Interpreting is Not an Easy Endeavor

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the great philosophers of the modern era, renown among other things for giving away his massive inheritance and becoming a gardener, once wrote: “ Language is a part of our organism, and no less complicated than it.” The truth is that no one realizes how truly complicated language can be until one feels the need to learn a new language. Most of our native language is generally learned at our mother’s knee by means of osmosis long before the onset of our higher critical faculties, which is why we don’t remember ever having to learn it. It is not until our first years in grade school that we come to the daunting realization that the language that we thought was so innate in us, so commonsensical, so second nature, now becomes a challenging and tedious system of rules and norms that bewilders the mind and bogs down our academic progress. Yet, let me reiterate, the bulk of our work in learning our mother tongue was done more or less unconsciously simply by steady exposure to our parents and siblings’ conversations throughout our upbringing; the drudgery of grammar and spelling rules simply follows from that. Now, try learning a second language, but rather than starting halfway through –as you would with your first language- you don’t get a head start, you have to start at zero. This is why most people still harbor an aversion to the strictures of language and despise those pedants who seem to have a flawless command of it. And this is also why most Americans learn a smidgeon of a foreign language in High School, conventionally foisted upon them by the school program, only to fully forget it in the following couple of years. It is only a small minority of students who happen to develop a liking for language, some of them even a passion for this field. Of said minority, only a rare tiny fraction will go on to make a career out their love of language and a yet slimmer portion will truly excel at such discipline. I am proud to boast the former as my current predicament; the latter, my constant aim.

As an interpreter/translator, two concepts are remarkably important: syntax and semantics. Syntax is simply the combination of words and other elements in order to form grammatical expressions, whereas issues of meaning and connotation fall within the purview of semantics. In practice, discerning among and extrapolating from these two distinct viewpoints can be a nightmare for both aspiring multi-linguals and automated translation systems. Here is a clear and brief demonstration. Using Google Translator –arguably one of the most complex translators on offer, I have entered the phrase in Spanish: George Carlin es un cínico. When translated into English, GT yields the following sentence: George Carlin is a cynic. The inaccuracy here is not obvious to most of us. On its face, this translation seems very precise. Two things are necessary in order for someone to spot the otherwise glaring mistake: one must have a rich cultural background in the source language, and a sufficiently wide vocabulary in the target one. Even for people whose native language is English only 1 out 50 college students knows what the word “cynic” means[1]. The problem lurks in the actual denotation of the cognate word “cínico”. In Spanish, someone who merits such disagreeable ascription is shameless, brazen, audaciously rude, or makes no effort to hide his bad intentions. In contrast, in English, someone who is “cynical” is someone who habitually distrusts people, or someone who perceives bad intentions where none exist. In the same vein, the word “vagabond” meaning someone who is homeless is translated into Spanish as “vagabundo”. The denotation for these words is actually identical in this case; it is their connotation that differs immensely. In English, the noun has a pejorative coloring, i.e., we don’t say, Let’s raise money to feed the vagabonds of Minnesota! However, a disgruntled divorcee would exclaim, My ex-husband left me only to become a squalid vagabond! Notice how the word “vagabond” captures the negative feelings she is trying to convey.  In Spanish the connotation is pretty much neutral. Vi a un vagabundo en la calle y le di de comer (I saw a homeless person on the street and gave him some food). No conspicuous ill-will or resentful emotions are in display here.  Thus, when the stakes are high as in public pronouncements, confounding these two nouns could cost someone his or her job!

Another common mistake is the capitalization of common nouns vs proper nouns. It just so happens that proper nouns tend to vary significantly depending on the language. The letter “m” in “Monday” deserves a higher case, but its Spanish equivalent, “lunes”, doesn’t. The same goes for the names of the months, and even for the names of languages and nationalities. One can speak “Urdu” or “urdu”, depending on whether one is writing in English or Spanish respectively. Hundreds and hundreds of examples like these exist, many more that I could squeeze into a terse paper of this size. It is in full awareness of these intricacies and ambiguities that I believe that it takes a lot more than is usually given credit for to be a non-mediocre interpreter, let alone a polished, perceptive and accurate translator. A shrewd interpreter/translator must able to pick up cultural cues that would otherwise go overlooked by the untutored eye of a less experienced interpreter. 

