Loss Of Language, And The Future Of Science – Scoop.co.nz

In our age of unnuanced media reporting, cynicism, and
political correctness, words and meanings are subject –
perhaps increasingly – to an effective process of
cancellation. It’s not a new process, in the past certain
words might be replaced by others – eg ‘race’ replaced by ‘ethnicity’, ‘illegitimate’ replaced by ‘ex-nuptial’, ‘benefit’ replaced by ‘handout’. Such replacements are not
necessarily problematic. In the first two examples given
above, words whose popular meanings have become pejorative
have been replaced by words with essentially the same
meanings, but without the pejorative connotations.

In
the third example, a word (‘benefit’) that is a very good
word – indeed a word that literally means ‘something good’
– has suffered a pejorative meaning and has been largely
replaced by a word that reinforces that pejorative meaning.
The proper meaning of ‘benefit’ – as a noun, though not as
a verb – has largely been lost to the language; and it’s a
critically important meaning to the understanding of the
available capitalist options for the future of human
civilisation. (I cannot conceive of any non-capitalist
options that are not dystopian; apologies for the quadruple
negative!)

Three words that I am particularly
lamenting are ‘disinterested’, ‘progressive’, and ‘literally’. Today the word ‘disinterested’ has been almost
entirely conflated with the word ‘uninterested’. Yet the
craft of an academic – of a scholar – is to be always
disinterested and never uninterested. The loss of this
distinction is one of the warning signs that the age of
reason – always tentative, but critically important to
facilitating a civilised way of life – is nearing its
end.

The word ‘progressive’ has two main meanings –
both somewhat nebulous. For the earlier meaning, we get the
full flavour in James Belich’s book on New Zealand history,
Making Peoples. It was exemplified in the settler
dream of creating a ‘Greater Britain’ in these islands;
progress was understood as growth on steroids. The
politicians in New Zealand most associated with this meaning
of progressive were Julius Vogel, Joseph Ward, and Robert
Muldoon (in Muldoon’s case it was about stemming what would
otherwise have been substantial negative growth). These were
our financially heroic political leaders, prepared to make
full use of the government’s privileged balance sheet to
build a materially advanced and equitable future.

The
alternative – and prevailing – meaning of ‘progressive’
was coined through the American progressive movement of the
early 1900s. Indeed these left-wing American intellectuals
looked to New Zealand – and particularly the initial ‘radical’ Liberal leadership of John Balance (who lost his
head, decades ago, in Whanganui) and William Pember Reeves
– as setting the pace to a bright new socially enlightened
twentieth century. (Refer Progressivism and the World of
Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare
State, 1987, by Peter J. Coleman.)

There are
ironies. In Canada in the twentieth century, the equivalent
of New Zealand’s National Party was the ‘Progressive
Conservatives’, with the word ‘progressive’ fully containing
that Vogellian meaning mentioned above. Yet today, the term ‘progressive’ relates to the new white collar socio-economic
elite – simultaneously left-wing and (like all elites)
conservative, inclined to shut down debates about practical
solutions to the actual problems of our age, pursuing
ideological agendas formed yesterday, and inclined to
interpret the contemporary world as a contest between
intelligentsia (defined as themselves) and an emerging
conspiracy-theorising stupidia.

The word ‘literally’
is a wonderful word, the antonym of ‘figuratively’. To
literally walk in someone else’s shoes means to actually
wear the shoes of that other person. Recently I heard
someone say, after a good result in the Olympic Games, that
they were ‘literally over the moon’. Yeah right! Not even
Jeff Bezos can do that. Not yet. ‘Literally’ is now becoming
a synonym of ‘figuratively’; and, more generally, its just
becoming another meaningless expression of
hyperbole.

Sex, Gender and
Certification

Language in this area is becoming a
(figurative) minefield. And, in reflection of these
sensitivities, this week the New Zealand Parliament is
proceeding with a bill that will enable people to modify
their birth certificates. This retrospective tinkering with
historical documents – like other retrospective procedures
in law – makes me very uneasy. Retrospectivity was one of
the important themes of George Orwell’s classic dystopia,
1984. People would be cancelled,
would become unpersons who legally never existed, even
though they are or were alive, literally.

