Nice article, but I have a very pedantic nitpick. The article should really be about ambiguity as opposed to vagueness. In general, we (i.e. philosophers of language, and I assume linguists) think of ambiguity as being about uncertainty of meaning, and vagueness as being about uncertainty regarding the state of affairs which make a statement true or false.
A question like “is there a limit to the fullness of emptiness?” is ambiguous because it’s not clear what question the speaker is trying to ask. By contrast a vague question like “how many grains of sand make a heap of sand?” is vague because it’s not clear what x amount of grains would qualify.
But notice the latter statement is non-ambiguous as it were. We know precisely what the speaker is asking, and that they want an answer of the form “x grains make a heap of sand”; we just don’t know what that x is because there are borderline cases that could constitute a heap.
But in the ambiguous example, it’s just not clear what even could satisfy the speakers question, since the meaning is indeterminate.
There is a wonderful parody of wanna be deep thinkers in the beginning of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Characters staying up all night "discussing" philosophical ideas by throwing out lines from the books they are reading without really understanding anything. Or so I presume.
Excellent. And there's so much more to say about Barnum effects and their equivalent for how we think of others as reputational caricatures and personas.
For example, that old chestnut of a headline that "Trump just told everyone to inject bleach." Rather than the solution of "both can be bullshit," most people self sorted into two narratives depending on which of two dueling caricatures "won."
A) Trump is such a bottomless pit of bullshit that he might as well have told everyone to inject bleach
B) The media is such a bottomless pit of bullshit that no matter what Trump does, he is automatically wrong.
Of course, the answer is always C) All of the above
or
D) NO U.
Tis' the not-so-subtle substitution of the question "would they?" for the question of "did they?" that makes for wonderful conspiracy theories.
Yes because arguing is so often a status competition, rather than a collaborative truth-seeking exercise, we often struggle to conceive of the possibility that both sides of an argument are full of shit. There has to be a "winner" or a "loser." I talk about this in my post Arguing Is Bullshit.
I see meaning as a relationship between linguistic form and communicative intent. In this regard I have a few questions
Do you see vague language as deliberately sacrificing communicative clarity for the sake of social filtering? Or is it just an alternative kind of meaning meaning grounded in shared background rather than explicit content? Or are you talking about hidden motives that is separate from communicative intent.
If meaning requires reliably linking form to intent, is this kind of ambiguity more about testing relationships than about transmitting ideas? Does that make it a sort of social grooming tool rather than communication in the classic sense?
Could this strategy backfire by producing false positives; people who think they understand you (projecting their own interpretations), when your actual intent was different?
I like your phrase “social filtering.” That’s a great way of putting it. I feel like the answer to all of your questions is yes. Vague bs is about sacrificing broad communicative clarity (discernible by anyone) for social filtering. I do see it as a kind of social grooming tool that is at least partly separate from communication in the classic sense. Yes it could produce false positives, but that may not always be a bad thing, because the goal might be to see who’s loyal enough see meaning in bs even when there’s no meaning there. I think there are multiple functions to vague bs and some forms of them may have no meaning at all and simply function to see who is loyal enough to assume there’s meaning. Other forms have some meaning but function to see who gets the meaning (social filtering). There may be overlap between these two forms. Even if you don’t get the meaning I intended, you’re still pretty good for me if you assumed there was deep meaning in it. There the game among the listeners might be to project the most profound meaning onto the utterance to make the speaker look good.
I also like your point that even false positives can be useful, since they reveal who’s eager to attribute meaning (and thus show loyalty or respect). It’s fascinating to think of this as a kind of social grooming mechanism that operates alongside or even separately from classic meaning transmission.
hi David, nice take. Maarten Boudry and yours truly published on this, Buekens, F., & Boudry, M. (2015). The dark side of the loon. Explaining the temptations of obscurantism. Theoria, 81(2), 126-142. Similar conclusions + additional delicate points.
This piece constitute an apologia for epistemic flattening.
The social signaling dimension is undoubtedly correct. And is also incredibly widespread. the number of beliefs that are vague yet widespread is gigantic and always has been
But it is also the case that some vague gibberish just is vague gibberish and the fact that it can be shared and thereby create a circle of empathy doesn't mean it is not gibberish.
