This may be excessive nit-picking, I’m not sure; but I just don’t think that your examples of the Connotation Game provide connotations as you define them. “demagogue” and “eloquent” have different denotations—it’s not just the emotional aura of the words, their actual meanings are different. Ditto for “patriotic” and “jingoistic” and so forth. The point of the game is that the same person/act can be described by flattering, neutral and disparaging words, but even though the same behavior is described by different words, the meanings of the words are different. The game points out inherent subjectivity present in those meanings.
If you used e.g. “black”, “colored” and “African-American”, then it’d be about connotations. But that’s not how the game is played.
More generally, I think you’re trying to give the concept of a connotation a larger role than it’s used to. Connotations are about differences in phrases like “ultra-rich”, “stinking rich”, and “independently wealthy”. In the phrase about the ultra-rich you quote, it seems difficult to assign the subtext being carried to connotations, unless you want to use “connotation” in the sense of “subtext, any implied meaning”. But I don’t think those shoes will fit the word.
Subtexts are very important, and are used insidiously all the time. They’re not always emotional; sometimes they exploit logical structure, as in the canonical example “Have you stopped beating your wife?” It’s difficult to stand your ground against them, and forcing them into the open, demanding that they be made explicit, as you suggest, is a useful technique. Unfortunately, it usually won’t work on someone who feels entitles to use a subtext against you—due to either intentional demagoguery or misguided self-righteousness, for instance.
One framework that seems to make a careful study of implied meanings is that of framing. I don’t really know what they’re doing with this and whether it’s more than a useful metaphor. But, to repeat myself, I think that “connotations” might be too straight a jacket to use for the notion.
Even more confusing: often statements carry useful implications in their subtexts, and often these useful implications are obscured or removed if one tries to keep all meanings explicit and all claims {verifiable/falsifiable}. For example, consider the use of the terms “bleggs” and “rubes” in Eliezer’s post disguised queries. The foreman in the story tells Susan about objects that are “bleggs” and “rubes”, rather than just substituting in the visible criteria about blue-ness and egg-shaped-ness, so that the implication that said objects represent “clusters in thingspace” can guide Susan’s further learning about the objects.
Much useful inference is done by updating the meaning of a term after its creation (as with the bleggs and rubes, or with Einstein’s vs. Newton’s notion of “space”). These update-possibilities would be harder to notice if we regarded words as mere shorthands for particular verifiable criteria. I agree with Yvain’s suggestion to more often make our disputes verifiable, but I have also seen people insist that everything be operationalized into concretely verifiable terms in a manner that may make it harder for them to update their deeper concepts.
If you used e.g. “black”, “colored” and “African-American”, then it’d be about connotations.
Well… I’m pretty sure a dark-skinned Nigerian who has never been to America and has no recent American ancestors would count as black but not as African-American.
This post just appeared at Language log and has this to say:
Language Log could devote a thousand posts to the project of underlining and elaborating the ways in which grammar does not protect us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name, and logic does not protect us against what we say having double meaning. Come to think of it, the thousand posts may already have been written: there are over 5,500 old posts searchable here and already over 1,200 new ones on the present server searchable here.
One theme of OB and LW has been to take the fuzzy complexity of the real world and show that in principle at some level it’s related to something precise. We can’t actually do Bayesian math in our heads for real-world calculations, but just knowing how to work the ideal case protects us against certain real-world errors. Likewise, Eliezer’s meta-ethics reduces morality down to some horrendously complex thing that we can never calculate, but it’s nice to know that morality does reduce to something when we’re wondering whether it exists at all, whether it’s all relative, or so on.
The real positivists thought they could reduce all language to their positivism and spent thirty years trying. I don’t think I’m going to do that in a few days of posting about stuff on a blog. But if I can sketch a few really-large-scale things and then let people’s common sense fill in the blanks, that’ll still be better than nothing.
Speaking of themes; I guess one thing that bothered me about this post (many of your other posts are very good) is that this post doesn’t seem to serve a point; questioning assumptions is often brought up on OB and LW and asking others to be more precise in describing their assumptions is also very common. Any connection to positivism here seems very tenuous; criticizing positivism has little or no impact on soft-positivism.
I feel that there are many other OB and LW posts that would address this issue more effectively and it might be better to just make this page an index of them as opposed to a full post.
That said, there is no way to easily recognize a lot of the themes here and LW in particular runs the risk of just becoming a repository of the same things over and over again.
