It's a nice piece of propaganda and it happens to be close to true (unlike the whole WMD fiasco). We haven't seen high quality PR from the Obama camp in a long time.
Good job, David Plouff. This is one e-mail I felt almost happy to read.
It's a nice piece of propaganda and it happens to be close to true (unlike the whole WMD fiasco). We haven't seen high quality PR from the Obama camp in a long time.
Good job, David Plouff. This is one e-mail I felt almost happy to read.
Note: In his Henry James Lectures How to Do Things With Words and BBC Radio talk "Performative Utterances," JL Austin explores a possible class of speech acts called "performative utterances" or "performatives." The basic performative consists of a verb formed in the first person present tense; Austin's central example of a performative is the phrase "I promise..." Austin believes that in saying the words "I promise..." the speaker effects a contract according to familiar conventions. These conventions are generally understood and accepted by both speaker and listener(s) in order for the performative to have "uptake," much like the signing of a formal contract. In an interesting passage, Austin provides a caveat in the case of fictional utterances: "a performative utterance will... be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy" (pg 22). This caveat has important implications for the Wordhoard analysis which follows.
->Find Word...Corpus: ShakespeareLemma: promise(v)Group by / Order by: Work / FrequencyGroup by / Order by: Work Part / Location
These two words-- ossify and etiolate-- are occasionally used by philosophers of language to describe the fluctuating use of words over time. A linguistic construction whose usage "ossifies" effectively loses potential applicability to new contexts and meanings; similarly, a linguistic construction whose usage "etiolates" effectively loses precision and be applied so widely to such diverse contexts that it risks becoming useless. It would seem as if the change in the usage of words must be "just right" in order for language as a whole to survive. Otherwise our language could split into extremes and render useless our attempts to communicate.
"And now, if you really want to know my opinion, I will tell you-- since we are all close friends here-- just what I think about one matter on which I have always hitherto kept silent because this seemed the wisest policy. In my view it is proper for even the best of orators, the men who speak really fluently and eloquently, to display some diffidence at the beginning of a speech, and some discomposure when they bring their discourse to a close. Otherwise they will tend to be regarded as shameless. However, for good speakers the problem does not, in fact, arise. For the better he is at his job, the more frightened he feels about the difficulty of making a speech, and about its uncertain fate, and about what the audience expects of him.
"But what the most shameless person of all, in my opinion, is the speech-maker who shows in the clearest possible way that he falls completely short of his subject, and the title of orator, and the expectations of his audience. For the way to avoid being shameless is not by being ashamed of something one has done wrong but by not making the mistake in the first place! Most speakers, I notice, have no feelings of shame at all. In which case, I maintain that they deserve to be not merely rebuked but heavily penalized.
"Personally, I react to making a speech in the same way I know you both do. That is to say, when I start, I find myself turning deadly pale and trembling in every limb and to the very depths of my soul. In fact once in my earliest days, when I was just beginning a prosecution, I got into such a complete panic that I felt deeply grateful to Quintus Maximus when he adjourned the case promptly because he saw I was overwhelmed and incapacitated by nerves."
At this point Crassus' listeners all showed by nods and murmurs of approval how they agreed with what he had been saying.
Spectacularly, not only do his companions unanimously agree, they are reduced to silence! Amazing for a group of intellectual, argumentative Roman politicians!
In real life, Cicero was famous for both speeches he delivered and failed to deliver. He suffered greatly from stage fright even though he was easily the most influential orator of his day, if not all time. It comes as no surprise that he would defend his profession by having weaknesses be presented as virtues.
Yet the one point that could be contested, and is not, is the implicit belief that shame or symptoms of shame is a mark of integrity. We tend to still believe this in Western culture; why?
]]>The dynamic forces which sustain economic security and progress in human comfort lie deep below the surface. They reach to those human impulses which are watered alone by freedom. The initiative of men, their enterprise, the inspiration of thought, flower in full only in the security of these [Constitutional] rights.