I will quote
Yuval Noah Harari – from p.170 of his very (and
deservedly) popular book Sapiens.
Harari has impeccable credentials as a ‘progressive’
intellectual, in the full twentyfirst century meaning of
that word.

Scholars usually distinguish between ‘sex’,
which is a biological category, and ‘gender’, a cultural
category. Sex is divided between males and females, and the
qualities of this division are objective and have remained
constant throughout history. Gender is divided between men
and women (and some cultures recognise other categories).
… To get to be a member of the male sex is the simplest
thing in the world. You just need to be born with an X and a
Y chromosome. To get to be a female is equally simple. A
pair of X chromosomes will do it.

The word ‘sex’ has
become a bit like the word ‘race’, and as a result many
people have come to use the word ‘gender’, incorrectly, as a
euphemism for ‘sex’. Some people accentuate the biological
concept of ‘sex’, while substituting the word ‘gender’. Take ‘gender-reveal parties’ as an example. Further, some
feminists refer to ‘gender’ as a biological attribute, while
others use it as a cultural attribute.

Gender, as a
term of identity, is much like that of religion. We know
that most people born to Muslim parents will live their
lives as Muslims; but it would be wrong to put the world ‘Muslim’ on a person’s birth certificate. A person born into
a Muslim family may choose to not be a Muslim. It’s even
trickier with Jews. To be an ‘Ashkenazy Jew’ is widely used
as an ethnicity (eg in ancestry DNA tests), as well as a
descriptor of a person’s faith, or an ancestor’s faith. This
is because of the widespread social practice – covering
three millenniums – of Jews to reproduce within their
religious community. Over time, a religious group thereby
becomes an ethnic group. Nevertheless, a person born into a
Jewish family can disavow Judaism, but will still have the
same ethnicity as their siblings who retain their birth
faith.

A birth certificate is the official
documentation of a birth, not a documentation of a person’s
life, nor a documentation of a person’s subjective status on
their eighteenth birthday. It’s meant to be a document of a
person’s biology, not of their culture.

The issue does
arise however, about the need to have a widely-used document
that states who someone ‘is’, rather than what they ‘were’.
Our common practice is to use passports and drivers’
licences for this purpose. But its an ad hoc
solution.

Given that, in the 2020s, fewer people will
travel internationally and more people are choosing not to
drive (or choosing to delay gaining a driver’s licence), it
is now time that New Zealanders ‘bite the bullet’ and
develop an official domestic system of identity
documentation; a present-focussed (rather than past-focused)
system that easily allows a person to revise their identity
when any aspect of their identity changes. Some categories
of identity – eg gender, religion, ethnicity – could be
optional inclusions. A person’s sex would not be required.
The items of information needed would be a photo, a
signature, a date of birth (to indicate age), a social
security number, and a person’s immigration status. (With
immigration status shown, a person’s place of birth would
not be required.)

Do we need to indicate sex at all on
a birth certificate? We don’t include ethnicity. I would
argue ‘yes’, a person’s sex is an important part of their
birth identity. (And, much academic research focusses on
different life outcomes and options and discriminations
based on their sex, even if much of its publication is
couched in the subjective language of gender. Sex, like age,
is a fundamental human attribute.) Harari (p.172) notes that “there is some universal biological [my emphasis]
reason” why we have regarded, throughout history, the
distinction between males and females as important. I
presume it relates to their distinctly different biological
roles in the literal reproduction of our
species.

There is no equivalent imperative to define a
person by their ethnicity, although some societies still do.
(This is a touchy hypothetical point though, because there
were once multiple species – not races – of humans. Even
politically correct people today hang on to the idea that it
is acceptable to be disparaging to extinct species of humans
– eg Neanderthals – whereas they should not be
disparaging to more recent victims of genocide, such as
Tasmania’s first peoples. The boundary between extinct human
species and extinct ethnicities is not clear though; it’s
still accepted practice to call an allegedly ‘uncultured’
person a ‘philistine’. Also, especially in this modern era
of DNA sequencing, we know that neither the genomes of
native Tasmanians nor native Europeans [Neanderthals] are
extinct.)

