Author: gnox

Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.

— Voltaire

Interpretations at any level are selective processes, and conscious selection is grounded in natural selection.

The problem is that natural selection among variant types causes the population to lose variation as the superior type comes to characterize the species. That is, selection destroys the very population variation that is the basis for its operation.

— Lewontin (2001, 80)

This seeming paradox, which explains why the little life of an organism or ecosystem tends toward senescence, also explains why any reading or explication has the effect of aborting other possible readings, in effect preventing what may have been equally implicit from ever becoming explicit. In the same way, the growth and development of the child progressively aborts most of the mature individuals he might have become. You don’t get another chance at living this day. With a turning symbol, on the other hand, you can return to a replica of it and resurrect the meanings that you missed by meaning something else by it previously.

Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.

— Joyce, Ulysses (45)

What geomancy reads what the windblown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a mighty tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jeté is a frantic variation on our one free fall.

— Annie Dillard (1974, 70)

According to Popper (1968, 174), ‘every language incorporates and preserves countless myths and theories, even in its grammatical structure.’ Science begins when myths and theories become self-modifying. ‘There is much less accumulation of knowledge in science than there is revolutionary changing of scientific theories.… science advances by the tradition of changing its traditional myths.’

Kuhn on the other hand says that ‘normal science’ consists of filling in the details of established theories, that revolutions are exceptional. Vague as they are, these are quantitative estimates, and perhaps we can account for the difference between them by considering what their respective authors chose to count. Kuhn is looking primarily at the everyday lives of ordinary working scientists: Popper might agree that their work may not advance science very much, and Kuhn would certainly agree that normal science prepares the ground for the revolutions which really advance it. The disagreement here is similar to the debate about “gradualism” vs. “saltations” or “punctuated equilibrium” in biological evolution; or the debate among Buddhists about whether “enlightenment” is sudden or gradual.

For Peirce, the scientific method was the only reliable approach to truth, in the long run. The ‘method of authority,’ as he argued in his 1877 essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’, can be effective in establishing social consensus or unifying a community, but ‘the notion of any weight of authority being attached to opinions in philosophy or in science is utterly illogical and unscientific’ (EP2:206).

But science students accept theories on the authority of teacher and text, not because of evidence. What alternatives have they, or what competence? The applications given in texts are not there as evidence but because learning them is part of learning the paradigm at the base of current practice. If applications were set forth as evidence, then the very failure of texts to suggest alternative interpretations or to discuss problems for which scientists have failed to produce paradigm solutions would convict their authors of extreme bias. There is not the slightest reason for such an indictment.

— Kuhn (1969, 80-81)

Kuhn is surely right that for the student, “learning the ropes” of any special science is not an entirely logical or scientific process, in the Peircean sense of those words. Similarly in a religious path, deference and submission to authority is a standard part of apprenticeship. It is by this route that one learns the basic stance from which discoveries can be made (when the situation becomes too hot for the old paradigm to handle) or learns how to pass on the tradition (in more normal circumstances). More generally still, obedience to authority is probably a necessary stage in moral development. But if development gets arrested at that stage – well, the Nuremberg trials should have taught us what happens then.

In a mature guidance system, ‘there are experts, but no authorities’ (Popper 1990, 34) – ‘experts’ being those with extensive and intensive experience in a given universe of discourse. The real authority belongs to the experience. The experience of a turning sign is the experience of turning and being turned. The truth of a turning symbol and the guidance value of its interpretant depend on the determination of that interpretant by its dynamic object, through the medium of the sign. Authority does not belong to its author, nor wisdom to the wise, nor is prophecy embodied in the prophet, but only in continuous semiosis. Worship of any human author is misdirected. In the idiom of the Gospel of Thomas,

Jesus said, ‘When you see one who was not born of woman, prostrate yourselves on your faces and worship him. That one is your father.’

— Thomas 15 (Lambdin)

As DeConick (2007a, 92) observes, ‘not born of woman’ is the usual code for ‘not human.’ Only the Creator is worthy of worship – the one whose need to be known is the sentient being’s need to know.

A bit of 20th-century scripture:

Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

These words have been widely quoted since the 1970s, and encapsulate much of the ecological awareness developing since then. They are usually attributed to ‘Chief Seattle,’ and thus taken to speak for authentic Native American culture. The real story (like the web of life) is a little more complex.

On October 29, 1887, Henry A. Smith published a column in the Seattle Sunday Star entitled ‘Scraps from a Diary—Chief Seattle.’ The column included Smith’s reconstruction, based on his notes taken at the time, of a speech given in 1854 by Chief Seattle, or Seath’tl, of the Duwamish people. There is no other record of this speech. Blaisdell (2000, 117-120) reprints the Smith text as given in Frederic James Grant’s History of Seattle (1891).

The Smith text was rediscovered, touched up and rendered into a more contemporary idiom by later writers, notably the poet William Arrowsmith in 1969. His version was used by screenwriter Ted Perry in producing the script for a documentary aired on television in 1971; and this is the source of the famous ‘web of life’ statement. But the producers of the film failed to credit Perry with the script, thus leaving the impression that the words were Chief Seattle’s. Perry’s text (given in Seed et al. 1988, 67-73), though doubtless quite different from whatever the Chief originally said, is now the most widely quoted version of it, and deservedly so: its power and beauty leave the Smith text in the dust. Many cite it as an authentic expression of Native American culture; Joseph Campbell, who recited it in his PBS TV series with Bill Moyers, attributed it to ‘one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order’ (Campbell 1988, 41). Fritjof Capra helped to set the record straight by using it for the title and epigraph of his 1996 book The Web of Life, crediting ‘Ted Perry, inspired by Chief Seattle.’ There is no question that Perry’s stirring words have inspired many others in their turn.

The Perry text is related to Chief Seattle’s original speech in much the same way as the Gospels are related to the original words of Jesus. However much editing, translation and revision took place along the way, the resulting texts have undoubtedly served some readers as a revelation. The history of that revision process may not matter to those readers, but it’s an interesting case study for those of us investigating the genesis of scriptures.