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[1] I personally surveyed 100 college peers for a school project in 2010 and only 2 provided an acceptable definition.

Sam Harris on Spirituality.

Much has been said about our human ability to harbor experiences and sensations which make us feel completely removed form the world. People often have these experiences in a variety of contexts; perhaps in their vast admiration of a natural scenery, or in utter awe at the calm and tranquility evinced in some picturesque idyll, or during some epiphany or eureka moment when -after a long period of indefatigable search- we get, as if by divine intervention, that idea or resolution to our formerly persisting quandary. Or sometimes the same sensory perceptions are achieved upon the ingestion of some specific pharmaceuticals. At any rate, nobody I know denies the existence of such experiences, but many of us find some of the believes tagged to them, intellectually suspect.

In the same vein, I think it is importnat to recognize that the vast majority of people, generally adherents of some religious persuasion, have used the term "spiritual"  to identify with the numinous and transcendent feelings that arise during at least two distinct forms of contemplative experiences: meditation and prayer. In his most recent blogpost, Sam Harris reiterates his conviction that
these  experiences, otherworldly though they may feel, in no way serve as evidence of the claims with which they come inextricably attached.
__________

Update

Jerry Coyne, after reading Sam's post, has also weighed in on this rather contested issue. 

On Committed Relationships

During a casual chat with a great friend, the issue of love and commitment surfaced the conversation. Although I tried my best to convey a clear message, it was impossible not to get bogged down in a mass of quandaries. This is my letter of clarification.

The talk we had the other night was initially not my way of baring my soul to you and put the cards on the table, it was simply a conversation in which we could exchange our own musings on the different flavors of personal relationships and the ones we found more tasteful. In passing, however, I ended up admitting that I see intellectual discrepancies in the labeling of committed relationships and the people who integrate these. You nodded in agreement (if not perplexity) to my every word. Either 1) I was astonishingly persuasive, or 2) you and I were on the same page right from the get-go. 3) Or maybe you hated each incendiary idea that came out of my mouth but were too nice to stop me on my tracks and put out the fires I had set. 

I think the following compendium will do some justice to my admissions that night:

Relationships shouldn’t be about keeping to socially constructed labels. If A likes B and B likes A, they should be free to spend time and experiment with each other without having to worry about what people might think of them.

Faithfulness in a committed relationship shouldn’t be the product of A limiting his/herself so as to please B, it should be the result of A finding B so attractive, interesting, and lovely that A's eyes won’t care to avert from B's.  It should be about A finding everything she/he needs in B and therefore deeming it useless to search for anything in X, Y and Z.

I think commitments of the sort in discussion here invite a variety of hypocrisies. If A is in a committed relationship with B, but happens to find C more attractive than B, it is necessary that A lies or at least hides this from B to avoid trouble and to stay in line with the established commitment. Hence we’ll keep the relationship in play but at the cost of B being kept in the dark regarding A’s true feelings and desires.  Or A could simply break the commitment at anytime and leave B only to run into the arms of C, in which case we’d avoid the hypocrisy and insincerity of withholding our true sentiments from our partner but at the expense of losing all intelligible use for a commitment in the first place.

What I propose is simple label-less transparency. This way, if A is with B, B will know for certain that A is not just trying to keep with an established commitment, but that A in fact enjoys being with B.  The moment A finds C overall more appealing than B (not that this will necessarily happen), there will be no need for A to conceal such findings from B. Because the burden of a commitment is not afoot, A will be free to seek the realization of his/her emotional needs in C without having to lie to B. And B will immediately know that A has changed his/her mind and will thus not be wasting his/her time with A.  In other words, if the interests of A and B legitimately converge, i.e., if A and B have in fact true feelings of mutual affection, desire, admiration, respect, etc., then a vowed commitment will add nothing interesting, if at all to said courtship. If the aforementioned emotions are not mutual or simply do not exist period, then even a sworn commitment won’t be of any use.

