that the most likely remaining hypothesis points to south of the Caucasus, either Iran or Armenia, because the population DNAs there are the most similar to what they ended up being in the European heartlands:

... ancient DNA from people who lived there [i.e. south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present day Iran or Armenia, RCK] matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians.

But as Reich had argued with respect to Colin Renfrew's agricultural hypothesis of language spread, that the populations who brought the agricultural revolution had brought Indo-European with them as well, 

... theory is always trumped by data ...

by which he means that new data will rule out previous paths. Data is the way to prune the search space.

And this pruning works both way, because it is a recognition function. It recognizes what it can accept (the prediction view) and it therefore knows what to filter. Sometimes these functions are couched positively and sometimes they will be couched negatively and that can muddle up the issue too. 

 

Jouko Väänänen's Short Course on Finite Model Theory

Jouko Väänänen, who also authored the higher-order logic page at the Stanford (Internet) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published his lecture notes as an introduction to finite model theory, based on his teaching them in Lissabon in 1993 and Helsinki in 1994.

His remarks are extremely helpful in following the basic gist. After disproving the compactness theorem (as Fagin had done in 1993), he comments:

It is only natural that the Compactness Theorem should fail, because its very idea is to generate examples of infinite models. (5)

In the lecture notes, the Trakhtenbrot Theorem of 1950 is proven, namely that the set of finitely valid first order sentences is not recursively enumerable (by mapping it onto the halting problem, which is also undecidable).  From the fact that Sat is recursively enumerable but undecidable, it follows that its "complement" cannot be recursively enumerable. This has the consequence that neither the Completeness Theorem nor the Dowardward Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem hold.

Logical Foundations for Interpretation

The following discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce is based on the paper by Michael Hoffmann, Problems with Peirce's Concept of Abduction, published in Foundations of Science, Vol 4 (1999), pp.271-305. Hoffmann opens with a long quote from Peirce's mature work that clarifies the concept of abduction, deduction and induction (p.271):

... there are but three elementary kinds of reasoning. The first, which I call abduction ... consists in examining a mass of facts and in allowing these facts to suggest a theory. In this way we gain new ideas; but there is no force in the reasoning. The second kind of reasoning is deduction, or necessary reasoning. It is applicable only to an ideal state of things, or to a state of things in so far as it may conform to an ideal. It merely gives a new aspect to the premisses. ... The third way of reasoning is induction, or experimental research. Its procedure is this. Abduction having suggested a theory, we employ deduction to deduce from that ideal theory a promiscuous variety of consequences to the effect that if we perform certain acts, we shall find ourselves confronted with certain experiences. We then proceed to try these experiments, and if the predictions of the theory are verified, we have a proportionate confidence that the experiments that remain to be tried will confirm the theory. I say that these three are the only elementary modes of reasoning there are. (Peirce, 1905, ca., CP 8.209)

 And later (p275):

“Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (Peirce, 1903a, CP 5.171; cf. also Peirce, 1901–2/1911, CP 2.777)

This new idea is due to a form of creativity that Peirce describes as present in every act of perception (p282):

Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; .... That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image, which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete. I perform an abduction when I so much as express in a sentence anything I see. The truth is that the whole fabric of our knowledge is one matted felt of pure hypothesis confirmed and refined by induction. Not the smallest advance can be made in knowledge beyond the stage of vacant staring, without making an abduction at every step.

Perhaps the notion of abduction being present in any mode of perception is too closely stitched along Kantian interests in the distinction between Begriff und Anschauung (which, after all, it should not be forgotten, was developed to counter Humean scepticism, a book that famously had kept up Kant all night).

Perhaps a more productive mode of consideration would be to see this as a general way of hermeneutics. The issue of the circular nature of hermeneutics begins then to cash out more in the direction of iteration over the inductive supports that add plausibility to the initial abductive leap (and here, Alvirez Tucker is quite right, Bayesian modes of inference that explain how the probabilities of confirmation can be employed, can be plugged in quite readily).

For the purposes of the modeling of historical argumentation, this insight then can be translated as follows: We posit an event with Davidsonian structure and Schank-Abelsonian scripts associated at the type level. We then abduce these scripts in a forward fashion to generate our potential candidates for confirmatory verification. This forward generation may require the abduction of additional events, actors and materiel that have their own scripts associated with them.

All of this needs to be understood as embedded in a larger discourse that has participants and a pool of assumptions that function as "facts" in the discourse, i.e. we normally do not expect these to be called into question. Often these facts form the general basis upon which the abductive leap is even predicated (the things the abductive leap has to organize, as Peirce conceptualizes explanation), though Peirce is quite right that internally they are structured just as abductively. It is a convenience of the discourse and a simplification of the research tasks to hold them artificially as "understood", "agreed upon", "non-problematic" or "common knowledge" that need not be independently treated as up for grabs during the explanation phase. (However much later revisionism may expose that simplifying assumption as inaccurate.)

Notice that this model is left-recursive in so far as we can spend all of our time fleshing out the scenario into the minutest detail without ever getting to the point of verification. So some form of sensible heuristical iteration is required in practice, thereby limiting the accuracy of the reconstruction (we may never iterate to the winning posit).

on Silence and Simplification

In Andrew Freyn's contribution to The Silent Morning, entitled `What a victory it might have been`: C. E. Montague and the First World War, pp.131-148, Freyn works with the pastiche method of approaches of analysis that makes historians so careless about contradictory positions.

He cites five different opinions, ranging from historians to composers like John Cage of 4'33" fame, to negate the position that silence is an absence of sound. However, he grapples nowhere with the assurance that these positions are not self-contradictory and in the end undercuts his own analysis by pointing out that Cage is trying to get the audience to listen to the ambient sound of itself, which shows conclusively that the "silence" that Cage is after is just another form of sound (albeit not the one that the patrons paid for, and not a "natural" sound, but one that Western music performers like Beethoven cultivated in their listeners, who had happily chatted through Haydn [see Greenberg's lectures on Beethoven, by the Teaching Company] or 19th century French music performances [see Bernier's Pleasure & Privilege, esp commentary on attending the opera).

Freyn is more successful in integrating the use of silence as a commemorative device into the concomitant silencing of other forms of celebration as well as other stories. He cites two observers for the second aspect who deserve to be quoted in full.

Jay WInter comments that 'every decision to commemorate is a decision to simplify and clarify a message by leaving out substantial parts of the story surrounding it' [citing Fn 11]; .... similarly, James V. Wertsch comments that commemorative performances have a 'tendency to eschew ambiguity and to present the past from a single committed perspective' [citing Fn12] (p.133)

[[RCK: The references are to Winter's paper Thinking about Silence in Ben-Ze'ev et al, A Social History of Silence in the 20th Century, Cambridge University Press 2010, p.20 and to Wertsch's monograph, Voices of Collective Remembering, Cambridge University Press 2002,  p;42.]]