Are we really refining the art of human rationality here?
This may be excessive nit-picking, I’m not sure; but I just don’t think that your examples of the Connotation Game provide connotations as you define them. “demagogue” and “eloquent” have different denotations—it’s not just the emotional aura of the words, their actual meanings are different. Ditto for “patriotic” and “jingoistic” and so forth. The point of the game is that the same person/act can be described by flattering, neutral and disparaging words, but even though the same behavior is described by different words, the meanings of the words are different. The game points out inherent subjectivity present in those meanings.
If you used e.g. “black”, “colored” and “African-American”, then it’d be about connotations. But that’s not how the game is played.
More generally, I think you’re trying to give the concept of a connotation a larger role than it’s used to. Connotations are about differences in phrases like “ultra-rich”, “stinking rich”, and “independently wealthy”. In the phrase about the ultra-rich you quote, it seems difficult to assign the subtext being carried to connotations, unless you want to use “connotation” in the sense of “subtext, any implied meaning”. But I don’t think those shoes will fit the word.
Subtexts are very important, and are used insidiously all the time. They’re not always emotional; sometimes they exploit logical structure, as in the canonical example “Have you stopped beating your wife?” It’s difficult to stand your ground against them, and forcing them into the open, demanding that they be made explicit, as you suggest, is a useful technique. Unfortunately, it usually won’t work on someone who feels entitles to use a subtext against you—due to either intentional demagoguery or misguided self-righteousness, for instance.
One framework that seems to make a careful study of implied meanings is that of framing. I don’t really know what they’re doing with this and whether it’s more than a useful metaphor. But, to repeat myself, I think that “connotations” might be too straight a jacket to use for the notion.
Even more confusing: often statements carry useful implications in their subtexts, and often these useful implications are obscured or removed if one tries to keep all meanings explicit and all claims {verifiable/falsifiable}. For example, consider the use of the terms “bleggs” and “rubes” in Eliezer’s post disguised queries. The foreman in the story tells Susan about objects that are “bleggs” and “rubes”, rather than just substituting in the visible criteria about blue-ness and egg-shaped-ness, so that the implication that said objects represent “clusters in thingspace” can guide Susan’s further learning about the objects.
Much useful inference is done by updating the meaning of a term after its creation (as with the bleggs and rubes, or with Einstein’s vs. Newton’s notion of “space”). These update-possibilities would be harder to notice if we regarded words as mere shorthands for particular verifiable criteria. I agree with Yvain’s suggestion to more often make our disputes verifiable, but I have also seen people insist that everything be operationalized into concretely verifiable terms in a manner that may make it harder for them to update their deeper concepts.
Well… I’m pretty sure a dark-skinned Nigerian who has never been to America and has no recent American ancestors would count as black but not as African-American.
This post just appeared at Language log and has this to say:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1258
Asking others to clarify their assumptions is good, but translating them into positivist language might not be as precise as it sounds
One theme of OB and LW has been to take the fuzzy complexity of the real world and show that in principle at some level it’s related to something precise. We can’t actually do Bayesian math in our heads for real-world calculations, but just knowing how to work the ideal case protects us against certain real-world errors. Likewise, Eliezer’s meta-ethics reduces morality down to some horrendously complex thing that we can never calculate, but it’s nice to know that morality does reduce to something when we’re wondering whether it exists at all, whether it’s all relative, or so on.
The real positivists thought they could reduce all language to their positivism and spent thirty years trying. I don’t think I’m going to do that in a few days of posting about stuff on a blog. But if I can sketch a few really-large-scale things and then let people’s common sense fill in the blanks, that’ll still be better than nothing.
Speaking of themes; I guess one thing that bothered me about this post (many of your other posts are very good) is that this post doesn’t seem to serve a point; questioning assumptions is often brought up on OB and LW and asking others to be more precise in describing their assumptions is also very common. Any connection to positivism here seems very tenuous; criticizing positivism has little or no impact on soft-positivism.
I feel that there are many other OB and LW posts that would address this issue more effectively and it might be better to just make this page an index of them as opposed to a full post.
That said, there is no way to easily recognize a lot of the themes here and LW in particular runs the risk of just becoming a repository of the same things over and over again.
Are we really refining the art of human rationality here?
Yeah, see my response to ciphergoth
You could be right; I have no formal training in this field. It sounds like you don’t like “subtext”. Suggest another word and I’ll switch to it.
I think “subtext” is fine in this role.