And by practical experience under the American system we have tested this truth. And here I may repeat what I have said elsewhere. Down through a century and a half this American concept of human freedom has enriched the whole world. From the release of the spirit, the initiative, the cooperation, and the courage of men, which alone comes of these freedoms, has [built] this very machine age with all its additions of comfort, its reductions of sweat. Wherever in the world the system of individual liberty has been sustained, mankind has been better clothed, better fed, better housed, has had more leisure. Above all, men and women have had more self-respect. They have been more generous and of finer spirit. Those who scoff that liberty is of no consequence to the underprivileged and the unemployed are grossly ignorant of the primary fact that it is through the creative and the productive impulses of free men that the redemption of those sufferers and their economic security must come. Any system which curtails these freedoms and stimulants to men destroys the possibility of the full production from which economic security can alone come.
Hoover had been out of office for nearly four years when he gave this speech, FDR's New Deal was transforming the country and its government, and the Second World War was on the horizon. Given the context, its difficult to gauge Hoover's target. He might be warning against FDR's policies as threats to American freedom, on par with Fascism or Bolshevism. Or he may simply be warning against radical, authoritarian parties within the United States.
Whatever Hoover's immediate political target, his ideological message is clear enough. He contrasts two pairs of principles whose contrast highlights the value of the US Constitution and its Amendments. The first pair is that of "initiative" and "freedom," each somehow generative of American successes. Hoover's logic suggests that initiative is the exercise of freedom; initiative is sufficient to show a healthy social order whereas freedom is necessary for one to act from initiative. The second pair--which is inimical to the first--is servitude and the State. When the individual serves the State or when the State exists only as a manifestation of the individual. In these cases of the fasces or the soviet, individuals have no interests separate from the State. Thus individuals are unable to act with the freedom bestowed by human nature, and, in Hoover's view, are destined to suffer the fate they wish to avoid.
As Hoover closes his speech he advocates a weaker, less unified form of government than FDR's policies would have encouraged. Hoover is a mere sentence away from invoking a slippery slope argument; but he refrains with a remarkable interpretation of the branches of government:
These rights and protections of the Bill of Rights are safeguarded in the Constitution through a delicate balance and separation of powers in the framework of our government.
The weakness of government is assured by the separation of power--that is, separation of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches from one another as well as the separation of "audacious men" from power itself.
How does one fulfill the need for economic security at a time when the nation may benefit--in the medium term--from government intervention?
]]>But I think the (somewhat weaker) point I was driving at still stands. The point is a specific metaphor is like a function, but the metaphor-maker faces a choice between several options when attempting to highlight a specific relationship between two otherwise unrelated things.
]]>Literature might seem distant from this field; it is, but for one particular issue. The problem of metaphor points out that while we OK accepting phrases such as "Juliet is the Sun" in certain contexts, we are not sure why we accept metaphors at all. In other words, it seems like metaphors should adhere to more explicit rules than they actually do; moreover, it seems like we should not be capable of understanding phrases that mean something other than what they (mechanically) say.
Here's the theorem which motivated this post:
Theorem. If R is an effectively enumerable relation where for all x there exists some y such that x and y relate, then there is a calculable total function f such that x and f(x) relate for every x.
Proof. Given n, enumerate ordered pairs in R until x = n (For instance: for R ordered pair <0,1>; enumerate once, ie. x = n =0 —the first step in an enumeration procedure). When this condition is met, the second component of the ordered pair is given as an output (From the same example: if x = n = 0 for R: <0,1> then output = 1 ).
See the source document: Vann McGee, pgs 12-13 “Key Computability Concepts,” Logic II. MIT: 2004.
What this says: the theorem states that an effectively enumerable relation—or “relation” for my purposes here—shows systematic matches of values of a class U (where x exists in U) to a member of class V (where y exists in V) to have an expressible function. Patterns suggest formulae; a relation between members of one class with a member of another class may be captured by a function.
To my non-mathematician eyes and ears, this is tantamount to saying that relations are functions, in a technical sense. I want to hammer this point further to force metaphors to fit the definition of relations functions; we might simply list similes and in the process come up with a general metaphor.
