Besides the sheer intellectual excitement and gratification afforded by
Steven Pinker's 2007 book,
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, I much enjoy his examples. Some are overtly political, as when he writes:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This sentence appeared in George W. Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003. It referred to intelligence reports suggesting that Saddam may have tried to buy five hundred tons of a kind of uranium ore called yellowcake...During the occupation it became clear that Saddam had had no facilities in place to manufacture nuclear weapons, and probably had never explored the possibility of buying yellowcake from Niger. In the words of placards and headlines all over the world, "Bush lied."
Did he? The answer is not as straightforward as partisans on both sides might think...
So did Bush lie? A strong case could be made that he did. When Bush said that the British government had "learned" that Saddam had sought uranium, he was committing himself to the proposition that the uranium seeking actually took place, not that the British government believed that it did....[pp. 6-8]
Other of Pinker's examples are simply curious...and informative:
Conundrums of causality are not just law-school exercises. On July 1, 1881, President James Garfield was waiting to board a train when Charles J. Guiteau took aim at him with a gun and shot him twice. Both bullets missed Garfield's major organs and arteries, but one lodged in the flesh of his back. The wound was minor by today's standards and needn't have been fatal even in Garfield's day. 
But his doctors subjected him to the harebrained medical practices of the time, like probing his wound with their unwashed hands (decades after antisepsis had been discovered) and feeding him through his rectum instead of his mouth. Garfield lost a hundred pounds as he lingered on his deathbed, succumbing to the effects of starvation and infection eighty days after the shooting. At his trial, Guiteau repeatedly said, "The doctors killed him; I just shot him." The jury was unpersuaded, and in 1882 Guiteau was hanged—another man whose fate hinged on the semantics of a verb.[pp. 86-87]
An earlier page of Pinker's book had made a subtle reference to the identity of the other man. The verb in that case was "is."
Besides the sheer intellectual excitement and gratification afforded by Steven Pinker's 2007 book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, I much enjoy his examples. Some are overtly political, as when he writes:
This is interesting, and I collect doctor stories in the same vein as yours, for I suspect future doctors will look back at these days as similarly harebrained.
ReplyDeletebut.....Guiteau must have been an educated man, or ahead of his time. How did he know the the doctors' methods were harebrained?
I do assume that the doctors attending a president of the United States would have been up to speed and that they were competently following the current state of the art, so it is apparent not only that they were following harebrained practices but also that the practices they followed represented the state of the art!
ReplyDeleteIt's scary to think that some of the practices that I myself (or my wife; we've both been operated on, etc., very likely much more than the national average) have undergone were, in retrospect, "harebrained." Nevertheless, I am alive, and without that pineal tumor resection I had, in the very middle of my head, I'd most likely not be alive. And without that L4-5 laminectomy I might be in constant pain or even unable to walk.
Of course, there are horror stories to counter every medical success story that can be told. Those, I imagine, are the ones that you particularly like to collect? Do you have any examples of faith healing that you like to put against some of these medical horror stories?
Hmm, I guess that rituals attendant on faith healing have "advanced" over time, too, haven't they? I mean, are some of the rituals of yore now considered witchdoctoring (I mean even by today's equivalent of the witchdoctors)? (These questions just occurred to me, so I may not have put them well.)
You speak of faith healing as if you expect me to embrace it or as if you think it is part and parcel of our beliefs. I'm not sure why you do that. Is this another example of "not knowing the other side?"
ReplyDeleteThe surgeries you speak of, in view of their success, certainly would not seem be be harebrained.
Stories that I like to collect are stories that illustrate human obstinateness. For example, you mentioned modern antiseptic methods. The importance of this was discovered decades before Joseph Lister by Ignaz Semmelweis. He conclusively demonstrated its effectiveness, yet he was laughed out of town. I wrote about it once:
http://carriertom.typepad.com/sheep_and_goats/2007/07/isaac-asimov-an.html
Of course, obstinate people are everywhere...we all know that. But I like to find examples of it in fields that define themselves as being not obstinate.....fields supposedly guided only by the scientific method, that claim to recognize and adapt to new truths the moment they are documented. The same examples of obstinateness are nowhere near as striking in....say, business or politics, because these areas make no claims to operate free from emotion.
But I'm not against medicine per se, nor is my religion.
Tom, I hoped you might know something about witchdoctoring is all, but perhaps not. You certainly don't seem like the sort of person who would embrace it.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course you're right that I don't know (or much care to know) whether Jehovah's Witnesses as a group embrace it or not. I like to think that we correspond as man to man, not as members of divergent or opposed groups. I don't speak for atheists, for example, whether or not you speak, for example, for the Witnesses of Jehovah (and you do seem to from time to time; or maybe it's a case of your letting THEM speak for you? As when you invoke some article of faith or other and indicate that I should go study it in order to know what YOU think).
This is hot off the press (of my mind), so it may not be expressed in the clearest or most felicitous way.
I don't think it's possible to identify a lie by the language used to assert something that is later shown to be untrue. I could say now that "I have learned that in fact Saddam was indeed negotiating with Niger for yellowcake" and not be lying. There is an inscrutable separation between mistaken conviction and the words used to express it. I'm sure of it!
ReplyDeleteKen, Pinker's argument (I'm pretty confident I understand it) is that "learned that" includes the implication that you know that what was "learned" is indeed the case. To say that you have learned that ("in fact," no less) something is true that (I assume) you really don't believe is true at all is, if not a lie, at least a significant misuse of the language of "to learn." That is, "to learn" does more than merely express conviction. Remember, the example given was not casual (slovenly) everyday speech, but official (politically motivated) language. The political motivation part (Pinker argues) exploited the logic of "to learn" to lead people to believe that Saddam really had been seeking yellowcase (although Bush knew no such thing).
ReplyDelete