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Author: Gavin Ferriby

if you know Yewno, and if Yewno, exactly what do you know? --that "exactly what" will likely contain machine-generated replications of problematic human biases.
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This is the third of "undiscovered summer reading" posts, see also the first and second.

At the recent Association of College and Research Libraries conference Baltimore I came across Yewno, a search-engine-like discovery or exploration layer that I had heard about.  I suspect that Yewno or something like it could be the "next big thing" in library and research services.  I have served as a librarian long enough both to be very interest, and to be wary at the same time --so many promises have been made by the information technology commercial sector and the reality fallen far short --remember the hype about discovery services?

Yewno-logoYewno is a so-called search app; it "resembles as search engines --you use it to search for information, after all--but its structure is network-like rather than list-based, the way Google's is. The idea is to return search results that illustrate relationships between relevant sources" --mapping them out graphically (like a mind map). Those words are quoted from Adrienne LaFrance's Atlantic article on growing understanding of the Antikythera mechanism as an example of computer-assisted associative thinking (see, all these readings really come together).  LaFrance traces the historical connections between "undiscovered public knowledge," Vannevar Bush's Memex (machine) in the epochal As We May Think, and Yewno.  The hope is that through use of an application such as Yewno, associations could be traced between ancient time-keeping, Babylonian and Arabic mathematics, medieval calendars, astronomy, astrological studies, ancient languages, and other realms of knowledge. At any rate, that's the big idea, and it's a good one.

So who is Yewno meant for, a what's it based on?

Lafrance notes that Yewno "was built primarily for academic researchers," but I'm not sure that's true, strictly. When I visited the Yewno booth at ACRL, I thought several things at once: 1) this could be very cool; 2) this could actually be useful; 3) this is going to be expensive (though I have neither requested nor received a quote); and 4) someone will buy them, probably Google or another technology octopus. (Subsequent thought: where's Google's version of this?)  I also thought that intelligence services and corporate intelligence advisory firms would be very, very interested --and indeed they are.  Several weeks later I read Alice Meadows' post, "Do You Know About Yewno?" on the Scholarly Kitchen blog, and her comments put Yewno in clearer context. (Had I access to Yewno, I would have searched, "yewno.")

Yewno is a start-up venture by Ruggero Gramatica (if you're unclear, that's a person), a research strategist with a background in applied mathematics (Ph.D. King's College, London) and M.B.A. (University of Chicago). He is first-named author of "Graph Theory Enables Drug Repurposing," a paper (DOI) on PLOS One that introduces:

a methodology to efficiently exploit natural-language expressed biomedical knowledge for repurposing existing drugs towards diseases for which they were not initially intended. Leveraging on developments in Computational Linguistics and Graph Theory, a methodology is defined to build a graph representation of knowledge, which is automatically analysed to discover hidden relations between any drug and any disease: these relations are specific paths among the biomedical entities of the graph, representing possible Modes of Action for any given pharmacological compound. We propose a measure for the likeliness of these paths based on a stochastic process on the graph.

Yewno does the same thing in other contexts:

an inference and discovery engine that has applications in a variety of fields such as financial, economics, biotech, legal, education and general knowledge search. Yewno offers an analytics capability that delivers better information and faster by ingesting a broad set of public and private data sources and, using its unique framework, finds inferences and connections. Yewno leverages on leading edge computational semantics, graph theoretical models as well as quantitative analytics to hunt for emerging signals across domains of unstructured data sources. (source: Ruggero Gramatica's LinkedIn profile)

This leads to several versions of Yewno: Yewno Discover, Yewno Finance, Yewno Life Sciences, and Yewno Unearth.  Ruth Pickering, the companies co-founder and CEO of Business Development & Strategy Officer, comments, "each vertical uses a specific set of ad-hoc machine learning based algorithms and content. The Yewno Unearth product sits across all verticals and can be applied to any content set in any domain of information."  Don't bother calling the NSA --they already know all about it (and probably use it, as well).