 And Freyn himself so aptly notes:

The officially sanctioned solemnity of Armistice commemorations [in Great Britain, RC] meant that alternative vibrant and boisterous celebrations were restricted, seen as unofficial and dissenting -- even if many of those who wanted to remember the war as a victory were those tho had worked hard to win it. (p.133)

Bibliography: Trudi TATE, Kate KENNEDY (eds), The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice, in series: Cultural History of Modern War,  Manchester (Manchester University Press) 2013.

Improving Scripts

For some scripts, it would seem helpful to know not merely which scenes follow which scenes, but also what the temporal constraints are on the individual scenes to get them accomplished.

Consider Arthur C Danto's example of lighting a pipe; if the match burns at the standard rate, then there are just a few moments until the match is too hot to hold and needs to be dropped. Similarly, for a recipe, there are time constraints on how soon the next processing steps have to take place before the processed food has changed in temperature or composition or moisture contents to make the next step less successful (or even impossible).

At the same time, similar constraints hold in the other direction of moving "too early" as it were. The rates of these changes put temporal bounds on the script that would be good to know and good to have.

Reactions to Schank

In my previous post,  I reviewed Roger Schank's Tell me a Story, New York (Scribener) 1990 (= NWU Press, 1995) as to the problem of how to construct narratives, what constituent pieces are, and especially how to challenge or critique them. Though in the previous post, I mentioned three examples of analysis by Schank, I mostly focused on Tawana Brawley and on Iran Air Flight 655 getting shot down by the USS Vincennes, leaving Canadian Olympic gold-medalist runner Ben Johnson aside.

In musing over my dialogue with Schank, I wanted to offer some preliminary stabilization of my thoughts in terms of some theses to historiography---especially in the aftermath of the political display of revisionist Southern supremacy history in Charlottesville. Some of these are issues that Schank is concerned about and some of them I do not take him to care about.

1. Schank is right that story skeletons and their selection form an initial stance on the problem that even leads to the filtering of information or adaptation of memories. In fact, if Schank had the benefit of hindsight that we have, he could have pointed to the US Navy's explanation of scenario confirmation offered to the BBC in 2000 for the precise behavior that his story skeletons had predicted in terms of filtering incoming information.
2. Schank correctly distinguishes between story, skeleton and gist. The story is the actual production of the human talker, targeting the listener. The skeleton is the summary of the basic telos and gives explanation patterns at hand (more of that probably in Schank's prior book on Explanation Patterns). The gist is the cake mix, to use an analogy from cooking, that can be turned into a variety of cakes that all share a distinct family resemblance. Knowledge about what my current guests like and what I have quickly at hand inform the actual execution.
3. Schank's skeletons provide an easy ingress into his theory for content analysis. The arguments made and the supports advanced and the information elided (if we can reconstruct it) come from the telos of the skeletons that is truly most like a political stance.

1. Because Schank does not do much with the evidence/story or fact/narrative distinction (possibly because his biases against expert systems and automated theorem proving), he misses out on the ability to postulate that facts are stories for a subculture that no longer can or wishes to treat these stories narratively. They are as if baked, and questioning them can be interpreted as a violation of the norms of the subculture. Even low level sensor readings have these stories behind them, and this holds true even in particle physics (cf Knorr-Czetina), where the individual detectors in a setup such as the CERN super-collider are attributed 'personality' (in a anaphoric sense) because of their non-interchangeable behaviors. Unlike edible cookies however, facts can be unbaked back into stories if there are anomalies, provided the research data is available. Thus, bad footnotes or page references ghost through the literature until some brave grad-student hunts them down and slays them. For many historical documents, that is not possible, and here the community finds the line drawn for it. 
2. Schank has no locus for the social role of power in the success of narratives, because he does not distinguish the UN Security Council adequately from a US district court or the admiralty of the US Navy. Schank tries to rope this in while looking at the story expectations, but that is really a small aspect of the problem only. His use of made-up stories or divorcee self-reports is equally ill-suited to discover this, as in the first case everyone knows the story is not real (thus there are no real validity requirement or possibility) while in the second case our culture considers it flat-out rude to question people's divorce narratives. 
3. Schank is handicapped by his focus on the genre newspaper articles and transcript of psychological experiment. He looks a bit at screenplays as well, but never clarifies how the fictional status of these works interacts with the realistic status of the newspaper article or the emotional stance of the transcribed individual.

What about all these Stories? Rereading Schank

In the aftermath of the civil disturbances of Charlottesville, Michael Eric Dyson wrote in the August 12th, 2017 edition of the New York Times:

Such an ungainly assembly of white supremacists rides herd on political memory. Their resentment of the removal of public symbols of the Confederate past — the genesis of this weekend’s rally — is fueled by revisionist history. They fancy themselves the victims of the so-called politically correct assault on American democracy, a false narrative that helped propel Mr. Trump to victory. Each feeds on the same demented lies about race and justice that corrupt true democracy and erode real liberty.

Dyson then distinguishes between political memories, between revisionist history and other history (proper? academic? he has no name for it, but cites Du Bois), between true and false narratives.

Tools of Story Telling

It is in this context relevant to look at the infrastructure that Roger Schank has identified for story telling (bracketing Schank's occupation with intelligence, however). Because of his particular slant to story analysis, Schank provides a repertoire of narratological tools and distinctions that differ from those in the literary toolkit. (This cuts both ways, Morson argues in the Foreword, missing for example the notion of Genre in Schank's musings, p.xxff.)

Stories are received and generated structures that people label in an attempt to index them, so that they can retrieve them and match them for comparison purposes. People are assisted in story manipulation by story skeletons, which give a basic direction to a narrative, and by the hierarchy of scripts, plans, goals and themes that Schank had identified in his classical work with Robert Abelson (1977). Because stories can be retold in a variety of ways and for various purposes, Schank posits that they are remembered in a different format, the gist, of which the individual retelling is a production. Stories vary by culture and subculture---Schank specifically discusses the French restaurant on the one hand and the teenager Rock fan on the other.

In much of the exposition of the book, and especially in the discussion of the story production and generation, Schank brackets the question of truth. Schank writes as if the intentionality of the stories would make the question of whether the stories are true or not irrelevant or even impossible to answer.

Diplomatic Incidents

Schank uses a diplomatic conflict, the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US Navy warship, the Vincennes, on July 3, 1988, to illustrate the way that the same event is used to make hay for the divergent political positions.

If we construct our own version of truth by reliance upon skeleton stories, two people can know exactly the same facts but construct a story that relays those facts in very different ways. (p.152)

Or even more patronizingly:

The real problem in using skeletons whis way is that the storytellers usually believe what they themselves are saying. Authors construct their own reality by finding the events that fit the skeleton convenient for them to believe. They enter a storytelling situation wanting to tell a certain kind of story and only then worrying about whether || the facts fit onto the bones of the skeleton that they have previously chosen. (p.154f)

Schank then goes on to label the skeletal stories that backed the reactions of the various government as the US using the understandable tragedy (p.152f), Great Britain the justifiability of self-defense (p.153),  Libya insolence and state terrorism (p.154),  and Bahrain justifiable bad effects of war on the aggressor and moral courage (p.155).