Marriages and Unions

An interesting
episode in New Zealand’s political history is when, half a
decade ago, New Zealand was one of the first jurisdictions
to redefine the word ‘marriage’. The
legislation came up, purely by chance, as a private member’s
bill, and was promoted as an exercise in the right of two
men (or two males) or two women (or two females) to love
each other in the same public sense as a man and a woman (or
a male and a female) could. Very few people disagreed with
that right, which already existed. (It’s a bit like the ‘anti-hate speech’ bill which we are told to expect this or
next year. We already have laws against
hate-speech.)

There was a small issue, a problem with
the earlier ‘Civil Union’ legislation, brought in about 15
years ago by the then Helen Clark led government. Imagine a
Venn Diagram with ‘marriage’ on one side and ‘civil union’
on the other. While the two sides largely intersected, in
some respects a civil union was wider in scope (same-sex
relationships) and in other respects marriage was wider in
scope (eg in the rights to adopt children). What we did, in
effect, was to extend the scope of the Civil Union
legislation, and then to redefine a ‘civil union’ as a ‘marriage’. The first part of this process was necessary,
the second part was not. In doing so, we removed by diktat
the meaning of a word – marriage, the union of an adult
male and an adult female – that had existed since Adam and
Eve, or Rangi and Papa.

The logically obvious approach
to take was to make traditional marriage a cultural subset
of an enhanced legal institution; a subset of a properly
defined civil union. (An unpleasant linguistic analogy is
that of ‘murder’ being a cultural subset of the legal term ‘homicide’.) In that way, marriage could still have been
what it always was (a popular name for a union between a man
and a woman), and there would have been no basis for any
discrimination between same-sex and different-sex unions. In
that case, marriage would have disappeared as a legal
construct, while maintaining its popular role as a
reproductive union.

My understanding is that the then
Attorney-General, Christopher Finlayson, held essentially
this same view. But hardly anybody – least of all people
like myself, or Christopher Finlayson – wanted to be seen
as gay-bashers or as neanderthals, as all opponents of
gay-marriage were framed as being. At that time, there was
no space for nuanced opposition to the legislation; in the
public eye, re that issue, a person was either a progressive
or a philistine.

At least the idea of a
biological-based reproductive union still exists, albeit as
a phrase – heterosexual marriage – rather than as a
word. So all is not lost. Problematic though is the fact
that – by affirming the legal meaning of the word ‘marriage’ – the concept of a de facto marriage, a
favoured union for many people, has become an
oxymoron.

Science, Knowledge, and other related
Concepts

We have a number of important words –
science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims, information –
that have related meanings, but distinctively different
(albeit nuanced) meanings.

A few weeks ago, a group of
University of Auckland scientists wrote to the New Zealand
Listener, arguing that traditional Māori knowledge (and
modern knowledge developed through that Mātauranga Māori
framework) was not science. While they were correct –
science and knowledge are not the same thing – the
uncritical reaction was immediate and
unforgiving.

Knowledge derives from three things:
observation (and measurement), reasoning, and literature (ie
culture). Knowledge is evolving, and much of what was
knowledge in the past would not be classed as knowledge
today (eg Galen’s paradigm of medical knowledge). Much that
is knowledge – such as complex knowledge that passes to us
through literature – is unverifiable, but it tells us who
we are, and how we see the world and how we think about it.
(Early medical knowledge may not be classed as knowledge
today, but the historiography of early medical knowledge
certainly would be classed as knowledge
today.)

Science is very much a method – associated
with the Age of Reason – that can only create negative
knowledge. Scientific research can only falsify
propositions; it cannot declare them to be ‘true’; and, in
practice, most falsification is based on probabilistic
arguments devised by statisticians.