The essence of a courtship is the affection shared out of one’s own volition. Not the conditional behavior performed in order to stay true to the pressure of a label such as ‘boyfriend’, ‘girlfriend’, and ‘committed relationship’.

You’ll have to excuse my deliberate elision of the word “love”. I happen to believe that such word has been rendered unintelligible by the vernacular use of it as a suitcase term.  If one can “love” one’s mother, one’s girlfriend, one’s cat, eating ice cream, and cooking meatballs, the word “love” then has been successfully diluted to insignificance. 

Sam Harris Vs William Craig

Last night's debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig was as droll as it was interesting. The topic was "Are Morals from God", and both being professional philosophers, an exhilarating clash of contentions was expected. 

One of the ingredients that made this debate so entertaining was the fact that Craig's script consisted largely on a conjunction of syllogisms which he imagined demonstrated that moral objectivity is conceivable only if one agrees that God exists. This assumption is generally accepted by most scientists and other debaters given that moral relativism has -in a dispiriting and daunting instance of moral concession to Christian dogma- become the prima facie and default purchase amongst modern liberals. Yet, not in the case of Harris, who cleverly utilized his first turn to speak to present his thesis on moral realism rather than to squander precious time exposing Craig's patent fallacies. Sam's notion of morality consists mainly on the acknowledgment that moral choices would not exist in the absence of conscious beings. In this sense it is  in utter opposition to Plato's view of Ideals or Forms, as Craig rightly points out, but which in no way detracts from the validity of his claim. Morality, says Harris, is entirely dependent on the contents of our experience, i.e., our ability to suffer and our capacity for well-being. We don't have moral obligations towards rocks simply because we recognize that rocks don't have nervous systems capable of experiencing pain. So if one can agree that sentient creatures do suffer and that there are better and worse ways to avoid such suffering, then one can confidently claim that objective morals exist regardless of subjective opinion or cultural contingencies.

To Craig's chagrin, Harris simply does not subscribe to the popular moral relativism that he is so used to disarming and thus finds himself in great pains trying to find loopholes in Harris' proposition. He starts desperately quoting from Sam's book (although not necessarily quotes written by Harris himself but from authors quoted by Harris), and he finally, to everyones bemusement, triumphantly proclaims to have in his possession a 'knock-out argument' against Harris' non-divine moral objectivity. He then wends on grieving Sam's reticence form responding his straw-man attacks and blathers with singular sophistry for a short time longer before ceding to podium back to Harris.

I must confess I was not expecting Harris to come out throwing blows and jabs so straightforwardly. But he did, and it was in fact refreshingly amusing given Sam's graceful ways to deride faith at its most abject. Exposing the overt ludicrousness shamefully displayed in each of the tenets of Christian doctrine is the best thing Harris could do. "Think about Hell", Sam challenged the audience. He let the words hang in the air for a few seconds thus allowing the public a chance to really conjure up an image of this inferno. That's right, the very idea of eternal fire should give people pause when talking about the infinite love and mercy of a living God. It never does, but it should. He then proceeded to point out the absurdity of a serial killer who right before the end of his life comes to repent and accept Jesus as his only savior, hence earning himself a place in paradise, as opposed to the life-long philanthropist who spent a lifetime helping those in need at the expense of herself, but for whom the doors of heaven will be irreversibly closed as a result of her having been born and raised in the wrong culture or at the wrong time. 

