April 2005
Sorry, I Don’t Speak Catholic
Two words on the new Pope: oy vey.
If I were a progressive Catholic, and I wanted to express my displeasure with Ratzinger, I’d call him Pope Ratzinger instead of Pope Benedict. His half-rodent, half-slapstick name is too good to pass up. But I don’t know the rules around calling the Pope by his, uh, nom de Pope. Is it a sin to call him Pope Ratzinger, or just incredibly disrespectful? I don’t want to encourage sin.
Suppose it is a sin to call him anything but his nom de Pope. Do you have to include the number in there too? “Pope Benedict the Sixteenth” is such a mouthful, whereas “Pope John Paul Two” had kind of a chunky rhythm to it. Will I be forgiven if I leave out the “sixteenth” bit? And if the number is morally mandatory, do I have to write it in Roman numerals? If I write “16″, am I “letting [my]self be tossed and ’swept along by every wind of teaching’”? I would, after all, be adopting the heathen post-modern Arabic numeral orthographic system, instead of the numeral orthographic system of Christ’s culture. Would I spend eternity in the Xth circle of hell? Am I being a moral relativist by asking these questions, or what?
Seriously, though: call him Ratzinger, if that suits you. Do it while people are still familiar with his nom de fallibility.
The Home-Field Advantage
ZDNet’s Joe Brockmeier gets it. He understands framing. Here’s his post on blogs.zdnet.com (which runs on WordPress–neat!):
Framing the discussion: Linux vs. Microsoft: ????Microsoft knows that it’s unlikely that the majority of IT professionals will take the results [of studies which conclude that their products are superior] at face value, once they learn that a study has been sponsored by the vendor. But, by releasing the study anyway, Microsoft has a chance at framing the discussion.
Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin, a director of platform strategy, said what he hopes the studies do is give IT executives some data to help frame a discussion, even if they disregard the specific numbers contained within the materials.
“Customers are looking for ways to think through and evaluate criteria,” Gavin said. “You don’t have to believe what the numbers are.”
So, they can’t tell you what to think, but maybe they can guide how you think. You’ll notice that the studies that come from Microsoft tend favor the software giant not only in the studies’ results, which most people are rightly skeptical of, but also the topics. If you look at Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” page, you’ll see that Microsoft wants to encourage discussion about indemnification, ease of management, total cost of ownership and use by small and medium-sized businesses. [all emphasis his]
Even if the Microsoft-sponsored researchers forgot to bias their statistics, and concluded that Linux is better at the things Microsoft wants to emphasize, Microsoft wins by keeping the terms of the debate where it wants them. Yes, it’s important that Linux counter FUD on the TCO and ease-of-use fronts, but for every article that disputes a Microsoft claim, Linux enthusiasts should write 5 articles about the things Linux is really about.
Except the Linux community doesn’t have much of an organization, much less an agenda, and much less a PR budget. Democrats do, and for every dollar they spend demonstrating that they’re better than Republicans at national security, or more fiscally responsible, they need to spend 5 dollars articulating their priorities and sticking to them. Catchy words and slogans are nothing unless the ideas behind them are well-formed and proactively infused into public debate.
Everything else in that post has a similar analogue to political strategy. A good read.
Linux and framing are my two major intellectual pursuits right now, so it’s nice to see them get together and not be totally bored by eachother’s company. Examples like this can be useful for decoupling framing from the emotional noise of politics, and showing how the ideas behind political framing apply to other areas of discourse as well.
Taste the Rainbow
The Language Log’s discussion of umami got me thinking about Berlin and Kay’s research on basic color terms. An explanatory quote from their post:
[H]ere’s a quote from I.E.T. de Araujo, M. L. Kringelbach, E. T. Rolls, and P. Hobden, Representation of Umami Taste in the Human Brain, J Neurophysiol 90: 313-319, 2003:
Recently, the taste referred to by the Japanese word umami has come to be recognized as a “fifth taste” … (after sweet, salt, bitter, and sour; umami captures what is sometimes described as the taste of protein). In fact, multidimensional scaling methods in humans … have shown that the taste of glutamate [as its sodium salt monosodium glutamate (MSG)] cannot be reduced to any of the other four basic tastes. Specific receptors for glutamate in lingual tissue with taste buds have been also recently found. Umami taste is found in a diversity of foods like fish, meats, milk, tomatoes, and some vegetables, and is produced by the glutamate ion and also by some ribonucleotides (including inosine and guanosine nucleotides), which are present in these foods.
So Japanese has a word for a whole dimension of taste that goes almost unrecognized in English. This is a great example of cultural relativity, which would claim that the categories by which we define tastes are different because we’re lacking a word for a certain basic taste.
One could make the same argument about colors. English speakers have a set of basic colors like red, yellow, blue and orange. All other colors seem to come from those colors: teal is a “type of” blue. Who’s to say that another culture can’t have teal as one of its basic colors, and that the color we call blue is, for them, a type of teal? To put it another way:
“There is a continuous gradation of color from one end of the [color] spectrum to another. Yet an American describing it will list the hues such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple–or something of the kind. There is nothing either in the spectrum or human perception of it which would compel its division in this way.” (Gleason, 1961, from Palmer, 1999)
In the same way, there’s nothing in the “spectrum” of flavors that would incline a language to divide it up into the sweet/bitter/salty/sour classification we’ve got in English.
Or is there?!?!
Well, the cultural relativity of color took a beating from Berlin and Kay, who basically discovered that every culture has approximately the same set of basic colors. There’s no culture that teaches its kids about fuschia and ochre before it teaches them about red and blue. Red and blue are universally important. This discovery about categorization has a basis in the structure of our visual hardware. If we have neurons in our retinas that respond to red, yellow, green and blue (which it looks like we do), that would explain why those colors are so salient for us. In other words, it seems like our retinal receptors do much of the categorization for us, and so our basic color categories are determined by the fact that we’re human, not by the fact that we speak English.
But the same setup has been found in the biology of taste, and yet taste words don’t exhibit the same phenomena. There are receptors for five types of taste, so every language should have around 5 basic flavor words. What gives?
There are essential differences between sight and taste. Flavor has always been a bit trickier to describe than color. Colors can be arranged on a spectrum, tastes cannot. Still, it’s hard to see how these differences account for the difference in categorization.
Another possibility: Berlin and Kay talked about languages that gain new color terms as the language develops. Perhaps the addition of “savory” to our taste lexicon is a step in the evolution of English, or something. Again, that sounds iffy.
It’s terribly inconsistent and I demand to know who is responsible.
Update: I must be new at this. (Palmer, 1999) is Vision Science by Stephen Palmer (MIT Press). Encyclopedic textbook of all things vision-related (”visionary”?).
Ribbon-cutting
Sunil egged me to start a linguistics/politics/framing blog, not knowing that I’d been cobbling this thing together for the past, what, month and a half? Okay. Open for business.
It was a lot of fun to do this the hard way, actually. To have crafted a blog, rather than signing up for one. Not that I wrote the software myself, but the configuration and design are all me, for better or worse. It’s not quite done yet, but I’ve got more important things to worry about this month.