doc_strange | On accuracy, and then some (Reply)

weds wrote recently:

". . . not only does "Indians and Eskimos" strike me as a sort of acceptable racism here, it pushes imprecision buttons." The other person asked her whether her preference for another term was a political correctness move.

The fight over "political correctness" was in essence a barren competition over terminology as a way to gain political territory; that debate itself began as a competition over curricula at certain US universities (Duke being one flashpoint). The fight found the "hard" sciences and many retired faculty opposing the humanities' extension of the canonical literature students would read. Newspapers reported the mini-tempests, bringing the nonsensical debate into the public sector. It boiled down to an obsession with fixed definitions versus an over-developed sense that meaning is variable.

Off on the sidelines, the social science departments (which, watching the debaters as phenomena for study, asked "what does asking 'what is meaning' itself 'mean'?" Or, "what the heck are they getting so huffy about?")... the social science departments were trying to point out how ridiculous the debate became. To “deaf” or “audio-challenged” ears (which were, in any event, clearly hearing impaired that that point). How do you explain to two debaters that the essential terms of the argument are nonsensical? Especially when the argument is really about power -- control of the curriculum -- and not about the books, words, or the students at all.

Absent power objectives, the debate over which terms to use, and why, becomes... well... academic -- unless coupled to some useful externality. However, with one side of the debate obsessively stating that terms are already coupled objectively to some externality, and the other side challenging all objective reality itself... well, the debate can't go very far. The debate pushed the sides to state the most extreme versions of the doctrine.

The social science folks (Anthropology, Psychology, Sociology -- the clinical/biological and cultural/interactive sides of each, even) already understood (by dealing with real live organisms) that such externalities don't need to be reduced to absolute 1:1 relationships. Indeed, they shouldn't be: our ability to communicate is always approximate word-wise, but most of the time is plenty precise-enough (like a proper measurement in engineering), socially. Remember, we're talking about public talking here. Not about precision professional jargon. More on precision soon.

So back to this politically correct nonsense. Nonsense at both polarities of the debate. The only externality was two opposed political objectives.

Replacing 1:1 one word with another is at best a social band-aid, in which word #2 will soon have all the baggage (or worse) of word #1. Ultimately, the new term becomes vague, encompassing even more because it lacks a history of social use. The forced use results at best in confusion, at worst in an under-funded newspeak that soon obtains the baggage of its predecessor.

Yet, obsessing on the one true set of words and meanings flies in the face of the very objective reality it purports to worship. Most of the contested terms relate to social phenomena, or the social experience and framing of physical phenomena -- in either case, phenomena continually undergoing transformation on and by the people living them.

Maintaining a critique of social terminology and canonical teachings does not need to go to the polarities described above. But the critique is not a "middle ground" -- the center of a nonsensical debate is just moderate nonsense.

Terms -- social, scientific, political -- are used because they are useful in some way, whether that utility be small or large. A word to a passerby is a social "ping" (like "how's it going?" "fine" -- or as I have often heard, "What's up?" "Good." and "How's it going?" "Not much." -- the content of the echo request and echo response just don't really matter most of the time). It has a small utility establishing some degree of overlapping society membership. Medical terms describing the location and nature of a venous aberration have high utility, and the members communicating understand the precision through years of training -- of real, physical, social context through patients, examples, interaction, training, books, etc. To the outsider, the term is nonsense or hard to understand; to the insider, it's "grounded" in controlled, peer-reviewed, common usage.

The terminology contested in the politically correct debates tends towards social categories. It's inherently political. The objective realist characterizes the new terms as a silly feel-goodism that strips objective realists of the ability to talk about what they would like to discuss (they're right -- it takes away some social power to group of people in older, perhaps oppressive ways of dealing with them, and replaces it with new, vague terms that give social power to pigeonhole the alleged oppressors); meanwhile the other side characterizes the old terms as suppressing dialogue about what they would like to discuss (they're right -- the old terms reflect a different politics, and the new issues aren't in there). That is, they're arguing over shortcut terms for immense, sprawling issues.

Sound like a political powerfight to you? Does to me, and to most social scientists with which I've discussed the debate. So before continuing, let's take a moment and note that some of the diametrically opposed players have real, political objectives, and know what they are doing. Many, however, are drawn to a philosophical dialogue they perceive as socially important and become entangled in silly debates over which terms are "right."

Terminologies reflect the experience of the real world. If you call the very same social grouping by another name, the new term will in time come to reflect the same politics, social stresses, illusions, delusions, and on-the-ground reality mix of the old term. If the new term is carefully constructed to group people differently in terms of some historical, biological, or social experience, then it may become useful to some political (social) objective. That's the underlying structure of the terms of the politically correct debate: cloaked in a debate over the objective reality of language is a straightforward political struggle for the control of social institutions (at universities, and in the public sphere).

If the new term is carefully constructed to group people differently, and the goal of that grouping is stated and related to the term on social, biological, and/or historical bases, then the term comes to have an accuracy related to those bases (Weds's "precision," I think). When a term so constructed is presented without the foundational discussion that created it, it sounds like the jargon it is. When an old or new term is presented without a foundational discussion as the "correct term," then it represents either an unthinking approach to discussion (thus not much of a discussion) or a political attempt to change the terms of debate under cover of terminology.

[Continued in PART 2!]