Theodicean dilemmas are still alive and pulsing in the veins of theologians, if not their brains. When Craig reassumed his place at the lectern, he conveniently withheld all vindication of the dozens of antinomies between God's commands, the hundreds of contradictions in the Bible, the innumerable horrors and instances of wanton barbarism allowed, if not commanded by Yahweh, etc. Instead, in a most ignominious moment of live-streamed powerlessness, he opted to shirk the problem of evil in front of hundreds of people, who were subsequently recommended rather to read a book about it. 

It is not often that one gets to hear the ontological argument applied, not to prove that God exists, but to prove that God is good. I in fact don't think that this frenetical spout  was anything more than the sound of the publicly abased hubris of an ineffectual popinjay. To Harris' query "How do you know that God is good?" Craig heedlessly retorted: "because anything that is worth worshipping must be good, and since God is worth worshiping, therefore God is good". And because anything that merits our contempt must be made of guacamole and the devil merits our contempt, therefore the devil must be made of guacamole. 

One need not be a brilliant logician to spot the unfounded premises. Yes, the syllogism is valid. If the premises are right the conclusion does derive from them. But in this case both premises are simply asserted as, needless to say, not a shred of evidence exists which bears them out. 

The opprobrium did not cease for Craig as the Q&A followed. His situation became even more pitiable as attendants began to produce a number of uncomfortable questions. With regard to one of Craig's analogies on how humans talked about light and darkness before knowing the actual physical properties of light, a young girl asked something to the effect of the following: before humans understood the physical components and behavior of light they would impute their ignorance to the mysteriousness of their gods. Could the same thing be said about our current quandaries with respect to the nature of morality? One had to be there to really savor the awkward boggle of an intellectually dumbfounded man. Craig purported to not having understood the question which bought him a few more seconds to overhaul and rearrange his wooly racing thoughts.  After the moderator -who, strangely enough, was seated right next to William Craig which afforded him the exact same faculty for understanding the question- rehashed the girl's challenge in a syntax fathomable by Dr. Craig, the latter expediently leveled the charge that his analogy was being misused. This may well have been the case, but such claim notwithstanding, the question was absolutely legitimate. Was Dr. Craig invoking God simply because we still don't have a fine grasp on morality? Whatever the case, Dr. Craig did not even attempt a response, remaining mute about the issue to the disillusion of many. 

Later on a teenage boy wasted his chance to ask a serious question by posturing the roll of a confused kid to whom God had spoken. God reportedly confessed to the kid that "homosexual relations were as good as heterosexual procreative sex". As blatantly histrionic as this was, the kid had a point. After all, doesn't Craig claim that divine revelation is a genuine form of epistemology?

Questions directed at Harris were admittedly facile and uninteresting. The most salient one pertained to skepticism in the face of collectively reported miracles. Sam answered by explaining how "stories of miracles are a dime a dozen". Even to this day there are hundreds of gurus who claim to have divine powers and whose 'miracles' are  believed and reported on a daily basis by millions of gullible followers. These interminable allegations of 'supernatural' events are rightly rejected by everyone who doesn't belong to the rabbles who have sadly succumbed to the blandishments and guile of these con artists. 

On a last minute direct exchange between Harris and Craig, the former affirms that nothing could be more immoral than a God who visits unnecessary suffering on his creation by burning them for eternity (or something like that), to which Craig -perhaps forgetting that Sam was not another relativist-  perfunctorily replies : "But you don't even have a coherent basis for morality! ". And in a signature moment of graciousness Harris can be heard as he quips: "I've just tried to offer you one, I'm sorry.". Act upon which a lovely and gratifying explosion of applause suffused every corner of the auditorium. And on this  cheerful note the debate is drawn to a close.

* Please excuse my poor chronological precision and some inaccurate paraphrases. All parts of the debate are now available here. 

From Sixth Grade to the Shoe Factory

This is a critique on Moffet's article.