So, we can summarize as a first impression that, while Schank will admit that some facts do not fit onto the bones of a skeleton, he is willing to talk about people's own realities and how the skeleton stories are what make up people's notions of truth.

... no matter what happens next, all the viewers of the play [that plays out in the international diplomatic incident, RCK] will retell the story according to the skeletons they have already selected; i.e. they will probably not be moved to reinterpret any new event in terms of some skeleton that they do not already have in mind. (p.158)

So even though the stories dominate to the point of where they shape the memory of the events and the way that future facts will attach to past narrations, there is still something that Schank can call coherence.

One of the oddities of story-based understanding is that people have difficulty making decisions if they know they will have trouble constructing a coherent story to explain their decision. (p.159)

So justificatory stories do have coherence requirements, otherwise they will not properly support the decisions through explanations. Schank goes on to demonstrate this with divorce stories (pp.160ff), which however need not concern us here.

Stories that were Challenged

While there is much plausibility to the fact that political agents have apriori decided how participants will respond to events in the arena that is international diplomacy---theorizing, as Sherlock Holmes would warn us, in advance of the facts (p.159), matters become more complicated when Schank looks at stories that were strongly challenged by agents able to do something about disagreement.

Schank discusses this problem in two examples, in the claimed rape of Tawana Brawley by white supremacists (pp.208ff) and the disqualification of Canadian runner Ben Johnson (pp.210ff) for allegations of doping. However, the larger context is the problem of the cultural and subcultural specificity of stories, and how to acquire that skill (pp.189-218). As a result, the analysis of these stories that were challenged (and ultimately rejected) by authoritative agents come across as situations of choosing bad raw materials for story telling on part of Brawley and Johnson.

Tawana Brawley

... Tawana Brawley ran away for four days, and she needed to tell a story. For her own reasons, she decided not to tell the true story of where she had been, but to invent one instead. (p.209)

It is easy to agree with Schank here, though one has to emphasize that he distinguishes between "true story" and "invend(ed) one" explicitly.

Schank then continues:

When we invent a story in order to mislead people, we try to figure out the story that they want to hear, and we tell it. Children frequently tell a he made me do it story or an it wasn't me that did it story when they are caught having done something wrong. And this kind of story is what Tawana Brawley told too. (p.209)

Again, we are on the same page as Shank here. But then Schank takes a departure that is interesting for the problem of reliability.

Her [Tawana Brawley's, RCK] problem was selecting a believable story. She failed to assess how many listeners would hear her story and failed to understand that what each of them wanted to hear was quite different. (p.209)

Even with the discussion of enculturation into story cultures and subcultures and the difficulties for teenagers to acquire these skills going before (p.208), the turn here is unexpected. The problem according to Schank at this point is not that too many listeners would eventually exhaust Tawana's range of fictional supports, but that they story expectations would eventually exceed her capabilities in some other way.

Schank argues that Brawley picked two basic skeletons, both shockingly realistic in 1980s America ( and as Dyson might remind us, even in 2017), namely young girl is kidnapped and raped as well as young black is victim of racial attack (p.209). Crucially for Schank's argument, the first one comes from the general American culture, and the second one from Brawley's subculture (p.209).

While either of these standard stories is bad enough, the combination of them produced something we can only assume Tawana had not counted on---the match of two types of stories || sought by the news media and black activists. (pp.209f)

Schank then discusses these two groups in turn:

The media looks for horrifying stories involving assaults on especially innocent people. Consequently, Tawana's story matched a skeleton story that news people are always looking to report. (p.210)

Her [i.e. Tawana Brawley's, RCK] story also matched a skeleton story that black activists are always on the lookout for: innocent blacks as easy victims of white officials. She had added that her rapists were state police officers and other officials of her area. The factor, of course, had it been true, should well have caused alarm on the part of the activists. (p.210)

Schank is entirely plausible in identifying the activation patterns for various groups' involvement, and the in arguing that Brawley did not understand how her chosen skeletons meshed with these activation skeletons. But even here, Schank is willing to admit that there are true stories of innocent blacks as victims---"had it been true" (p.210)---that activists should be alarmed by.

Tawana's mistake, apart from fabricating events in the first place, was to invent stories without understanding the standard nature of the stories that others look for. (p.210)

There are a polite and a critical reading to this sentence. The admission, and as an aside only, that "fabricating events in the first place" was a mistake either is Schank's backdoor to admit that the events matter (this is the polite reading) or an indication of his lack of appreciation for how much events matter (the critical reading), i.e. that Brawley's failure to grasp "the standard nature of stories" (p.210) pale to the point of irrelevance in comparison with the need to fabricate facts that could hold up to the scrutiny of multiple organizations.

It is thus with much less agreement than previously, or with a feeling of the emphasis lying on the wrong part, that we head into the description of the role of the standard nature of stories.

Thus, when doctors are handed a rape case or a case of unconsciousness from beating and deprivation, they have certain tests they perform to aid the victim. They also use skeleton stories to understand such cases, and they seek to fit the details of any new story into the familiar story. (p.210)

This  is just an adapted restating of Schank's general epistemology that understanding in humans is story-based.

Similarly, the police know a story about rape, and in the case of Tawana Brawley, they tried to fit the details of her story into theirs. (p.210)

As a result of casting the problem in this way, Schank posits that the police became suspicious because of the mismatch between Tawana's story and their expected story.

For both the doctors and the police, Tawan's story did not agree with the standard stories about rape, and this disparity caused them to question the truth of Tawana's claims. (p.210)

Notice that the whole problem of truth---now however applied to claims, not to facts or events or stories---is admitted and raised by Schank. Yet his conclusion is cast in terms of story skeletons and of subcultures:

Not surprisingly, since she is young and rather unsophisticated, Tawana Brawley failed to understand how to make up a story that matched the ones that the people who were listening to her expected to hear. She did not know the stories of the other subcultures. (p.210)

And almost wistfully, Schank concludes:

Traveling across cultures, it seems, requires the help of a translator. (p.210)

Perhaps a stronger stance that Schank could have taken was to recur on his prior notion of scripts. Tawana failed, because she did not really understand the rape script and the deprivation script, and was therefore unable to tell stories that matched well enough with the script that the doctors and the police officers had for these incidents.

Furthermore, as the New York Times article that Schank quotes (pp.208f) suggests, while the doctors and the police officers took their departure from their questioning the validity of the story, they did not condemn her on that account but used it to find actual evidence that contradicted Tawana's narrative. Notice the use of the word "evidence" in the cited article:

The conclusion that Miss Brawley fabricated her story is supported by ... evidence that she ran away and spent much of the next four days at her former apartment, evidence that she concocted the condition in which she was found, and evidence that she tried to mislead the police, doctors and others about what had happened to her.  --New York Times, September 27, 1988, cited in: Schank 1990, (p.209)

In fact, the article, a two-page spread as Schank admits (p.208), was called "Evidence points to Deceit by Brawley".

Even granted all the usual caveats of the mutual interaction between evidence and narrative, it seems hard to support the stance that for Miss Brawley, the story skeletons did her in. At best they tipped the police off to problems. And the failure in the collection of confirming evidence, which would have been required equally for a court of law, would have done her in just as much as the success in finding fabricated evidence.

