Facts Can Be Undermined by Ambiguities of Meaning

Facts Can Be Undermined by Ambiguities of Meaning

Watson and Sherlock

Source: Public Domain

Let’s talk about truth again.
“Blue is a color” is a proposition that may be true or false. But “x is a y” is a proposition in form only; it has no sense of truth or falsity until both x and y are replaced by words that have meaning. Logicians call the statement “x is a y” a propositional function. Its truth or falsity entirely depends on the words substituted for the variables x and y. The trouble is that discourses often contain undefined or ambiguous terms that make propositions moot, though the speakers most likely intend them to be consequential. For example, the statement, “Tears are mixtures of water and sodium chloride,” is not a proposition because it contains a word that has several meanings. We can even say different things using the same words. An advertisement on Travelocity.com reads, “Go virtually anywhere.” Permute the words to say, Virtually go anywhere, or Go anywhere virtually, and you have different meanings.

Ideas are the profits of ambiguities
Words of informal languages such as English are blessed with ambiguities, leading to misinterpretations of truth on the one hand and the creation of new thoughts on the other. Those misinterpretations account for at least part of the reason why people of the same culture have so many arguments and disagreements. Formal languages, on the other hand, such as computer programming languages and symbolic logic, talk about x being y and therefore can express definitive conclusions based solely on formal relations among the variables, even though those variables have no meaning at all.

Unlike the x and y of a formal language, words of an informal language do have content-related meanings. Some single words can be powerful. Others must be joined together in phrases to be persuasively strong. When communicated with trust, they build our beliefs. But that trust comes from interactions with our environments, our friends, the news we hear, the affiliations we subscribe to, and sometimes from our neighborhoods. When news and conversations use ambiguities to manipulate facts, what happens to trust? A country without trust is doomed to perish.

Controlling forces
Confidence in truth is empowering. It can also be manipulated by controlling forces tampering with facts. When facts become open to interpretation, the mind still has the power to override vagueness and twisted interpretations by the conscious willingness to doubt.
When a government becomes involved with the controlling forces, it can make speaking the truth illegal. A few days ago, the Russian and Chinese translations of my book The Clock Mirage were ready to be launched. Then the censorship ministries blocked it. They wanted me to delete whole chapters that included scientific facts not complimentary to their governments. I refused the Russian version because of the invasion of Ukraine but reluctantly agreed to the requested deletions for the Chinese.

Imagine living in a regime where you are not free to speak your mind. You would not be free to say something as benign as, “Workers were paid about four dollars per day,” referring to one factory in China. The ministry said no, you must also take out what you said later: “One would not be surprised if the factory might consider a robotic food machine to feed workers lunch without stopping production. Time is consumed, so why not production?”

I was not intentionally writing something negative directly about the government, but even the indirect parody was not to be accepted. In the end, the whole chapter had to be deleted for the book to pass censure. I admit, the bit about the robotic food machine was a satirical sentence placed there to emphasize the exploitation of workers. But it was also meant to be humorous. There is no room for humor in Russia or China.

The Kremlin, for instance, concocts interpretations of truth through outlandish denials. Without any independent news outlets, Russians repeatedly are propagandized to believe in many astounding military successes with no failures. With every broadcast and every printed newspaper, there are no disputes.

Russians hear Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismiss incriminating photos of dead women, children, and babies murdered as fake news. They see UN Ambassador Vasily Alekseevich Nebenzya reading from a script that the purpose of Russia’s “incursion is to cut out the malignant Nazi tumor that is consuming Ukraine.” Russians have been indoctrinated in the belief that Nazi means what the code of stripped context means: not Russian, not us. So what do they believe? The war is “a peacekeeping mission.” If you see dead Ukrainian civilians lying face-down with their hands tied behind their backs at curbsides, their homes destroyed, hospitals and train stations bombed? Well, your eyes must be deceiving you. It never happened.

That is what an authoritarian country gets when it controls you and all the news. The Kremlin can play that game with Russians in Russia for a short time: either support the war or go to prison for 15 years. What will be the choice? That is how the regime survives; by terrorizing its citizens. But the world is now watching in real-time how authoritarianism works. Ukraine refuses to live that way. What will America stand for when Q-anon gets dominant control of its elected officials if so many citizens ignore their doubt? Wake up, America.

Politics

Subtitle: 
Truths and falsities stem from information accessible from objective reality.

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The Speed of Life

Teaser Text: 
Are our beliefs influenced simply by our culture, our intelligence, or general familiarities?

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Content Topics: 
Politics
Persuasion
Confidence
Deception
Media

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Essential Reads Basics: 
Deception
Politics
Persuasion

QScore Date: 
Thursday, April 14, 2022 – 10:45pm

QScore User Id: 
2583

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KEY POINTS

Many of our beliefs are influenced by our culture or our personal ignorance.
Belief can empower us to control success and to alter our future.
When facts become open to interpretation, the mind has the power to doubt.

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Author: jmazur

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