This article certainly represents a quintessential instance of the exasperating boggle of being caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Vicente’s predicament is indeed dire, grim and fraught with unfavorable circumstances that he could potentially incur by preserving his new ‘career’ at the shoe factory. However, there is something important to be said about the prospects that await children and their families should they decide to stay in school and continue their education at the expense of their loved ones and their extremely daunting financial straits.

The article gets the ball rolling: “When Vincent Guerrero reported for work at the shoe factory he had to leave his yo-yo with the guard at the door” (Moffett 88). Poignant as this narration is, it is impossible to ignore the pitiable pathetic fallacy it contains. This red herring raises a waiving yellow flag not worth overlooking. Moffett wends describing the precarious and perilous conditions of the workplace and the environment in which Vicente was being foisted to perform. The poor youngster had to “shinny up the press and throw all his 90 pounds backward to yank the stiff steel bar downward”, and of course this “reminded him [this inexperienced little facetious boy] of the playground contraption” (Ibid). I am completely sure that older people, too, are often forced to work in far more dangerous and physically challenging environments. Notwithstanding this shameless piece of casuistry, there are corresponding legal regulations that must be taken into consideration before moving forward. It is true that Mexico jurisprudence prohibits infants under the age of 14 to join the workforce, such regulatory injunction being enacted in order to prevent abuse by parents who send their unwilling kids out onto the streets to make a profit. However in this case, the article does not provide good reasons to believe that Vicente was being compulsorily instituted as a member of factory’s staff. Quite the contrary, it elaborates on how the 12 year old kid acknowledged the benefits of having dropped out of school and becoming one more pillar in his family’s economy incrementing significantly their revenue stream. Granted, a decent case can be made condemning the perils that await laborers working for extended periods of time in such insalubrious conditions, i.e., inhaling the allegedly poisonous effluvium which emanates from toxic glue, especially given the absence of adequate ventilation. The fact that Vicente came down with a respiratory illness presenting symptoms like: cough, burning eyes, nausea, etc., also casts our position in a dimmer light. Nonetheless, I have long been a strong advocate of personal autonomy, and although children at this age cannot be relied upon to make truly informed decisions, the reading makes it clear that “Economic necessity is stronger than theoretical prohibition” (Ibid).

It is apparent from the narrative as well that, given the meager financial freedoms Vincent’s family live in, being employed at the age of twelve by a shoe making company is not so much a matter of heedful decision making as much as it is a matter of finding a way to subsist. If their reality is as red in tooth and claw as it is being portrayed along the touching lines of Moffett’s impeaching article, then scouring the moral landscape for favorable alternatives in this context is, indeed, a fool’s errand.

I shall now proceed through the scant number of alternatives imaginable and the way in which these embody a frivolous disservice to this unprivileged class. One -and perhaps the most conspicuous, alternative path to follow is that of a continued education. The article emphasized the promising intellectual character of the child; doubtless a prosperous mathematician, possibly a future educator or engineer and maybe even a doctor. Nonetheless, the wages therein mentioned are, at the very least, dispiriting. Vicente’s dad is purported to make 180,000 Mexican pesos per week. The twelve year old is said to earn weekly the miserable amount of 100,000 Mexican pesos per week. Despite their joint income (and bearing in mind that two members of his household had been laid off) and after 3 decades of hard work, they are forced to live in the most destitute and marginal habitat, evinced in the article as:

“…a tumbledown brick shell about the size and shape of a baseball dugout. It is home to 25 people, maybe 26”, and it adds that: “Vicente, to get some privacy in the bedroom he shares with 8 other children occasionally rigs a crude tent from the laundry on the clothesline crisscrossing the hut” (Ibid 89).

Talk about human dignity. Their predicament is in no way encouraging. But there is one more salary that surfaced in the article: that of a teacher’s. A teacher reportedly makes the weekly sum of 120,000 Mexican pesos. That is 60 thousand less than dad and 20 thousand more than the kid. If these figures have any credibility, our intellectual and philosophical wherewithal to build a moral argument in favor of Vicente’s furtherance of academic education diminishes neatly to the point of nonexistence. One can only imagine the quality of life borne by a teacher in light of her lower-than-a-laborer’s income. What can we tell the kid in order to incentivize him and encourage him to stay in school and take additional training? How can we foment his academic aspirations, as noble as the might be, if the pursuit of a professional career will only make inroads at the cost of his and his family’s current interests and stability?