Canadian Runner Ben Johnson

Schank of course believes that he has proven that Brawley became entrapped by being unfamiliar with the story expectations. Thus he can use the case of Ben Johnson, a Canadian runner disqualified from the Olympics for doping, as "another case of story misunderstanding" (p.210). 

The story is interesting in this context because the press assumed that everyone who used steroids also knows how to avoid getting caught. (p.211)

Schank's quotes from the NY Times actually do not bear this statement out. It is Dr Voy, the chief medical officer of the US Olympic Committee is the one that is quoted as commenting on the masking know-how in the athletes community.

Schank then goes on to enumerate the stories that Dr Voy, the physician and official, has---to wit: the miscalculate the dose, the screwy system, and the reckless gamble story, the panic to insure victory story and the masking the drug story (p.211)---as well as the stories that Johnson was familiar with---to wit: spiked my drink with drugs and bad lab test (p.211).

The first thing to notice is that Voy's and Johnson's narrative intentions are at odds. None of Dr Voy's stories would have gotten Johnson a pass for testing positive. Indeed, the article gives no examples of stories that Dr Voy would have considered legitimate for a positive testing candidate to continue on as a medal bearer. So Johnson could not have used any of these stories. In fact, all we learn is that the stories Johnson alleged were not part of Dr Voy's repertoire of acceptable excuses; that set may have been empty. If there was no story for Johnson to choose, then Schank's comment, that "in essence, the only thinking we have here is the selection of stories" (p.211), is puzzling in the extreme.

Summary

Though Schank at times sounds as if he is flirting with both sides of the relativism divide, this effect is produced partially by sloppy wording and partially by not distinguishing the following points correctly:

1. Even if skeletal stories are hard to disprove because of their intentionality, which functions as a political stance does, their are notions of quality of match that can lead to not selecting them.
2. Stories include factual information and can be challenged much more readily along that dimension. Admittedly, facts may themselves be the outcome of stories (a topic that Schank unfortunately bypasses), and facts have some of the same subcultural aspects that Schank identified for the stories (e.g. water-logged dinosaurs supporting a Biblical flood narrative) as to acceptability and validity.
3. Though it may not be possible to show that some stories are true, it is sufficient to be able to show that some stories are false for historiography to have the ability to stem the flood of politically-charged revisionist history. Tawana Brawley's story for sure and possibly Ben Johnson's story as well (Schank's source material is too terse) are stories that are false, due to the evidence found, not the skeletons chosen.

It is possible that Schank's side-stepping of the question of truth is due to his general goal of moving AI work from theorem proving and expert systems (p.xlii) toward story generation / understanding / summarization and explanation.

If we take a step back and look at the larger sources of information available for the examples that Schank uses, such as the Admiral Fogarty report from August 1988 or the investigative research journalism by the New York Times reporters Robert McFadden et al, Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, from August 1990,  we get the suspicion that Schank is used in the small forms, such as the newspaper article, not the hundred-plus pages slugfest of details that Fogarty or McFadden and their collaborators provided with.

Postscriptum

In an amusing twist, the McFadden's book Outrage, published contemporaneously with Schank's book in 1990, possibly even contradicts the sequence of events claimed by Schank. 

Later, Dr [Alice, RCK] Pena [the emergency room physician, cf. p20, RCK] had her put her feet into stirrups for an examination of the vaginal, rectal and pelvic areas. The examination revealed no cuts, dried blood, bruises, swelling, deep redness, or other indications of injury. There were no signs of trauma to the mouth …. Indeed, the girl’s [Tawana Brawley’s, RCK] teeth were surprisingly clean and her mouth did not even have a bad odor. Dr Pena decided to forego the use of a rape-detection kit, at least for a while. There weren’t enough signs to warrant it …. (p.21)

At this point, with Tawana still giving signs of semi-consciousness (p.17), and had hardly launched into a story of the type that Schank is looking for. Already the initial interaction with the paramedics and the emergency room physician was gathering evidence against the narrative that Tawana was planning or had been told to use.

Bibliographic Record

Roger C. Schank, Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence,  Evanston, IL (Northwestern University Press), 1995 (= reprint of the 1990 edition published in New York (Scribner), 1990; with a foreword of Gary Saul Morson, from 1995). [Google Book Selections]

Reading with Context in Mind: Plough, Sword and Book (Part 1)

The following discussion analyses a few pages of material from Ernest Gellner's Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History, London (Collins Harville) 1988. The idea behind the exercise is to distill out in exemplary fashion the contextual form of book contents that makes some of the strategies of statistical or pattern-based NLP less helpful than one might hope.

In addressing the problem of the role that primitive man plays in modern political thought (the chapter is entitled, "Which way will the Stone Age Vote swing?"), Gellner analyzes the way in which some philosophers talk about previous social states and their impact on morality.

In between the two extremes---candid fictional reconstructionists and paid-up professional anthropologists---there are other who, while not professional specialists in the area of early man, nevertheless intend their affirmation about him [i.e. early man] to be realistic, not mere fictions, but who wish them, all the same, to point a moral for the conduct of our own social life. (p.26)

The fact that this is Gellner's analysis means that this paragraph is his own, and he owns the words in it and the thoughts as well. Thus, if Gellner, to concoct an example, were to deny ever using the word "realistic", one would be justified in pointing to this paragraph and contradicting that assertion.

For instance, one of the profoundest and most influential of prophets of modern economic and other liberalism is F. A. Hayek. Hayek's analysis of the options and perils of modern society do in fact dovetail with a sharply delineated vision of the primitive social order and ethos. On his view, the strong social morality of early man and its survival in contemporary society constitute a positive danger to us: (p.26)

This paragraph is a potential mixture; it starts out as something that Gellner says about Hayek, but toward the end it becomes possible that Gellner uses diction that is more properly considered Hayek's than Gellner's. This is because Gellner is trying to reconstruct Hayek's thought, and when people do that, they often use the words that the author to be reconstructed employs. For example, if the expression "positive danger" strikes readers as interesting, this paragraph would be ill-suited to determine if Hayek or Gellner would use that expression.

Gellner then quotes Hayek, using a block-quote with reduced font-size to indicate that this is so (p.26):

There is ... so far as present society is concerned, no "natural goodness", because with his innate instincts man could never have built up the civilisation on which the numbers of present mankind depend for their lives. To be able to do so, he had to shed many sentiments that were good for the small band, and to submit to the sacrifices which the discipline of freedom demands but which he hates. The abstract society rests on learnt rules and not on pursuing perceived desirable common objects; and wanting to do good to known people will not achieve the most for the community, but only the observation of its abstract and seemingly purposeless rules.^(Fn6) (p.26)

Notice that this paragraph needs to be attributed to Hayek---as footnote 6 tells us, here indicated by ^(Fn6), the passage is from page 20 of Hayek's work The Three Sources of Human Values, published by the London School of Economics and Political Science in London in 1978. Thus, Hayek is the one who talks about submitting to sacrifices, and the discipline of freedom, not Gellner. (Gellner may of course share that view, but we have so far not seen any textual material to support such a supposition.)