Empirical
knowledge about the stars sufficient to enable trans-oceanic
navigation is no more ‘science’ than is knowledge about
which herbal remedies relieve certain conditions of pain or
disease. Ptolemaic astronomy, traditional Polynesian
astronomy, and Copernican astronomy all equally convey
practical navigational knowledge. Polynesian astronomical
knowledge is ‘true’, as observational knowledge; but it’s
not science, it cannot be falsified. Ptolemaic astronomy,
likewise, enabled navigation. But it offered an explanation
for the movements of celestial objects that has been proven
to be false. Likewise, Copernican astronomy is also false
– the sun is not at the centre of the universe – but in
an important scientific sense it is less false than
Ptolemaic astronomy. Copernican astronomy made it possible
to create further truths that are even less false (eg those
associated with Gallileo, Kepler and Newton). These are
evolving truths that are progressive – in the Vogellian
sense – without which humans could never have visited the
moon.

Truth is a philosophical rather than a
scientific concept. If I say that I believe Vitamin C
supplements are good for a person’s health in some
circumstances, then I know that that is true, because I know
what I believe. Further, that belief is verifiable (sort of)
if I am observed to be taking Vitamin C supplements;
although I could be taking the supplements as part of an
experiment, and not necessarily because I believe they are
good for me. Beliefs are truths, albeit subjective truths. I
know what I believe, even if you don’t. If I believe in
flying pigs, then it is true that I believe in flying
pigs.

A scientific truth is a plausible ‘claim’, or ‘hypothesis’; an assertion of objective truth. By its very
nuanced meaning, all scientific truths are provisional. A
scientific truth, by definition, must be conceptually
falsifiable.

Information is a mix of all the
above-mentioned: science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims.
Information makes no special claim to truth, and may be
intentionally false, or an untested claim.

Trivial
truths may be called facts. My date of birth is a fact. The
size of a crowd for an event at Eden Park is a fact, but
only has meaning if contextualised; it needs to be ‘time-stamped’, because the crowd size varies during an
event. And even then, the truthful meaning of a time-stamped
fact may vary; 50,000 people may have turned up by 7:30pm on
the day of a given event, but most those people may have
left soon after. The size of the crowd at 9:00pm is an
alternative fact. For an event to be truthfully classed as
more popular than another event, it depends on the duration
of the crowd as well as its peak size.

One important
kind of truth is abstract (or a priori) truth.
Mathematics is a set of such abstract truths. 2+3=5 is a
truth. So is +x+(-x)=0; the truth that underpins
double-entry bookkeeping (where ‘x’ can be any number). So
is i²=-1, where i is by definition the imaginary number
which makes that truth true.

Historical
Truth

A particularly important class of truth is ‘historical truth’. Historical truth is a set of facts
underpinned by a set of counterfactuals that confer meaning
or explanation onto that truth. Facts can be observed;
that’s the easier part. Counterfactuals can only be argued;
they can only be reasoned, because, by definition, they did
not happen.

Much of what we think of as history is
sequences of facts; many of these are provisional facts
which may be disputed because of gaps or anomalies in the
documentary record. Further, such facts are often
interpreted. Was a recovered archaeological monument a
temple, or a palace, or a parliament?

That James Cook
and Jean-François-Marie de Surville unknowingly crossed
paths off Cape Reinga in December 1769 is a fact. The date
of that crossing is an unresolvable fact, because 17 Dec
1769 on Surville’s calendar would have been 16 Dec 1769 on
Cook’s calendar. (I thank Mike Lee, former Auckland
Councillor and author of Navigators and Naturalists
for alerting me to this!) This is because Surville’s voyage
was travelling towards the east, while Cook was travelling
towards the west. (And for Surville, New Zealand’s north
cape was one bit of land – now named in his honour –
while Cook saw and named North Cape, another piece of land;
close but not the same.)

The deeper historical truth
is that these voyages changed New Zealand (named ‘New
Zealand’ in the 1640s, after Abel Tasman’s voyage, so both
navigators knew in advance that New Zealand was there, and
that New Zealanders were fierce) forever. Possibly an even
deeper historical truth is that, even if none of these three
European voyagers had ventured to these islands, Europeans
would still have come to – and colonised – New Zealand,
and before the year 1800.

The last-mentioned ‘probable
truth’ is a counterfactual. It is a fact that all the
Europeans who visited New Zealand in the eighteenth century
knew in advance that it was there. It is an argument,
however, to claim that Europeans would have visited New
Zealand before 1800 even if they had not known it was there.
The argument is based on two main pieces of reasoning: first
that Europeans at that time believed that there was land in
our part of the world even before they knew it was there;
and, second, Europeans had become a global voyaging people,
much like the Polynesians before them. So, sooner or later
– most likely sooner – they would have found us anyway,
by chance.