And as far as the ethical responsibility that lies in the hands of those who are in a position to hire underage children, I hope I have explicated to some discernible detail the extent to which the consequences in this context would accrue. If the contractor’s choice is 1) to hire or 2) not to hire, when hiring willful children (underage as they might be) whose parents are in the best disposition to comply, entails the betterment of their condition, then to withhold recruitment is not only wrong, but to a degree, even perverse. These children’s horizons are not as ample as most people imagine, and providing their families with work and a fixed income at least gives them the opportunity to survive. Considering that nobody’s interests are being unnecessarily thwarted, and that no viable option promises to ameliorate their situation, I submit that I see no reason in this context to favor further education over willful labor work.

Landon Ross rails against no-fly-zone detractors

Over at The Rational Ape Landon Ross has written a great article: Action in Lybia is Way Overdue. In it, he admonishes from the get-go:

If the U.S. maintains its position miles behind the U.K., France, and even the Arab League, by continually vacillating and expressing “deep concern” at the slaughter of an Arab people fighting to emancipate themselves from the yoke of tyranny, it will be another stain on the history of American foreign policy serving to further drain the U.S. of what moral authority it retains.

I couldn't agree more. But one can already hear the invective voices of moral relativists  and a selected brand of spineless left-wing liberals suffused with indignation  at the very thought of another US intervention. Landon rightly anticipates their reaction and their banal use of a well known fallacy:

To those critics who predictably chime “Iraq War” at the very mention of a no-fly-zone over Libya: advocating one strategic blunder by reminding us of another does neither the U.S. nor the Libyans any good.

The fallacy of False Analogy, albeit an informal fallacy -given that its error lies in the validity of the content and not in the logical structure of the argument- is ultimately applicable in this case. If action X had Z consequences in place Y,  then action X must also have Z consequences in place W. It's really hard to overlook such blatant piece of intellectual sophistry.

Landon, of course, goes on to remind us that:

...the no-fly-zone over Iraq was something of an effective policy, at least after 1993 when Saddam's aggressions toward patrolling aircraft were met with effective reprisals.

So we know that the reasoning behind the analogy is extremely subtle. However, I think that the chief quandary behind whether there is a legitimate justification for our intrusion in foreign soil won't get settled until after the adjudication of and ethical dilemma. Given our current national budget deficit oscillating in the vicinity of the trillions of dollars, and the political uprising that is astir in our own country; do we really have the political and financial wherewithal to afford a worldwide display of kindness and empathy? Because if we do, I'd like to propose another country in need of military intervention. It is a closest neighbor in the south and is being ravaged by an internecine conflict between drug cartels and the national military.  

The Sound the Universe Makes

Janna Levin delivered a most florid talk on cosmic sonic emissions.

We tend think of space as an eerily silent darkness. And in a way that is correct as sound waves cannot propagate in a vacuum, and many of the comments below the video allude precisely to this quandary.  Another points that elicits some inquietude is the fact that light is incapable of escaping black holes given of course the intensity of their gravitational pull. So, how can any sound -whose velocity is much less than that of light- emerge from their collisions?

Levin helpfully elucidates her critics via a comment stating that:

The medium is spacetime. It can ring like a drum -- a three-dimensional drum.

These are not "sound waves" but "gravitational waves". The waves in space itself can be measured, soon we hope, and those waveforms plugged into a stereo to generate actual sound

I'm no expert in the field so I still have my doubts, not necessarily about the veracity of her claims but as to the process behind it. All in all, however, it was a mesmerizing lecture and I recommend it fully.