Gellner then prepares to quote another passage from Hayek, which he relates to the first passage via an editorial comment on the stance that Hayek has taken.

And, should anyone not understand what this implies in practice, let it be spelt out: (p.26)

So even though Gellner is pointing out a relationship in Hayek's thought, Gellner is at least to some extent using his own words to express that relationship and thereby give an interpretive bias to the reading of the Hayek passage.

The following quote is again distinguished by a smaller font and a blockquote presentation, marking it as a direct quote from a writing by Hayek (minus the editorial [The] that Gellner felt should be inserted).

... the long submerged innate instincts have again surged to the top. [The] demand for a just distribution in which organised power is to be used to allocate to each what he deserves is thus strictly an atavism, based on primordial emotions. And it is these || widely prevalent feelings to which prophets, moral philosophers and constructivists appeal by their plans for the deliberate creation of a new type of society.^(Fn7) (pp.26f)

The passage is from the same work, as we learn from Fn 7, but two pages earlier, p.18. Notice that this casts an odd light on Gellner's transitional phrasing, because having the implication of a thesis precede the thesis is an odd way to present an argument, and cannot really be called a spelling-out, given that most people read from the low to high page numbers.

Gellner now tries to give Hayek a strong interpretation, one that makes plausible why someone would agree to Hayek's claims. That means, we should expect to encounter Hayek's thinking presented in Gellner's words with Hayek's phrases sprinkled throughout.

The picture is striking and suggestive. Men must have lived in something like "bands", groups too small to be capable of imposing abstract and impersonal rules, for a long time---during the overwhelming majority of generations since the inception of humanity, however that inception may be dated. So, on this view, throughout most of our history our situation instilled in us an ethic which is directly opposed to all that is innovative, creative, progressive in human civilization. Hence, civilization is based on the overcoming, not so much of our lowest instincts, but on the contrary of all that had usually been held to be moral: the social impulses of mankind, the tendency to cooperate with fellows in the pursuit of shared aims. Respect for abstract and incomprehensible rules must replace love of fellow men and community and a sense of shared purpose, if civilization is to emerge and survive. (p.27)

We can see immediately that this is a paraphrase of Hayek's thinking; so far, Hayek has only spoken of  "abstract and seemingly purposeless rules", which under Gellner's reconstruction morph into "abstract and impersonal rules" or "abstract and incomprehensible rules", neither of which is far away from Hayek's meaning, but clearly not synonymous with it either.

After all, rules that are seemingly without purpose may still be personal and comprehensible---for example, the rule that after each 1000-point drop in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 have to apologize on public TV and do 20 push-ups. That rule is both personal and comprehensible, just not very conducive to any purpose that we associate with economics.

It remains possible that Gellner was citing phrases from other sections of the Hayek paper that he did not quote directly; we lack the information to determine this. But we can already see that the complex interplay of commentary ("The picture is striking and suggestive"), expansion of ideas (the speculation on the small groups, with the word `bands`, a term that Hayek uses without quotation marks, now in double-quotes) and summaries of arguments ("the tendency to cooperate with fellows in the pursuit of shared aims") makes it very difficult to attribute phrases and ideas to either Hayek or Gellner directly. At the same time, I cannot shake the feeling that, if someone cited the sentence

Respect for abstract and incomprehensible rules must replace love of fellow men and community and a sense of shared purpose, if civilization is to emerge and survive. (p.27)

as Gellner's point of view, Gellner would probably protest, calling such use a case of being quoted out of context, and seeing himself as primarily elucidating Hayek---even if Hayek should object to the rules being labeled "incomprehensible".

It is important to note that Gellner strengthening Hayek's stance by paraphrasing and working to give it additional plausibility is not a fault at all, but one of Gellner's qualities as a good writer, as someone who tries to compact Hayek's writing for an audience unfamiliar with Hayek's views and takes the arguments of Hayek seriously.

Not very surprising, Gellner continues to unfold Hayek's thought, formally repeating the methods of the previous paragraph, elucidating and bringing in new notions from Hayek's extensive oeuvre.

In Hayek's vision, an unplanned, unintended culture, which was the fruit neither of conscious reason nor of animal instinct, had somehow arisen, and it alone made possible that automatic mechanism of response to need, that sustained innovative improvement, which is manifested in and fostered by the market. ... || ... Seeing how recent precarious our liberation from over-socialization is, it is surprising that we are not even more thoroughly in thrall to atavistic sociability than Hayek fears. It is a social ethic and cohesiveness, not their absence, which are our greatest threat. (pp.27f)

Even though Gellner explicitly labels the exposition as Hayek's (his "vision"), he is now bringing in terms that are not licensed by the quotes and that presumably come from the other parts of Hayek's oeuvre, key among which the notion of the market, or the notion of natural selection. (Gellner errs in not providing footnotes for the source of these concepts in Hayek's writing, but increasingly, footnotes have come to be viewed as pedantic and no longer in need of precision.)

At the same time, the paraphrasing with its subtle shifts of meaning continues; Hayek in the quotes at least never spoke of "animal instinct", but called them "innate instincts". For example, with Steven Pinker we could claim that language belongs to the innate instincts, but clearly is not a good example of an animal instinct, give how few (or none, if one follows Pinker) animals share our form of language.

Since the point of the exercise is not to understand either Hayek or Gellner's argument, just how the thoughts and the linguistic presentations of these thoughts co-occur in a specific text, we will not delve into the elided middle section of that paragraph of Gellner's (see the ellipsis in the quotation from pp.27f above) and continue straight to the next paragraph of Gellner's exposition, on page 28.

Hayek's way of presenting our general condition differs from what might be called the simplest or classical formulation of laissez faire liberalism, in his conscious stress on the cultural preconditions of an open or market society. The classical formulation suggests that its only important condition is a political one: a just, effective and unrapacious state must be present, a political authority which uses its power to keep the peace and uphold the rules, and does not use it simply to despoil civil society. Hayek's new way of defining the problem makes him insist that mere political order is not enough, that a certain kind of abstract culture is also required, the emergence of a sense of and respect for abstract rules, and a detachment from communal, cooperative ends. The Hidden Hand can operate only in a suitable cultural milieu, amongst men who are not too sociable, men who respect rules rather than social aims. (p.28)

At this point, Gellner is contrasting two stances simultaneously, what he calls the classical formulation of liberalism and Hayek's form. These two stances are distinguished, according to Gellner, in their emphasis, the one putting the accent on the political and the other on the cultural preconditions.  Because the paragraph has the potential for losing even the interested reader, Gellner has begun to use emphasis (italics) in the typography to distinguish the key terms that identify the stances. Such an emphasis would have been even more effective if he had not been forced, by convention, to also italicize the French (i.e. non-English) phrase "laissez faire" in the same paragraph.

We observe that Gellner's use of italics for emphasis is in general ambiguous to its precise meaning; on p.27, he used it to mark the introduction of important economic term of the market. That market's regulatory force, the Hidden Hand, however, receives no such emphasis and is capitalized as an agentive force instead.

