Touch the Truth

Opening eyes and seeing

Dedicated to Anna Sfard, author of Thinking as Communicating, a wonderful book that helped me clarify and advance my thinking on these topics.

Open and Insulated Discourse

Nobody is born inside a discourse. We are initiated into them by the communities already practicing them. We are exposed to basic numeracy and literacy by our parents, and more complex discourses as we grow. These discourses were born to help us grasp at something real as a community. There was something that hurt the world and an antidote was found; a way of seeing was made accessible and could be communicated. These real points of contact with the world made this discourse so fruitful and valuable, hence participating in these new discourses meant learning to see what we could not yet see or do what we could not yet do.

But discourses do not remain unchanged as they grow. Each participant and each utterance is a small mutation from the previous state. The discourses accumulate terminology, commentary, rituals of entry, and internal hierarchies—it’s not just the content of the discourse, but the internal structure that is ever shifting. These mutations are often evolutions, where patterns of discourse are chunked and made quicker with new jargon, or explicit rules are transformed into implicit culture. But evolution and degeneration are two sides of the same coin; where change exists, it can be for the better or for the worse. What began as a way of making contact with the world can drift into a discourse that is severed from reality and serves insulated power structures. This essay is about that drift, and about what it means for initiation into a discourse, both for the teacher and the learner.

Being fluent in a discourse proves that one is a peer, but it says nothing about the value of the discourse itself. Even a sophisticated discourse can be an insulated one—a discourse that has close to zero representation in reality. In fact, it is likely that as a discourse gets more and more sophisticated, it drifts away from reality and becomes insulated, layering itself with self-referentiality, and losing contact with the extradiscursive world.

Think of Sigmund Freud’s first discoveries in psychopathology. They were valued because they were effective for extradiscursive use; his practice healed people. As his theory developed, it still had extradiscursive functionality, often in its explanatory power of lived experience, or its predictive power for dealing with psychic problems. But as the psychoanalytic discourse gained prestige it accumulated interlocutors and commentators who focused on mastering the discourse, without regard to the reality that was supposed to contact it. This process accelerated until psychoanalysis is hardly a field of psychology. Observing the current situation of psychoanalysis and Freudian literature one cannot but be impressed that it has drifted away from reality and has become a closed discourse. Empirical, extradiscursive utterances are hardly used to invalidate theories, and most intellectual energies are devoted to textual inquiries.

A similar process can be said to have happened to Socrates¹. It is rare to find a direct discussion asking if Socrates is correct. The discourse of most Classical Scholars is focused on understanding what Socrates said, and the context of his utterances; the most ambitious may draw implications or point out conflicts between Socrates and other thinkers. Rarely will we find in the discourse a thinker challenging Socrates. In fact, much like some psychoanalysts or Marxists, many members of the discourse openly proclaim that they are scholars, not philosophers².

One might argue that this is a new field—the historical analysis of Socrates. But the scholarly discourse is exactly the drift that is so concerning. Astronomy used to be a unified field with astrology, and rightly so. There were good reasons to consider these astral beings to have influence on our lowly earth³. But as we made progress in considering the movements of the planets, astrology was generally dropped. To be an astrologist is not the same things as being an astronomer⁴. And yet, to be obsessed with the person of Socrates at the expense of the ideas of Socrates, is analogous to astrology instead of astronomy. The research is about who said what, has little empirical rigor, and does not ask what is true, but what was said.

The degeneration into an insulated discourse begins with good intentions, and even with good deeds. If we look at those insulated discourses, we can see that the genesis of a discourse and its initial value is always rooted in contact with reality. It is as more individuals join the conversation that the discourse itself becomes an object of mastery. As this discourse develops it creates a loop that expands it, demanding more energy to master. Hence, new members are barred from joining the conversation until they have mastered large bodies of commentary which focus exclusively on interpretation of texts and are isolated from contact with reality. By the time one is considered by the community of the discourse to be qualified to have a voice, the training has done its job. The individual has mastered a prestigious literature, and to subvert it all would be costly. More so, they themselves have found a functionality of their discourse, namely to communicate with other masters of the language. The degeneration of the discourse to mere fancy is hard to see once one has invested so much effort and has gained a fluency that gives access to peers.

Note that the genealogy of insulated discourses presented here points to their parasitic nature; there is something valuable at the root that the insulated degeneracy is able to feed off of. Socrates and Sigmund Freud both had valuable contributions to the world, and it is precisely because of this that they can bear so much weight of empty words. Similarly, vast mystical corpuses have been written, expanding a few worthy insights into a sea of incestuous texts.

The spectrum between insulated and open discourses has infinite shades, but by presenting a fictive binary, we can get a better sense of how they function. Open discourses are ones where new utterances regarding extradiscursive facts are valued when they have implications for the discourse. The open discourse invites these moves in order to anchor it down into reality. Over a long enough time period, facts and assumptions are added to (and others are removed from) the discourse, helping make the discourse congruent with reality⁵.

If you think about mathematics as an open discourse, and perhaps one of the most intellectually honest discourses that we as humans know, you’ll notice that there are mountains of self-reference. Division turns into fractions, negative, imaginary and irrational numbers turn from imaginary procedures into objects that are referred to. In fact, we often start our learning by thinking that these things are ‘real’ first, and only later come to understand that these nouns are a strange shorthand for verbs!

This is the same type of recursive discourse that refers to itself in order to become more efficient. However, in math, the sophistication of the discourse is rooted deep in reality, and hence drift is minimal⁶.