Yewno Unearth is relevant to multiple functions of publishing: portfolio categorization, the ability to spot gaps in content, audience selection, editorial oversight and description, and other purposes for improving a publisher's position, both intellectually and in the information marketplace. So  Yewno Discovery is helpful for academics and researchers, but the whole of Yewno is also designed to relay more information about them to their editors, publishers, funders, and those who will in turn market publications to their libraries.  Elsevier, Ebsco, and ProQuest will undoubtedly appear soon in librarians' offices with Yewno-derived information, and that encounter likely could prove to be truly intimidating.  So Yewno might be a very good thing for a library, but not simply an unalloyed very good thing.

So what is Yewno really based on? The going gets more interesting.

Meadows notes that Yewno's underlying theory emerged from the field of complex systems at the foundational level of econophysics, an inquiry "aimed at describing economic and financial cycles utilized mathematical structures derived from physics." The mathematical framework, involving uncertainty, stochastic (random probability distribution) processes and nonlinear dynamics, came to be applied to biology and drug discovery (hello, Big Pharma). This kind of information processing is described in detail in a review article, Deep Learning in Nature (Vol. 521, 28 May 2015, doi10.1038/nature14539).  Developing machine learning, deep learning "allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction."  Such deep learning "discovers intricate structure in are data sets by using the backpropagation algorithm to indicate how a machine should change its internal parameters that are used to compute the representation in each layer from the representation in the previous layer." Such "deep convolutional nets" have brought about significant break-throughs when processing images, video, speech, and "recurrent nets" have brought new learning powers to "sequential data such as text and speech."

The article goes on in great detail, and I do not pretend I understand very much of it.  Its discussion of recurrent neural networks (RNNs), however, is highly pertinent to libraries and discovery.  The backpropagational algorithm is basically a process that adjusts the weights used in machine analysis while that analysis is taking place.  For example, RNNs "have been found to be very good at predicting the next character in the text, or next word in a sequence," and by such backpropagational adjustments, machine language translations have achieved greater levels of accuracy. (But why not complete accuracy? --read on.)  The process "is more compatible with the view that everyday reasoning involves many simultaneous analogies that each contribute plausibility to a conclusion." In their review's conclusion, the authors expect "systems that use RNNs to understand sentences or whole documents will become much better when they learn strategies for selectively attending to one part at a time."

After all this, what do you know? Yewno presents the results of deep learning through recurrent neural networks that identify nonlinear concepts in a text, a kind of "knowledge." Hence Ruth Pickering can plausibly state:

Yewno's mission is "Knowledge Singularity" and by that we mean the day when knowledge, not information, is at everyone's fingertips. In the search and discovery space the problems that people face today are the overwhelming volume of information and the fact that sources are fragmented and dispersed. There' a great T.S. Eliot quote, "Where's the knowledge we lost in information" and that sums up the problem perfectly. (source: Meadows' post)

Ms. Pickering perhaps revealed more than she intended.  Her quotation from T.S. Eliot is found in a much larger and quite different context:

Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust. (Choruses from The Rock)

Eliot's interest is in the Life we have lost in living, and his religious and literary use of the word "knowledge" signals the puzzle at the very base of econophysics, machine learning, deep learning, and backpropagational algorithms.  Deep learning performed by machines mimics what humans do, their forms of life.  Pickering's "Knowledge Singularity" alludes to the semi-theological vision of the Ray Kurzweil's millennialist "Singularity;" a machine intelligence infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined.  In other words, where Eliot is ultimately concerned with Wisdom, the Knowledge Singularity is ultimately concerned with Power.  Power in the end means power over other people: otherwise it has no social meaning apart from simply more computing.  Wisdom interrogates power, and questions its ideological supremacy.

For example, three researchers at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University have shown that "applying machine learning to ordinary human language results in human-like semantic biases." ("Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases," Science 14 April 2017, Vol. 356, issue 6334: 183-186, doi 10.1126/science.aal4230). The results of their replication of a spectrum of know biases (measured by the Implicit Association Test) "indicate that text corpora contain recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases, whether morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as race and gender, for even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names. Their approach holds "promise for identifying and addressing sources of bias in culture, including technology."  The authors laconically conclude, "caution must be used in incorporating modules constructed via unsupervised machine learning into decision-making systems."  Power resides in decisions such decisions about other people, resources, and time.

