Digest 7

Generalizations:

Spoiler alert: I never tell the truth, and that’s the truth. But there’s no need to worry because all generalizations are false, including this one. I do love paradoxes, ever since I read that they are the truth standing on its head to get your attention.

Plato started this game by writing that “I’m a Cretan and all Cretans are liars.” For most of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead and other philosophers tried repeatedly to “solve” this paradox, with only limited success, declaring that there were different “classes” of information involved, “layers” or something like that. In other words, they gave up.

We must take a long look at generalizations, because they dominate our thinking and our communications. The brain evolved by learning to accumulate information and then generalize about what we had learned in order to reach decisions about moving forward. Clearly, without that process we never could have progressed beyond the primate stage of evolution. Just as clearly, this process is both a blessing and a curse. As noted above, all generalizations are false, and we forget that at our peril. To make matters worse, the English language regularly requires generalities of which we are not aware, primarily around the verb “to be,” which serves as a kind of equals sign.

Alfred Korzybski: (July 3, 1879 – March 1, 1950) “a Polish-American independent scholar who developed a field he called general semantics, which he viewed as both distinct from, and more encompassing than, the field of semantics. He argued that human knowledge of the world is limited both by the human nervous system and the languages humans have developed, and thus no one can have direct access to reality, given that the most we can know is that which is filtered through the brain’s responses to reality. His best known dictum is ‘The map is not the territory.’ Quoted directly from Wikipedia, because he is that important and I cannot hope to summarize him better.”

In Science and Sanity (1933), he insisted that English was an “Aristotelian” language, in which everything is either this or that because the most important verb, “to be,” serves as a kind of equals sign, and that any sentence using it must be essentially untrue because it creates a generalization, an inadequate description of the subject of the sentence. For example: Question: “What are you?” Answer: “I am a man.” Of course, I am much more than that. The more truthful answer, which no one would employ, would be “Among many other things, I am a man.”

Why is all this important? Because any discussion of serious issues in our language inevitably involves generalizations, unless qualifications are included: “more often than not,” “most of the time,” “with some exceptions,” without which someone can always jump up and claim to disprove what you are saying by citing an exception. Obviously, constant qualifications tend to weaken an argument, so they are rarely employed.

Another common generalization is the stereotype, and now I am bound to offend some of you. (It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it). First, stereotypes are not created out of whole cloth; they are the result of many years of actual experiences by many, many people. Most derive from cultural differences, which are also very real. Like all generalizations, they are both false and also relevant. The definition of prejudice is pre-judging someone by assuming that they fit the stereotype of the cultural group to which we think they belong. We may even be wrong to include them, and, in any event, it should be obvious that not all members of any group share the general characteristics we associate with that group. Thinking in generalities is lazy thinking. It should be obvious, but isn’t. If we didn’t ever generalize it would be hard to make any of the constant decisions that allow us to act. Some things to think about…

Next week, some back story about who I am and why I decided to start this Digest. The following issue will be back to foolish philosophy: The Reactionary Revolution, as oxymoronic as that may seem.