Quotes on perception and interpretation

Sen. J. William Fulbright:

“...people in different societies look at the same facts and "see" different things, that what they see, or think they see, is largely determined by what they expect to see.

The point is illustrated by an experiment in which a psychologist had two groups of schoolteachers, one Mexican, the other American, look into a device that simultaneously showed a picture of a bullfighter to one eye and a picture of a baseball player to the other. When asked what they had seen, most of the Mexicans said they had seen a bullfighter and most of the Americans said that they had seen a baseball player. Obviously, what each individual saw had a great deal to do with whether he was a Mexican or an American.”

Steven Lukes:

“He recalled James Thurber's encouraging thoughts about the strange pleasure of going blind. As one's eyesight fails, the role of the external world in fixing what one sees declines while that of interpretation increases, so you only have to be optimistic for women to be attractive, buildings to be elegant, the sun to shine.”

Tom Hayden:

"As Fritjof Capra pointed out in The Tao of Physics, the intellect in such Asian philosophy is a means to clear the way for the direct mystical experience of oneness, not a tool for endless filing of data."

Gary Zukav:

"During the Lebanese civil war, a story goes, a visiting American was stopped by a group of masked gunmen. One wrong word could cost him his life.
'Are you Christian or Moslem?' they asked.
'I am a tourist!' he cried.
The way that we pose our questions often illusorily limits our responses."

Sources

Sen. J. William Fulbright. The Arrogance of Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. p. 176.

Steven Lukes. The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat. London, New York: Verso, 1995, reprinted 2000. p 2.

Tom Hayden. The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. p. 169.

Gary Zukav. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1979. p. 286.

Writing what you don't know

"There are only two or three human stories," said Willa Cather, "and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." When a story is told enough, it becomes a "ritual of truth," to use Thomas Dumm's phrase. He wrote that "democracy itself depends upon the continuing and autonomous iteration and reiteration of the meaning of words, sentences, paragraphs, and fragments. Instead of reaching final conclusions, perhaps we would do better to think in terms of the rituals of truth that govern our lives together and apart, truths that are radically historical in character." Why isn't a truth-ritual a final conclusion? Because a truth-ritual is a story, and stories contain unresolved ideas. Joan Didion wrote: "The idea that fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology." Those unresolved ideas are why the stories repeat as if they'd never happened before, to answer Willa Cather's question.

Arthur Herzog explained C. Wright Mills' use of the term "sponge words," meaning words that are vague and flexible.

The verbal concoctions dripping from our lips can easily lead to illusion and error, and result in the inflamed rhetoric and unceasing cant of our day. Words are means of doing things, and chaos in language brings chaos in deed.

* * *

Let us take an example from business. As a red-blooded American businessman, you might say (in fact, you do say) that the American business system is historically unique. But you also claim that free enterprise is natural to human beings. Logically, it is impossible to have it both ways. Either free enterprise as practiced here is unique, in which case it can hardly be called natural, or it is natural, in which case it is not unique. Rather than facing up to the contradiction, the temptation is to summon what the sociologist C. Wright Mills called sponge words — such as "freedom" — which soak up the inconsistency.

Iris Murdoch said that we should strive for more "verbal precision" since it is through language that we are able to reveal truth. To deliberately strive for precision is good, and to deliberately obfuscate to gain power is evil. (Note the distinction between the idea that truth is revealed and that, as suggested earlier, it is created through ritual.)

Words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being, since they are the most refined and delicate and detailed, as well as the most universally used and understood of the symbolisms whereby we express ourselves into existence.

We become spiritual animals when we become verbal animals. The fundamental distinctions can only be made in words. Words are spirit. Of course eloquence is no guarantee of goodness, and an inarticulate man can be virtuous. But the quality of a civilization depends upon its ability to discern and reveal truth and this depends upon the scope and purity of its language.

Any dictator attempts to degrade the language because this is a way to mystify. And many of the quasi-automatic operations of capitalist industrial society tend also toward mystification and the blunting of verbal precision.

"Every story arises out of perplexity," said Manohar Shyam Joshi:

"I started writing and found that composing a story about perplexity was itself a perplexing and troubling thing, partly because perplexity is beyond words and partly because words themselves produce perplexity. Even by being written down, no final form and no fixed denouement could be given the story of the perplexity of Hariya Hercules. Every story arises out of perplexity and it is the responsibility of every story to explain that perplexity in the idiom of everyday language. But where in the idiom of everyday language is there any scope for perplexity?"