Arvind Narayanan, who published the paper with Aylin Caliskan and Joanna J. Bryson, noted that "we have a situation where these artificial-intelligence systems may be perpetuating historical patterns of bias that we might find socially unacceptable and which we might be trying to move away from."  Princeton researchers developed an experiment with a program called GloVe that replicated the Implicit Association test in machine-learning representation of co-occurent words and phrases.  Researchers at Stanford turn this loose on roughtly 840 billion words from the Web, and looked for co-occurences and associations of words such as "man, male" or "woman, female" with "programmer engineer scientist, nurse teacher, librarian."   They showed familiar biases in distributions of associations, biases that can "end up having pernicious, sexist effects."

For example, machine-learning programs can translate foreign languages into sentences taht reflect or reinforce gender stereotypes. Turkish uses a gender-neutral, third person pronoun, "o."  Plugged into the online translation service Google Translate, however, the Turkish sentence "o bir doktor" and "o bir hemşire" are translated into English as "he is a doctor" and "she is a nurse."  . . . . "The Biases that we studied in the paper are easy to overlook when designers are creating systems," Narayanan said. (Source: Princeton University, "Biased Bots" by Adam Hadhazy.)

Yewno is exactly such a system insofar as it mimics human forms of life which include, alas, the reinforcement of biases and prejudice.  So in the end, do you know Yewno, and if Yewno, exactly what do you know? --that "exactly what" will likely contain machine-generated replications of problematic human biases.  Machine translations will never offer perfect, complete translations of languages because language is never complete --humans will always use it new ways, with new shades of meaning and connotations of plausibility, because human go on living in their innumerable, linguistic forms of life.  Machines have to map language within language (here I include mathematics as kinds of languages with distinctive games and forms of life).  No "Knowledge Singularity" can occur outside of language, because it will be made of language: but the ideology of "Singularity" can conceal its origins in many forms of life, and thus appear "natural," "inevitable," and "unstoppable." 

The "Knowledge Singularity" will calcify bias and injustice in an everlasting status quo unless humans, no matter how comparatively deficient, resolve that knowledge is not a philosophical problem to be solved (such as in Karl Popper's Worlds 1, 2, and 3), but a puzzle to be wrestled with and contested in many human forms of life and language (Wittgenstein). Only by addressing human forms of life can we ever address the greater silence and the Life that we have lost in living.  What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen, sentence 7 of the Tractatus) --and that silence, contra both the positivist Vienna Circle and Karl Popper (who was never part of it) is the most important part of human living.  In the Tractatus Wittengenstein dreamt, as it were, a conclusive solution to the puzzle of language --but such a solution can only be found in the silence beyond strict logical (or machine) forms: a silence of the religious quest beyond the ethical dilemma (Kierkegaard).

This journey through my "undiscovered summer reading," from the Antikythera mechanism to the alleged "Knowledge Singularity," has reinforced my daily, functional belief that knowing is truly something that humans do within language and through language, and that the quest which makes human life human is careful attention to the forms of human life, and the way that language, mathematics, and silence are woven into and through those forms. The techno-solutionism inherent in educational technology and library information technology --no matter how sophisticated-- cannot undo the basic puzzle of human life: how do we individually and social find the world? (Find: in the sense of locating, of discovering, and of characterizing.)  Yewno will not lead to a Knowledge Singularity, but to derived bias and reproduced injustice, unless we acknowledge its limitations within language. 

The promise of educational and information technology becomes more powerful when approached with modesty: there are no quick, technological solutions to puzzles of education, of finance, of information discovery, of "undiscovered public knowledge."  What those of us who are existentially involved with the much-maligned, greatly misunderstood, and routinely dismissed "liberal arts" can contribute is exactly what makes those technologies humane: a sense of modesty, proportion, generosity, and silence.  Even to remember those at this present moment is a profoundly counter-cultural act, a resistance of the techno-idology of unconscious bias and entrenched injustice.

In educational technology, we are in the presence of a powerful ideology, and an ideology of the powerful: the neoliberal state and its allies in higher education.
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(This is part two of posts of my summer reading thus far: see parts one  and three.

Another article in found in my strange cleaning mania is not so very old: George Veletsianos and Rolin Moe's The Rise of Educational Technology as a Sociocultural and Ideological Phenomenon. Published by (upper-case obligatory) EDUCAUSE, it argues that "the rise of educational technology is part of a larger shift in political thought" that favors (so-called) free-market principles to government oversight, and is also a response to the increasing costs of higher education.  Edtech proponents have (always? often?) "assumed positive impacts, promoting an optimistic rhetoric despite little empirical evidence of results --and ample documentation of failures."  In other words, we are in the presence of a powerful ideology, and an ideology of the powerful: the neoliberal state and its allies in higher education.