Our little excursion is almost completed at this point, as we turn to the last paragraph in Gellner's consideration of early man. Gellner turns to the social theory of Hayek's one-time colleague at the London School of Economics and former compatriot, Karl Popper.

A very similar sense of the struggle, not with destructive animal instincts, but on the contrary with an oppressively social morality and the deep feelings which underline it, is also found in the social thought of Karl Popper.^(Fn8) This Hayek/Popper vision might well be called the Viennese Theory. One may well wonder whether it was not inspired by the fact that, in the nineteenth century, the individualistic, atomized, cultivated bourgeoisie of the Habsburg capital had to contend with the influx of swarms of kin-bound, collectivistic, rule-ignoring migrants from the easter marches of the Empire, from the Balkans and Galicia. Cosmopolitan liberals had to contend, in the political sphere, with the emerging breed of national socialists. This "Viennese" vision is an inversion, a denial all at once of romanticism -- it elevates || Gesellschaft (society) over Gemeinschaft (community) --- and of Marxism. Marx anticipated the restoration, rather than the overcoming, of the alleged social proclivities of early man. (pp.28f)

The literature referenced for Karl Popper in Footnote 8 is his classic The Open Society and Its Enemies, London 1945. We observe that we again encounter the use of italics to highlight terms, e,g, national socialists such as the Austro-Fascists as compared to economic socialists in the sense of the followers of Karl Marx, as well as non-English terminology, such as the German words Gesellschaft or Gemeinschaft.

In this paragraph, the reader has to pay careful attention to attribute stances properly. Not only is Gellner discussing Popper, but he is aligning Popper with Hayek and even combining them into a single theory or "vision" (cf the Viennese Theory versus the "Viennese" vision).  At the same moment, for the first time in the selection that we have been analyzing, Gellner actually engages in historiography (we will get to this problem soon), so he is reporting background information to justify his postulate of a Viennese Theory. Thus, because he is not describing the stance of the theory, but its genesis, Gellner owns this paragraph and its terminology.

To summarize: In roughly three pages, Gellner has given us an exposition of at least two intellectual stances that he may or may not share, namely those of F.A. Hayek and of the classical formulation of laissez-faire liberalism; Popper really received one sentence only and was not given a single quote. Gellner has presented these positions in quotes, which are typographically distinct, and in paraphrases, some of which make inexact use of the terminology found in the reconstructed texts. Gellner has interleaved these reconstructions which his comments and in the case of the Vienna Theory, even with an origins story that draws additional background information into the text. Notice that the brevity of the sample did not allow some other occurrences one should expect in a book the size of Gellner's, such as direct quotes of other writers' interpretations of Hayek or Popper, or paraphrases of others' reconstructions of the texts under consideration.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the typical techniques of corpus linguistics cannot succeed readily in such a setting; even though there is a sense in which Gellner's book is a corpus of conceptual stances. Perhaps the reading is not distant enough.

Objective as time-independent

In her article on the then-latest breast cancer screening research, 538-science writer Christie Aschwanden noted

Welch’s group has published other studies with similar results. One of those categorized cancers according to stage, rather than size, however, and some critics countered that the way that cancers are categorized has evolved, which could make comparisons difficult. So in this latest study, the researchers looked at size — a measure that is objective and hasn’t changed over time — and came to the same conclusion: Mammography produces an increase in the number of women diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and a non-invasive cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), but it doesn’t do much to prevent the deadliest cases.

The main point I wish to draw attention to is the distinction between evolving categories, such as cancer stages, and the measurement of size. Though her precise wording, namely that size is an objective measure, is contestable, Aschwanden's phrasing suggests that the crucial difference is the one between evolving and categories that remain constant for a duration of research.

Now granted, this is not what people mean when they use the word "objective", but perhaps it is a better meaning for the word than the current one, which seems to imply some socially indisputable common ground.

Explanation in the Golden Bough

In describing the Arician Grove, Frazer writes--all quotes from the two-volume Golden Bough (Vol 1, Vol 2) edition of 1894:

Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he held office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier. 

This strange rule has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. (GB-1894, v1, p.2) 

And then Frazer goes on to spell out what his concept of explanation is.

It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly if we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity, then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. (p.3)

Frazer assumes a structural equivalence across the human race for the "first crude philosophy of life", which is the origin of the "custom" we wish to explain. This assumption allows us to go wide and search other times and places (i.e. "elsewhere") and discover the structural similarities of the customs practiced in other places and at other times. Frazer sees the customs or "institutions" as responses to "motives".  [RCK: it is quite possible that Frazer does not distinguish between institutions and customs much, as one of the meanings of the Latin word "institutiones" is "custom", e.g. Cicero, Attic Nights.]

Thus if the motives so isolated led to comparable customs and institutions across time and space, and these motives can be shown to be present in classical antiquity, it is probable to assume that they led to similar outcomes, i.e. "the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi".

In order to understand the Frazerian notion of motives, we need to look to this Paragraph 2 (pp.7-), titled Primitive Man and the Supernatural, where Frazer expounds his theory of the relationship between primitive man, the supernatural and causality, especially with reference to the task of influencing the agricultural necessities of rain and sunshine (cf. (p.13) below).

A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is mostly worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings || acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their fears and their hopes. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage ... [his tools being, RCK] prayers, promises, or threats [which, RCK] may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods .... (pp.8-9)

In the limit, this similarity ends in the notion of incarnation:

... and if a good should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher power; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the supernatural powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow man. (p.9)

But this is not the sum-total of Frazer's conceptual tools; for side-by-side with it is that precursor, the "germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency" (p.9), as Frazer sees it, namely sympathetic magic.

One of the principles of sympathetic magic is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. (p.9)

To choose two agricultural examples that Frazer cites.

In Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed, in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax crop to wave in the wind. (p.10)

In the interior of Sumatra the rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. (p.10)

These illustrations also provide the general pattern of explanation that Frazer has in mind. The activity alludes via symbolism to a property of the object under consideration, and understanding the example means understanding the relationship between the activity and the intended property.

But Frazer is quite right that this use of symbolism in sympathetic magic is fundamentally instrumental; it is not itself pointing to a separate agency.