Mo Willems said:

“I learned that I love writing for kids because you don’t have to deal with cultural modifiers. I’m just writing about emotions. I like to say: ‘Love, jealousy, hatred, wanting to drive a bus — the fundamental, core things.’ As I’ve evolved, I’ve started to realize that every book that I write is a philosophical question that I don’t know the answer to. And therefore it interests me. If I know the answer, I won’t make a book out of it.”

This drive to explain the perplexity is a drive to transform mere data into usable information. “Many people think all written words and numbers are information," said Richard Saul Wurman, "but if they don’t inform — if you do not understand them — they are data, not information.”

A novel by Sharad P. Paul poses this question: "This is the paradox of journalism. If it is all about uncovering the truth, then why are their newspaper articles called 'articles'? Sometimes I have found that truth can be like one of those Russian dolls. You know the ones I mean, the ones with sequentially smaller dolls inside larger ones. Sometimes you have to open many dolls before you find the real one." Uncovering the truth is difficult because people hide it. As Julie Jensen put it: "Now a human truth and also a character truth: Characters, like most people, almost never tell the truth. Sometimes they're protecting themselves, sometimes they're manipulating others, sometimes they've got a skewed vision of the world. And sometimes they're just polite and go along when someone else seems to know more." People's truth-telling is often confined to private journals, which are, themselves, written in "ambiguous language" to maintain privacy. One of Amin Maalouf's fictional characters said:

"But sometimes I ask myself: why keep a diary, and in this ambiguous language, when I know no one will ever read it? When in fact I don’t even want anyone to read it? I do it precisely because it helps me to clarify my thoughts and memories without having to tell my travelling companions about them.

Other people write as they speak. I write as I stay silent."

Sources

Willa Cather, quoted in the Ithaca, NY Journal, quoted in The Week, Feb. 11, 2011, p. 21.

Thomas Dumm. Loneliness as a Way of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. p. 34.

Joan Didion. The White Album (1979). New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990. p. 112.

Arthur Herzog. The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America. (1973) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Inc., 1974. p. 22.

Iris Murdoch, reported in The Times. Quoted in Arthur Herzog. The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America. (1973) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Inc., 1974. p. 202.

Manohar Shyam Joshi. The Perplexity of Hariya Hercules. Translated from the Hindi by Robert E. Hueckstedt. New Delhi, India: Penguin, 2009. p. 154.

“Thinking like a child.” Mo Willems, as told to Visi Tilak. Boston Globe Magazine. June 14, 2015. p. 10.

Richard Saul Wurman, interviewed by Nadine Epstein, “In Search of the God of Understanding.” Moment Magazine, Sept/Oct 2013, p. 31.

Sharad P. Paul. Cool Cut. London: Picador, 2007. p. 145.

"Playwriting Quick and Dirty." Julie Jensen. Printed in The Writer's Handbook, 1998 Edition. Ed. Sylvia K. Burack. Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1997. p. 422.

Amin Maalouf, Balthasar's Odyssey (2000) Translated from the French by Barbara Bray. New York: Arcade, 2002. p. 50.

How ideas take root

Osborn Segerberg, Jr.:

"The search for truth – or understanding – is not simply an indulgence of curiosity nor merely an intellectual exercise. It is a sophisticated means to survive. ... Survival (which often requires domination) is the ultimate test we have for efficacy, or congruence with reality, whether applied to a belief, an idea, a system of thought, a way of doing things, or an individual and his descendants, his group, his species."

Max Lerner:

"A doctrine does not spread by itself – because of its own inner beauty or logic or consistency. It spreads because it is a response to deeply experienced needs. It spreads because of strong impulsions from the system of production and from the alignment of economic power. It spreads when there is something in it that is a response to the ethos of a period. It spreads when there are powerful groups willing to spread it because they are able to use it."

Noam Chomsky:

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

Nicholas Fearn:

"To the delight of politicians and the chagrin of philosophers, people can be convinced of just about anything so long as one does not employ rational argument."

George Orwell:

”They slapped his face, wrung his ears, pulled his hair, made him stand on one leg, refused him leave to urinate, shone glaring lights in his face until his eyes ran with water; but the aim of this was simply to humiliate him and destroy his power of arguing and reasoning.”

Hannah Arendt:

"...factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the non-totalitarian world."

Robert A. Burton:

"The revolutionary premise at the heart of this book is:

Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of 'knowing what we know' arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason.