The challenge in maintaining an open discourse is that the sophistication and distancing from the immediate reality and most primitive elements is often a good thing, as mathematics makes evident. Layers of abstraction allow for conceptual development and make communication more effective. The problem arises when the previous utterances of the discourse itself become an object and this recursive action continues until there is a rupture between discourse and reality. When taken too far in a reckless manner, a rift appears between theory and reality. As long as the discourse maintains a chain of substantiation that returns to the original contact, the tower can be constructed. Ironically, the discourses that have avoided contact are the ones most protective over their lack of touch with the ground.

Each discourse has its own particular angle on how it sees itself answerable to reality. What I mean, is that until a discourse becomes fully insulated⁷, the contact it posits with reality is considered to be verified or disputable, but these extradiscursive facts need to fit the form of the facts posited. This is a reasonable situation, where neurological facts shouldn’t be considered significant for trying to relate to the Oedipus complex. However, it is exactly in the negotiation of the shape of the pathways extradiscursive facts need to fit that a discourse can deceive and isolate itself from its own destruction or major upheavals. If neuroscience cannot say anything significant to a psychoanalyst, what can? The question should always be at the ready: “What kind of information would make you change your mind about this?”

The plurality of discourses combine into a broad social structure, and a measure of the health of this society is their response to outsider critique. What is the legitimacy of critiquing a discourse from ‘outside’ entirely? Critics often attempt to present why the origins of the discourse are either unimportant, misinterpretations, or simply false by extradiscursive measures. A healthy society will protect its discourses by demanding some sort of proof of familiarity of the outsider. If it demands full expertise, we rightfully suspect the emperor is naked. If it demands none, we suspect that the society has poor epistemic norms, and is pulled more by fads and convenience than rigorous inquiry.

Upon Entering

No discourse is an island, but the bridges that an individual might have access to when they are still newcomers to a certain domain may be scant and may be rich. Compare an individual who is immersed in the Bible, Mishna and Tosefta and begins studying the Babylonian Talmud to another person who has never even heard of Jews. Naturally, the ability of one person to become a participant in the discourse will be different.

The way a person enters a discourse will have an impact on their entire trajectory. Did they enter the discourse seeking a solution to a problem or confusion? Or did they enter the discourse due to social pull? In the first case, the newcomer is continuously sniffing for hints that lead to the contact that will solve his mystery. In the second, it is about acclimating oneself to the discourse and mastering the rituals that lead their progression.

Someone who enters a discourse without a passion for finding the contact will likely never find it. The points of contact are hidden in the dark. Even those discourses that have managed to maintain strong contact with reality don’t usually reveal these points to the novice⁸. This can happen in even the most physical of science: 2e can be introduced Newtonian physics without ever moving an object and measuring anything! It is precisely at these points that the whole conversation can be overturned. And it is often at these points that the beginner can see things that the expert cannot. Their vulnerability is the reason to keep them hidden.

But it is also true that it is often at these points that the beginner fails to see the value of the purposeful blurring of the expert. The expert has already encountered and can practice using extrapolations of the base knowledge, and has found it beneficial. Whether their judgment is correct, and whether they are sacrificing a better opportunity with their commitment is a question left open. Regardless, because the expert knows the value of the structure, they protect the base from attack.

How to Invite

One of the signs of a pedagogical master is to introduce new participants to a discourse, beginning from the closest point of contact to reality accessible to the newcomer. By beginning there, all future discourse is rooted in a place of sanity.

As I wrote, these points of contact are the most vulnerable and precious pieces of knowledge in any discourse. It is in striving to make them visible that one makes enemies of the experts who fear their expertise, built from layer upon layer of words, will collapse upon inspection. And the experts who never cared for prestige, but for truth, are the rare voices who admire and invite the beginners to inspect the foundations of their palace.

For a seeker of truth, an illusory palace is best left deserted with a sign that says “look closely before entering.”

Thank you to Sam Senchal for feedback, David Campbell for both discussing and helping me articulate these ideas, as well as helping make this essay better, Omar Shehata, CEO of Open Research Institute for generating and hosting a special space.

Yana Dhyana: Twilight Stories: Let's to break the spell the forest and the stars

1. Or Plato. Not important for my purposes.

2. This is part of what makes Nietzsche so charming—he cares about the contact with reality more than about the discourse about reality. He sees the unfolding history of ideas as a mountain to climb and look beyond, while others stay in a swamp of quotations.

3. In fact, even according to modern astronomy they do! It’s a big deal, just not the way 11th century philosophers thought.

4. Props to those astrologists who are also astro-physicists.

5. Open discourses are made up of people who are open to extradiscursive input, ideally in their role as participants of that specific discourse. If participants in ‘discourse x’ will not talk to you about ideas in the discourse when placed in relation to extradiscursive utterances, then there’s no way in! Even if they do ‘humor’ these utterances, it won’t help if they won’t ever acknowledge them in their capacity as participants in the discourse. It can at best become an open secret.

6. It’s quite a curiosity why math has close to zero drift as it sophisticates. One could argue that this is because in order to say something novel in math, you need to be able to understand what you are saying in a deeply rooted matter. It’s unclear how AI’s are going to change the discourse of mathematics.

7. I don’t know if such a discourse can exist that is fully insulated, but it’s an interesting thought experiment, no?

8. See Richard Feynman’s description of Brazilian science in his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!