Thus we see that in sympathetic magic one event is supposed to be followed necessarily and invariably by another, without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. This is, in fact, the modern conception of physical causation; the conception, indeed, is misapplied, but it is there none the less [sic RCK]. Here, then, we have another mode in which primitive man seeks to bend nature to his wishes. (p.12)

This also elucidates that Frazer considers the motives to be primarily influence over social--e.g. enemies; cf (pp.11f)---and especially natural phenomena:

 Of all natural phenomena there are perhaps none which civilised man feels himself more powerless to influence than the rain, the sun, and the wind. Yet all these are commonly supposed by savages to be in some degree under their control. (p.13)

Frazer of course knows his examples too well to make the mistake of drawing the lines too clearly between sympathetic magic and supernatural agency (p.12), and will comment on this problem when looking at specific examples:

The Fountain of Baranton ... in the forest of Brecilien, used to be resorted to by peasants when they needed rain; they caught some of the water in a tankard and threw it on a slab near the spring [i.e. sympathetic magic]. (p.15)

In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making god [i.e. supernatural agency RCK];  and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession, and dipped it in a stream. (p.14)

There is a lonely tarn on Snowdon called Dulyn or the Black Lake, lying "in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and dangerous rocks." A row of stepping stones runs out into the lake; and if any one steps on the stones and throws water so as to wet the farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, "it is but a chance that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather." In these cases it is probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as in some sort divine. (p.15)

In Navarre the image of St Peter was taken to a river, where some prayed for him to rain, but others called out to duck him in the water. Here the dipping in || the water is used as a threat; but originally it was probably a sympathetic charm .... (pp.15f)

Thus, explanation needs not only pay attention to the action as such, but also to the intended form of influence being exerted: is there a supernatural agency involved, which is threatened, propitiated, or merely leveraged---compare the New Caledonian ancestor represented through a dug-up skeleton, who functions as a conduit to the sky, i.e. "They [the New Caledonian rain makers, RCK] supposed that the soul of the departed took up the water, made rain of it, and showered it down again." (p.16)
Or is a non-agentive entity leveraged as part of the symbolism. The Servian girl turned into the Dodola--a fertility goddess dressed in grass, herbs and flowers only--does not herself become divine in the process (p.16), though she represents the "spirit of vegetation" and the drenching with water is imitative of rain. In a lurch, a passing stranger will do as a visiting god or spirit (p.17) and be treated as such (p.16).

The problem of explanation remains that not all aspects of a ceremony may be elucidated in this fashion in all cases. Consider the scenario of the floating harrow.

In the district of Transylvania, when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the field to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go home. (p.17)

We already have some of the infrastructure to suggest pieces for the interpretation. Naked women symbolize spirits, and the cultural implement put into the water expresses the need of the parched ground for rain. However, it is unclear what the flames burning on the corners (they have to be tiny because the harrow is most likely wooden) and the hour of floating in the brook is supposed to accomplish. Is the carrying of the harrow over the field from the to the brook part of the ritual or part of the description? Is the age difference between the leadership and the performers ritually relevant (wisdom vs fertility) or pragmatic (someone needs to know what to do, but is too old to do it themselves)? Thus, there are different levels of matching quality that need to be kept in mind. (The rainmaking ceremony of the Diyerie of South Australia, with its bleeding and large stones and putting the stones into the trees fifteen miles or more away is another case with oddities; cf. (p.20).)

Sometimes even the experts cannot agree.

A peculiar mode of making rain was adopted by the heathen Arabs. They tied two sorts of bushes to the tails and hind-legs of their cattle, and setting fire to the bushes drove the cattle to the top of a mountain, praying for rain. This may be, as Wellhausen suggests, an imitation of lightning on the horizon. But it may also be a way of threatening the sky .... (p.20) 

Frazer gives the example of West-African rain-makers threatening the sky with fire (p.20).

Keeping tabs on Frazer

I have begun putting together the bits and pieces for my next research undertaking. I want to see if the inductive argument in Sir Frazer's Golden Bough (Vol 1, Vol 2 from 1894) is plausible.

Specifically, we want to verify Frazer's argument by encoding all of the ethnographic literature that he piles up and then seeing

• if the model selection algorithm that he uses can find the argument that he makes from the cases that he presents (internal validity)
• if the model selection algorithm that he uses finds other arguments as well, using the same case material (internal decisiveness)
• in the case of model ambiguity, whether Frazer selected the best model, most likely in the minimal-message reformulated sense of Ockham's Razor (internal conciseness)

More on what we mean by model selection in a future post.

This is distinct from showing that Frazer's argument is consistent with current or even past research agendas (communal validity). In fact, few today will share his assumptions about the uniformity of religious belief of an Aryan Race, which entails

... every inquiry into the primitive religion of the Aryans should either start from the superstitious beliefs and observances of the peasantry, or should at least be constantly checked and controlled by reference to them. (Preface, p.viii, ed. 1894)

Frazer himself uses this stance to downplay the reports in the old literature vis-a-vis the cultural context in which the non-literate peasantry has been reared.

... and so it has come about that in Europe at the present day the superstitious beliefs and practices which have been handed | down by word of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race. (p.viiif)

The idea for the title so far has been "The Logic of Sympathetic Magic: Taking a Leaf from Frazer's Golden Bough". I think it's funny, too.

On estimation of confounders

I came to this paper on controlling for statistical confounders via Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex website, which covers statistical topics.

Westfall and Yarkoni remind us that we use proxies to estimate the true latent constructs, e.g. a "specific survey item asking about respondents’ income bracket" to estimate "socioeconomic status". Thus, statistical arguments cannot easily control for the potentially confounding latent construct, but only for a measure of that construct, which has its own error brackets.

At the root of the problem lies the insight countervening conventional wisdom that 

The relationship between n and Type 1 error may be less obvious: all else equal, as sample size increases, error rates also increase.

The problem is exacerbated by the way reliability interacts with error rates, giving a non-monotonic relationship.

In the middle [of the reliability range, RCK], however, there exists a territory where effects are large enough to afford detection, but reliability is too low to prevent misattribution, leading to particularly high Type 1 error rates.

Furthermore, this problem is independent of the statistical analysis approach used (frequentist vs Bayesian, parameter estimation) as long as reliability is not explicitly accounted for.

Indeed, somehow getting a grip on the reliability is the core of the problem. But that is easier said than done. Westfall and Yarkoni point out that

econometric studies attempting to control for SES [i.e. socioeconomic status, cf. above, RCK] hardly ever estimate or report the reliability of the actual survey item(s) used to operationalize the SES construct ....

This is why Westfall and Yarkoni recommend structural equation modeling (SEM) in order to avoid the trap altogether. Lacking any estimations for the reliability, the researchers can then at least plot their results across a range of estimates to see how sensitive their findings are on reliability.

Bibliographic Record:
Westfall J, Yarkoni T (2016) Statistically Controlling for Confounding Constructs Is Harder than You Think. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0152719. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0152719

Nelson Goodman on Ampliative Inference

By ampliative inference is central to many historiographical arguments, such as induction by enumeration, analogical reasoning, inference to the best explanation, and other forms that expand on what is available in the premise.

However, it is in these contexts precisely that projectibility can be lost. In my current understanding this has to do with discontinuities in the underlying space, as the bleen and grue examples show that Nelson Goodman introduced in the 1940s and revisited in his 1984 paper New Riddle of Induction in Fact, Fiction and Forecast. Thus, while

1. All observed emeralds are green.
2. Thus, all emeralds are green.

is valid, the form

1. All observed emeralds are grue.
2. Thus, all emeralds are grue.

fails, the fact that the definition of "grue" contains the notion of "observed before the year X" in its definition means that the property of "grue" is insufficiently general for projectability. 