The problem of metaphor then becomes, not how to describe the relationships between objects, but how to select which objects to place into relationships. “Duh,” you'll probably tell me. But just think about how this observation concerning selection complicates what we might consider the basis of understanding. One could work backwards and induce the rigorus relationship between components of a metaphor; yet that still would not explain why the author of that metaphor decided on those components. Why is, to Romeo, Juliet the Sun? Why not the moon? Or the apple of his eye?
In other words, the metaphor may make sense once we have examined it, ie. decided its computability, but it may no longer make sense when we test our preference for it against other metaphors. A machine could not have written Romeo and Juliet because it could never have decided on which of all possible metaphors to use.
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I'm talking about the subjunctive, because the President of the United States must discontinue its use. Here is why; a sentence from President Obama's Nobel Prize address reads:
For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith.
The grammatical construction is not immediately clear; the sentence looks like a basic conditional statement where if p then q. But the context surrounding the sentence and the colloquial construction of "if you truly believe..." gives Obama's remark its inflection. Obama is saying, "if p were true then q would be true"--which is the basic subjunctive form in English.
Thousands of people will not read this sentence correctly, I guarantee. Worse, dozens of translators will misconstrue the colloquial construction and fail to give the sentence the proper subjunctive form in different languages. This means that people will come to believe that Obama believes in a doctrine of heinous total warfare. Which is, needless to say, completely incorrect.
So Mr President: stop using subjunctive phrases and counterfactuals. It is complicated language and you are dealing with, let's say, uncomplicated people.
]]>First, of course, are the questions which test and what standards? The difficulty of inventing a so-called "perfect" standardized test is one that requires many expensive investments and incentives. The best standardized tests--such as the SAT and ACT (for colleges), GRE (for graduate schools), MCAT (medical), LSAT (law), and GMAT (business)--are all proprietary exams. They are expensive to create, distribute, and evaluate, and they all require a hefty fee from students not only to take the exams, but also to distribute test scores to potential schools. The GRE, for instance, is computer adaptive: the test program selects questions from a bank of presorted samples; each question matches the student's current progress according to a statistical algorithm. The final score depends not only on how many questions the student answers correctly, but also the difficulty of each question AND the relative success of other test takers that same session. It is an enormously complex process, as well as enormously expensive.
When states turn to cheaper tests--usually produced with government subsidies or contracts--they do so to lower the tab for both students and the district. These cheaper tests are often less predictive of academic merit; they are limited to more basic subject matter and have less robust statistical sampling. As a result, it is very difficult to adjust standards up or down; if a state commissions a test, they must limit the relative difficulty of questions to a very specific range--otherwise the results will be either meaningless (too easy) or politically embarrassing (too hard).
Hence, the tests given to 4th, 8th, and 10th grade students aim towards the middle 50%. This means two things: (1) if your child is in the bottom 25% of his peers (a "D" range), the primary goal of his teachers will be to bring him up to the next quartile (a "C" range). (2) if your child is in the top 25% of his peers (an "A" range), his teachers will not face direct pressure from the district until he falls two quartiles (the "C" range). Teachers will have not only an incentive to teach the test, but an incentive to teach mediocre scores rather than high scores.
This is all solved by a better test, but a better test is more expensive. State budgets are already restricted.
Secondly if teacher pay and teacher tenure is dependent upon student test scores, why would a new teacher select to teach in a "failing" school? The scenario is like this: a new teacher is trying to decide between job offers between school A and school B. School A has historically high-performing students, therefore new teachers reach their instructional targets sooner; school B has historically low-performing students, therefore new teachers reach their instructional targets later. The first choice will clearly be school A, since there is a stronger possibility of success and higher pay. School B is a riskier choice--perhaps a challenge for the ambitious education school graduate--but we can expect few people to volunteer for the risk. The result will likely show new teachers competing for spots at the better school. Risk will be portioned out to weaker teachers--exactly the opposite of what we want.
(One might easily counter that we don't want weaker teachers at all--but that's a different issue.)
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