* * *

To expect well-reasoned arguments to easily alter personal expressions of purpose is to misunderstand the biology of belief. If there is to be any rapprochement between science and religion, both sides must accept this basic limitation.

* * *

The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren't deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us."

Sources

Osborn Segerberg, Jr. The Immortality Factor. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc. 1974. p xvii-xviii.

Max Lerner. It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy. New York: The Viking Press, 1939. p 7-8.

Noam Chomsky, quoted in TheAtlantic.com, quoted in The Week, March 18, 2016. p. 19.

Nicholas Fearn, How to Think Like a Philosopher. New York: Grove Press, 2001. p 25.

George Orwell. 1984. (Originally published 1949.) New York: The New American Library, 1961. p. 199.

Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 375.

Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. p. xiii, 183-184, 218.

A receptive mind

We all carry preexisting beliefs, preferences, judgments. "An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head," Eric Hoffer said. We must be careful about the thoughts we cultivate. As Upton Sinclair put it: "And here is the crucial fact, never to be forgotten; what we believe about this spring [the wellspring of the soul] helps to determine what flows out of it!
"

One pitfall to avoid is obsessive thought or unrelenting inquiry. All thought is a kind of illusion, and to be unable to loosen one's grip is to drown what merit the thought might have had if it had been kept in its proper context. "To the mind which pursues every road to its end, every road leads nowhere," said Alan Watts.

One rule of thumb is K.I.S.S., "Keep it simple, stupid." Albert Einstein said, "If you can't explain it to a 6-year-old, you don't understand it yourself."

It's also important to admit when we are ignorant or uncertain, but not – depending on the degree of uncertainty and the relevance of the information – let our imperfection stop us from moving forward. Leah Hager Cohen wrote: "Firefighters, surgeons, triage nurses, hostage negotiators, miners, loggers, police officers, and soldiers all regularly face situations in which they have to take action based on imperfect knowledge – and where the repercussions of those actions might mean the difference between life and death. These are people who have to deal with the discomfort of acknowledging, 'I don't know,' and then get on with it."

Better to admit the gap in one's knowledge than to stuff it with rubbish!

Sources

Eric Hoffer, quoted in the Nashville Tennessean, quoted in The Week, August 10, 2012, p. 17.

Upton Sinclair, What God Means to Me. New York: Ferris Printing Company, 1935. p 4.

Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman (1958). New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 84.

Albert Einstein, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, Cited in The Week, September 14, 2012, p. 19.

Leah Hager Cohen. I Don't Know: In Praise of Admitting Ignorance (Except When You Shouldn't). New York: Riverhead Books, 2013. p. 33.

Quotes on uncertainty in philosophy

Mark Corner:

"It is the beliefs of which we can be most certain, [John Henry] Newman [author of University Sermons] argues, that play the least significant part in our lives. We can possess a mathematical certainty that two and two make four, but this rarely matters to us. On the other hand, we can never possess such a certainty that someone loves us. There is always a possibility of deceit or self-deception. But it is precisely the possibility of being wrong in believing that someone loves us that makes it appropriate to talk in this context of trust."

R. I. Page:

"According to Snorri (not in Voluspa but in Vagprudnismal), two humans will survive the holocaust [in Norse mythology at the end of the world], nourished by the morning dews. From them the new race of men will be born. So the whole sad business starts again. Gangleri would doubtless have wanted to know more, but High shuts him up firmly. ‘If you want to know anything after this, I’ve no idea where you are going to learn it from. I’ve heard nobody tell of the future of the world beyond this point. So make the most of what you have learnt.’ Which is probably as far as any philosopher has got."

Rene Descartes

"I will say nothing of philosophy except that it has been studied for many centuries by the most outstanding minds without having produced anything which is not in dispute and consequently doubtful and uncertain."

Alexander McCall Smith:

"She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin."

Sources

Mark Corner, Does God Exist? New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991. p 28-29.

R. I. Page. Norse Myths. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. p 66.

Rene Descartes. "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Field of Science." Discourse on Method and Meditations. Translated by Laurence J. Lafleur. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1960. p 8.

Alexander McCall Smith. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. (1998) New York: Random House, Anchor Books, 2002. p 85.