I'm not persuaded we should be quite so tolerant of vagueness and obscurantism. Better understand it's social role by all means. Just don't take it seriously epistemologically.
Yea not saying we should take vague bullshit seriously epistemically. Just saying we should take it seriously as a social ritual with important functions and try be aware of the ways we might be using it ourselves.
Thank you very much for your articles. I have a question: Do you believe everything can be said or named with direct language? Don't you think there are more things than words can name and require indirect, metaphorical, or poetic language? Best regards;
I think conscious, first-person experience (or phenomenology) is often best conveyed through indirect, metaphorical, or poetic language and is often difficult to state with direct language. But the goal there is activating the same experience in someone else's head, which is different than the goal of accurately describing the neurocomputational details of the experience. I think a complete neurocomputational account of the experience will fail to activate the actual experience in someone's head. There's much more to be said here and it probably warrants a larger post on what consciousness is and how we intuitively think about it.
An example of good vagueness is song lyrics. They usually mean an enormous multiplicity of possible experiences while having strong emotional valence, and thus create connection across people affiliated with starkly distinct sacred values.
Max Stirner calls "sacred values" = "Spooks", like a ghost haunting you but is invisible.
I know I'm not the only (autistic) person who fantasized about escaping the memetic swamp of human society, then thoroughly researched how to make and maintain a homestead in the forest on their own, and realized that it's difficult and will take up all my time leaving little for personal interests.
It seems an interesting game of life can still be played by seeing if one's main character can survive if he refused to expose himself to within the fire-range of the most dysfunctional spooks and memetic status games, while treating the rest as either tactical instruments towards concrete experiences or the target of mockery in jovial merriment.
I tend to think of the median recreational trader's 'technical analysis' as having a similar level of bullshit to astrology, but maybe they're less similar than I thought - technical analysis is less vague and more quantified?
Nice article, but I have a very pedantic nitpick. The article should really be about ambiguity as opposed to vagueness. In general, we (i.e. philosophers of language, and I assume linguists) think of ambiguity as being about uncertainty of meaning, and vagueness as being about uncertainty regarding the state of affairs which make a statement true or false.
A question like “is there a limit to the fullness of emptiness?” is ambiguous because it’s not clear what question the speaker is trying to ask. By contrast a vague question like “how many grains of sand make a heap of sand?” is vague because it’s not clear what x amount of grains would qualify.
But notice the latter statement is non-ambiguous as it were. We know precisely what the speaker is asking, and that they want an answer of the form “x grains make a heap of sand”; we just don’t know what that x is because there are borderline cases that could constitute a heap.
But in the ambiguous example, it’s just not clear what even could satisfy the speakers question, since the meaning is indeterminate.
Yes I’m defining vagueness differently than philosophers do. If you want to substitute my notion of vagueness with ambiguity that’s fine with me.
Fyi I deleted my previous response here, I think I misread your intended point. Sorry.
There is a wonderful parody of wanna be deep thinkers in the beginning of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Characters staying up all night "discussing" philosophical ideas by throwing out lines from the books they are reading without really understanding anything. Or so I presume.
Excellent. And there's so much more to say about Barnum effects and their equivalent for how we think of others as reputational caricatures and personas.
For example, that old chestnut of a headline that "Trump just told everyone to inject bleach." Rather than the solution of "both can be bullshit," most people self sorted into two narratives depending on which of two dueling caricatures "won."
A) Trump is such a bottomless pit of bullshit that he might as well have told everyone to inject bleach
B) The media is such a bottomless pit of bullshit that no matter what Trump does, he is automatically wrong.
Of course, the answer is always C) All of the above
or
D) NO U.
Tis' the not-so-subtle substitution of the question "would they?" for the question of "did they?" that makes for wonderful conspiracy theories.
Yes because arguing is so often a status competition, rather than a collaborative truth-seeking exercise, we often struggle to conceive of the possibility that both sides of an argument are full of shit. There has to be a "winner" or a "loser." I talk about this in my post Arguing Is Bullshit.
I see meaning as a relationship between linguistic form and communicative intent. In this regard I have a few questions
Do you see vague language as deliberately sacrificing communicative clarity for the sake of social filtering? Or is it just an alternative kind of meaning meaning grounded in shared background rather than explicit content? Or are you talking about hidden motives that is separate from communicative intent.