Chris Swoyer, who wrote the SEP article used here, argues that the grue problem is "just an instance of the ubiquitous underdetermination of hypotheses by finite bodies of data". And such underdetermination is a problem for inductive inference, unless the induction is controlled in some fashion, i.e. some hypothesis are rejected from the inductive step. Restriction to projectable relations is one way to tackle the problem.

In his 3rd Lecture, Goodman looks at the way that justification and inference are related, and states a co-dependency that is virtuously circular:

A rule is amended if it yields an inference we are unwilling to accept; an inference is rejected if it violates a rule we are unwilling to amend. (p.67)

Thus:

The process of justification is the delicate one of making mutual adjustments between rules and accepted inferences; and in the agreement achieved lies the only justification needed for either. (p.67)

Similarly for inductive inference.

An inductive inference, too, is justified by conformity to general rules, and a general rule by conformity to accepted inductive inferences. Predictions are justified if they conform to valid canons of induction; and the canons are valid fi they accurately codify accepted inductive practice. (p.67)

Applying this to inductive work, which is neglected as compared to deductive inference, is what Goodman calls the Constructive Task of Confirmation Theory (p.68). However, just as with defining any term, we tweak the usage and the definition to make sure that the definition picks out only the instances of usage an no others (p.69).

Goodman's discussion of the black and the raven things starting on pp.70ff is dependent on Carl Gustav Hempel's Studies in the Logic of Confirmation, from: Mind, v.54 n.213 (January 1945), pp.1-26, where Hempel (p.9ff) pulls apart Nicod's criterion for confirmation or invalidation, as Nicod termed it. The basic point is that the basic structure of a rule in its logical form as disjunct no longer separates the assumptions of the hypothesis from the predictions of the hypothesis. This has the effect that logically equivalent hypotheses (R => B and !B => !R) are supported or neutral with respect to the same observations (e.g. the observation !R & !B supports the second but not the first hypothesis). Clearly independence of formulation is an important desideratum (Hempel 1945, p.12).

[Note: I could not find an easy simplification rule that allows to rewrite S1 in the multi-variable case (Hempel 1945, p.13 Fn) into S2, i.e. ~R(x,y) => R(x,y) & ~R(y,x) into R(x,y), but the truth tables show that this is so.]
Taking a leaf from Carl Gustav Hempel, Goodman points out that the only substitutions in the hypothesis step can be the variables for the objects, not the relations (p.71), or put differently:

... the hypothesis says of all things what the evidence statement says of one thing .... (p.71)

The central idea for an improved definition is that, within certain limitations, what is asserted to be true for the narrow universe of the evidence statements is confirmed for the whole universe of discourse. (p.73) 

 (to be continued)

the possibility of digitally supporting argumentation in the humanities

As noted in my previous post,  while the decision process regarding the quality of arguments in the digital humanities is complicated and usually involves mainly sins of omission, the basic model of an argument being open to confirmation makes for a sensible launching point to bring DH support to bear.

It is important to understand that at the level of generality under discussion here, there is no principal bias toward formal models of argumentation. By this I mean that there is no bias toward argumentation whose rules of inference have already been formalized (such as first-order predicate calculus or decision logic or similar). However, it seems to me that the interest in the ability of others to follow our arguments implies that the rules of inference I use in my argument could at least in principle be formalized. If such a "mechanical" or "symbolic" notion of inference is admitted, then Turing has good news for us: such a process of validation of an argument is a Turing-computable function and we can bring effective digital support to bear on the problem.

On the one hand it seems clear that, within the schools of the various disciplines of the humanities, rules for what are valid and proper forms of argumentation (and what are not) have developed and are taught successfully to the new generation. (This is the direction that Thomas Kuhn's arguments about the paradigms of scientific practice are hinting toward.) On the other hand, most humanities scholars would be hard-pressed to successfully formalize their underlying rules of inference. They may even have difficulties to press the forms of argumentation of their school of thinking correctly into another formalized system of inference---such as first-order predicate logic or decision logic.

The situation appears perhaps even more difficult when faced with heuristics, by which I mean argument constructs that are rule-like but are mutually exclusive and are known to be only valid in some situations. Perhaps best-known in the humanities are the rules for cross-document textual interpretation when reconstructing an Urtext, such as lectio difficilior or lectio brevior.  These heuristics come into conflict if the shorter text eliminated difficulties.

But even if we are admonished not to apply these heuristics mechanically, the fact that their weighing against each other could be taught suggests that they can be explained and in the limit applied mechanically by those wishing to understand the process of our weighing, that is our argument.

digital support for argumentation in the humanities

Perhaps it is especially obvious to someone who has just published his first book that monographs are large complex theoretical undertakings that could benefit from more digital support than word processing, map drawing, or Google and Amazon Kindle books (as searchable sources) provide---however helpful all of these things are!

At the same time, these analogous tools give an appreciation for the limitations of the support one should expect realistically: for example, it took about two weeks of low-level LaTeX tweaking to get my monograph just right, with judicious page stretching and negative-space fiddling and, in the end, we were stuck splicing a page-break into a generated file (the output from the indexer) in order to get the look "just right" (TM by Goldilocks)---a computer-science no-no if there ever was one!

The basic idea behind argumentation in the humanities is simple enough: I would want other people, given the data that I used, and applying to these the analysis that I applied, to come to the same conclusion that I arrived at. In the limit, that process should be effectively mechanical.

The practice of actual scholarly argumentation is of course vastly more complicated, where people often challenge arguments, by

• challenging the data selection, meaning that there is other data that should have been used
• challenge the data use, meaning that other features of the data set should have been used 
• challenging the models (scripts, in the language of Schank and Abelson) that are used to interpret people's actions 
• etc

The implied criticism is always that these differences in strategies would have led to differences in the argument outcomes (everything else would be supporting evidence). This means that an argument that can be followed and agreed to under its premises is only a small part of the scientific process in the humanities. 

While this is true,  it also stands to reason that the infrastructure developed for digitally supporting the construction and maintenance of humanities arguments and narratives are a good launching pad for digitally supporting the comparison of different arguments and narratives in the humanities. 

So, while effort expended in the digital support of humanities argumentation will not solve "the problem", it is an interesting incremental improvement of supporting ever more of the scientific work of the humanities digitally.

Carson and the Pseudo-Archeologists

Presidential candidate Ben Carson made use of his Seventh-Day Adventist convictions to interpret the Pyramids as grain silos, provoking reactions from many archeologists, such as Kristina Killgrove, who pointed out not only various issues with the claim but also to general recent efforts in combating pseudo-archeology in the first place. The most interesting of these are the initiative to review pseudo-archeological work in archeological reviews and the link to a Fall 2015 university course on that problem.

My take-home quote for right now is

In the second review, The Ancient Alien Question, archaeologist Jeb Card points out, as does Feder, that the origins of this idea lay in Victorian mysticism and Theosophy, a movement that “blended hermetic magic, spiritualism, Western curiosity ab[o]ut Eastern religion, colonial racism, and misconceptions of evolution into a worldview of root races, lost continents, and ascended masters who originated on Venus or other worlds.