Being morally accountable while being uncertain

George Cunningham wrote that, "if you think about it, most things you know about the universe are really just beliefs justified by a sufficient quantity and quality of evidence." Some beliefs are not even especially well justified, in which case what we have isn't knowledge but merely prejudice. William James: “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”

We refer to ourselves as having knowledge, but we can never attain absolute assurance of our correctness, and to pretend that we have done so or to delude ourselves into believing that we have done so leads us astray from our own humanity, which is inherently limited. "Every judgement teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty," wrote that author of Dune.

Of course, we have a feeling that we refer to as certainty. People feel more or less certain about all kinds of things. At the extreme of either end of the "certainty spectrum," humans are unable to function successfully. "Psychologists have recently begun to consider," Robert A. Burton wrote in On Being Certain, "the role of pathological certainty and pathological uncertainty as they relate to schizophrenia and OCD [respectively]." That is, a person with schizophrenia might feel certain that the government is spying on them based on no evidence whatsoever, while a person with obsessive compulsive disorder might feel uncertain that the table is really clean even after they have washed it twenty times. So, it's important to our lives that we experience the feeling of certainty in a balanced way.

The feeling of certainty is separate from attaining grounds for assurance of our correctness. Those grounds may be rational, emotive, sensory, or any way in which we normally gain information, but they are not the same as whether we feel certain about what we have learned.

Nikki Stern sees a kind of beauty and power in maintaining uncertainty as it relates to moral judgements:

Moral authority is anathema to thinking, questioning, examining, reasoning, or wondering – the talents with which we humans have been gifted and which we Americans in particular are fortunate to be able to freely employ. The whole notion of moral authority contradicts everything we know about how our brains work, how our consciences should work, and maybe even how our souls might work.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, presents all sorts of possibilities: what about, what if, why not? We could fear uncertainty, but I'd much rather we all accepted it or, better yet, embraced it. After all, what we don't know absolutely is what we can imagine, invent, dream, or dare to hope.

J. B. MacKinnon acknowledges, in a different way, that we can take actions that we believe will produce positive change without necessarily feeling certainty that we are correct. If we are aware that our beliefs have some kind of grounding, then we are accountable to ourselves and can be accountable to others.

When people make lifestyle choices based on their concerns about the environment, they are often seen as – accused of – being "good." That label never sat well with me, though it took me a long time to find a better word. That word is accountable, and I can't define it any more plainly than the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur did: "Those who can account for actions to themselves are 'accountable.'" I prefer accountability to goodness because it embraces the imperfection of change as a process. If I can explain and defend my actions, it doesn't necessarily mean that I believe that my choices are without a doubt the right ones. Accountability is not certainty; it is attempted certainty.

James Hollis says that the process of arriving at this kind of accountability, all the while in the face of uncertainty, is what it means to live the examined life.

Nothing really important will prove simple. Denial and shallowness never prove worthy of what Socrates called "the examined life." The examined life will oblige us to consider that all issues, all issues, have more than one facet to consider, that our capacity for self-delusion is very strong, that we are always at least part of the problem, and that we will ultimately walk right into what we have fled, sooner or later. What is wrong with saying, "I do not know; I do not possess certainty; I think this is a fascinating journey and I am open to discovery?" Why should this simple confession require so much courage?

---

Update:

On the topic of listening to the teacher as an authority, there's this quote from the closing of Sacha Lamb's novel:

“It can’t go by the word of Rav,” said Little Ash, slapping the table. “Rav’s word makes no sense at all. The logic doesn’t follow!”

Uriel looked sideways at him as he again slapped the table to emphasize his point. “It has to go by the word of Rav,” it said. “You don’t understand the logic, only.”

It was very pleasant to have such an argument. They fully intended to stay that way forever."

In other words, when you don't know, when you can't know, sometimes you just listen to a teacher, and that's the tiebreaker and is as good as any approach you personally can take in this life.

Sources

George C. Cunningham. Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? Prometheus Books, 2009. p. 38.

William James, quoted in the Associated Press, quoted in The Week, April 25, 2014. p. 17.

Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965

Robert A. Burton. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2008. p. 39.

Nikki Stern. Because I Say So: The Dangerous Appeal of Moral Authority. Bascom Hill Books, 2010. p. 127.

"In an Age of Eco-Uncertainty." J. B. MacKinnon. Reprinted from Explore (May 2010). UTNE Reader, Sept-Oct 2010, p. 71.

James Hollis, Ph.D. Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves. New York: Gotham Books, 2007. p. 201.

Sacha Lamb. Epilogue to When the Angels Left the Old Country. Levine Querido: 2022.