If meaning requires reliably linking form to intent, is this kind of ambiguity more about testing relationships than about transmitting ideas? Does that make it a sort of social grooming tool rather than communication in the classic sense?
Could this strategy backfire by producing false positives; people who think they understand you (projecting their own interpretations), when your actual intent was different?
I like your phrase “social filtering.” That’s a great way of putting it. I feel like the answer to all of your questions is yes. Vague bs is about sacrificing broad communicative clarity (discernible by anyone) for social filtering. I do see it as a kind of social grooming tool that is at least partly separate from communication in the classic sense. Yes it could produce false positives, but that may not always be a bad thing, because the goal might be to see who’s loyal enough see meaning in bs even when there’s no meaning there. I think there are multiple functions to vague bs and some forms of them may have no meaning at all and simply function to see who is loyal enough to assume there’s meaning. Other forms have some meaning but function to see who gets the meaning (social filtering). There may be overlap between these two forms. Even if you don’t get the meaning I intended, you’re still pretty good for me if you assumed there was deep meaning in it. There the game among the listeners might be to project the most profound meaning onto the utterance to make the speaker look good.
Thank you for your post and response.
I also like your point that even false positives can be useful, since they reveal who’s eager to attribute meaning (and thus show loyalty or respect). It’s fascinating to think of this as a kind of social grooming mechanism that operates alongside or even separately from classic meaning transmission.
hi David, nice take. Maarten Boudry and yours truly published on this, Buekens, F., & Boudry, M. (2015). The dark side of the loon. Explaining the temptations of obscurantism. Theoria, 81(2), 126-142. Similar conclusions + additional delicate points.
Cool thanks—will check it out!
This piece constitute an apologia for epistemic flattening.
The social signaling dimension is undoubtedly correct. And is also incredibly widespread. the number of beliefs that are vague yet widespread is gigantic and always has been
But it is also the case that some vague gibberish just is vague gibberish and the fact that it can be shared and thereby create a circle of empathy doesn't mean it is not gibberish.
I'm not persuaded we should be quite so tolerant of vagueness and obscurantism. Better understand it's social role by all means. Just don't take it seriously epistemologically.
Yea not saying we should take vague bullshit seriously epistemically. Just saying we should take it seriously as a social ritual with important functions and try be aware of the ways we might be using it ourselves.
Agreed
Thank you very much for your articles. I have a question: Do you believe everything can be said or named with direct language? Don't you think there are more things than words can name and require indirect, metaphorical, or poetic language? Best regards;
I think conscious, first-person experience (or phenomenology) is often best conveyed through indirect, metaphorical, or poetic language and is often difficult to state with direct language. But the goal there is activating the same experience in someone else's head, which is different than the goal of accurately describing the neurocomputational details of the experience. I think a complete neurocomputational account of the experience will fail to activate the actual experience in someone's head. There's much more to be said here and it probably warrants a larger post on what consciousness is and how we intuitively think about it.
This is a really good response, I like your thinking here
Thank you so much for your reply. You're very generous in sharing your knowledge. I learn a lot from your articles.
Well, okay, excellent observations . . . but I really was hoping for a more direct obliteration of astrology, which is the bullshittiest of them all.
Very good. As usual
An example of good vagueness is song lyrics. They usually mean an enormous multiplicity of possible experiences while having strong emotional valence, and thus create connection across people affiliated with starkly distinct sacred values.
Max Stirner calls "sacred values" = "Spooks", like a ghost haunting you but is invisible.
I know I'm not the only (autistic) person who fantasized about escaping the memetic swamp of human society, then thoroughly researched how to make and maintain a homestead in the forest on their own, and realized that it's difficult and will take up all my time leaving little for personal interests.
It seems an interesting game of life can still be played by seeing if one's main character can survive if he refused to expose himself to within the fire-range of the most dysfunctional spooks and memetic status games, while treating the rest as either tactical instruments towards concrete experiences or the target of mockery in jovial merriment.
Blabla,měl byste přestat myslet bez rozumu.
Everything I don’t understand is just bullshit.
Everyone who doesn’t understand me is just dumb.
😝
I tend to think of the median recreational trader's 'technical analysis' as having a similar level of bullshit to astrology, but maybe they're less similar than I thought - technical analysis is less vague and more quantified?