This counterfactual actually devalues the
significance of the ‘discoveries’ of Cook et. al., because
others would have made them had they not made them. But the
fact that Cook – and men of the French Enlightenment –
made voyages to New Zealand when they did (in the era of the ‘Noble Savage’), may be important in that other people with
less reputable motives could have made those first contacts
instead.

The history of New Zealand can only be
understood through well-argued counterfactuals; how did what
actually happened differ from the other likely scenarios
that might have happened. This applies, obviously, to all
aspects of history, and not just the history of early
encounters between Pakeha and Māori, between Europe and
Aotearoa. To establish the best historical truths available,
the most critical skill is to be able to present one or more
well-argued counterfactuals. The art of argument is
essential to the acquisition of historical
knowledge.

Counterfactuals, as mentioned, represent
alternative probabilities. There is another kind of
counterfactual, an ideal counterfactual, which considers
what might have been the best historical possibility.
And knowledge of ideal counterfactuals can inform the
future. In my example case above, relating to early
post-contact New Zealand, we can imagine ‘win-win’ scenarios
in which post-contact history might have worked out better
for all parties. (We can also imagine other ‘win-lose’
scenarios, bearing in mind that today’s progressive
narrative is that post-contact factual history represents
one such ‘win-lose’ scenario.) Thinking about win-win
historical scenarios can help us to think about win-win
futures. But there is one proviso, and that is that
well-intentioned behaviours do not necessarily bring about
desirable outcomes; and selfishly-intentioned behaviours do
not necessarily bring about undesirable outcomes.
(Unintended and unforeseen consequences constitute one of
history’s major themes.)

Covid19 Delta

A final
example of historical truth worth mentioning here is that
relating to the ongoing outbreak of Covid19 in New South
Wales, Australia. I heard on the news last night some
gentleman claiming that we are now in a near-existential
battle between humanity and delta.

Certainly, the way
the story is being reported is that all would be well for us
on the viral front if only the delta mutation of the covid
virus had not happened. Thus, the story we are getting comes
with an ordained (rather than argued) counterfactual; that
delta, and only delta, is the beastie. An alternative
counterfactual is that what is happening in Australia is
much the same as what would be happening there had delta not
evolved. After-all, South America – consider Uruguay as a
particularly pertinent case – experienced something much
worse, and without a hint of delta.

If we go back to
the story of the near-existential battle between humanity
and delta, where delta is an allegory for a strengthened
foe, an important factor is whether humanity (the good guys)
are stronger or weaker than in previous episodes. If
humanity this year is weaker – ie less immune to
respiratory viruses – than last year then the present
weakness of humanity may be the key determinant of events,
meaning that the New South Wales event might have happened
regardless of delta.

Yet the narrative we have may be
useful, if not true. If the message is that humanity has to
strengthen in order to match a stronger foe – eg
strengthen through taking vaccines – then the ‘official’
narrative, though probably not true, nevertheless supports
good behaviour.

Finally

By losing language,
and conflating words with similar meanings into the same
meaning, we lose our ability to conceptualise the
alternative realities which represent the pathways to better
futures. Too many words today become synonymous with
hyperbole. Other words morph into their
opposites.

Science is a particularly important word.
Unlike ‘marriage’, if the word ‘science’ loses or changes
its meaning, eg morphing with ‘knowledge’ and ‘facts’, there
is no other word or phrase which we can use, in its stead,
to mean what ‘science’ has meant. Indeed, all the slightly
synonymous words used above – science, knowledge, truth,
facts, claims, information – may all be coming to mean ‘beliefs’. In other words, all these nuanced words – with
their underlying objectivity – may be lost in favour of
post-modern subjectivity.

Our most important word may
be the word ‘otherwise’. It is the word that indicates a
counterfactual – a blend of imagination and argument that
we need to make sense of our world, and to make progress in
it.

————-

Keith Rankin, trained as an
economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and
Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New
Zealand.

contact: keith at rankin.nz

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