The authors frame their argument through assertions:  The edtech phenomenon is a response to the increasing price of higher education: seen as a way of slow, stop, or reverse prices.  The popular press questions the viability of college degrees, higher education, sometimes with familiar "bubble" language borrowed from market analyses.  Second: The edtech phenomenon reflects a shift in political thought from government to free-market oversight of education: reducing governmental involvement and funding along with increasing emphases on market forces "has provided a space and an opportunity for the edtech industry to flourish." Although set vastly to accelerate under Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, funding reductions and a turn to "private sector" responses have long been in evidence, associated with the "perspective" (the authors eschew "ideology") of neoliberalism: the ideology that the free, market competition invariably results in improved services at lower costs.  Outsourcing numerous campus services supposedly leads to lower costs, but also "will relegate power and control to non-institutional actors" (and that is what neoliberalism is all about).

The authors (thirdly) assert "the edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of a view of education as product to be package, automated, and delivered" --in other words, neoliberal service and production assumptions transferred to education.  This ideology is enabled by a "curious amnesia, forgetfulness, or even willful ignorance" (remember: we are in the presence of an ideology) "of past phases of technology development and implementation in schools."  When I was in elementary schools (late 1950s and 1960s), the phase was filmstrips, movies, and "the new math," and worked hand-in-glove with Robert McNamara's Ford Corporation, and subsequent Department of Defense, to "scale" productivity-oriented education for obedient workers and soldiers (the results of New Math, were in my case disastrous, and I am hardly alone).  The educational objectivism implicit in much of edtech sits simultaneously and oddly with tributes to professed educational constructivism --"learning by doing," which tends then to be reserved for those who can afford it in the neoliberal state.  I have bristled when hearing the cliché that the new pedagogy aims for "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage" --when my life and outlook have been changed by carefully crafted, deeply engaging lectures (but remember: we are in the presence of an ideology).

Finally, the authors assert "the edtech phenomenon is symptomatic of the technocentric belief that technology is the most efficient solution to the problems of higher education."  There is an ideological solutionism afoot here. Despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary, techno-determinism (technology shapes its emerging society autonomously) and techno-solutionism (technology will solve societal problems) assumes the power of "naturally given," a sure sign of ideology.  Ignorance of its history and impact "is illustrated by public comments arguing that the education system has remained unchanged for hundreds of years" (by edX CEO Anant Agarwal, among others), when the reality is that of academia's constant development and change of course.  Anyone who thinks otherwise should visit a really old institution such as Oxford University: older instances of architecture meant to serve medieval educational practices, retro-fitted to 19th- and early 20th-century uses, and now sometimes awkwardly retro-fitted yet again to the needs of a modern research university.  The rise and swift fall of MOOCs is another illustration of the remarkable ignorance that ideological techno-solutionism mandates in order to appear "smart" (or at least in line with Gartner's hype cycle).

The authors conclude, "unless greater collaborative efforts take place between edtech developers and the greater academic community, as well as more informed deep understandings of how learning and teaching actually occur, any efforts to make edtech education's silver bullet are doomed to fail."  They recommend that edtech developers and implementers commit to support their claims with empirical evidence "resulting from transparent and rigorous evaluation processes" (!--no "proprietary data" here); invite independent expertise; attend to discourse (at conferences and elsewhere) critical of edtech rather than merely promotional, and undertake reflection that is more than personal, situational, or reflective of one particular institutional location.  Edtech as a scholarly field and community of practice could in this was continue efforts to improve teaching and learning that will bear fruit for educators, not just for corporate technology collaborators.

How many points of their article are relevant by extension to library information technology, its implementation, and reflections on its use!  Commendably, ACRL and other professional venues have subjected library technologies to critical review and discourse (although LITA's Top Technology Trends Committee too often reverts to techno-solutionism and boosterism from the same old same old).  Veletsianos' and Moe's points are regarding the neoliberal ideological suppositions of the library information technology market, however, are well-taken --just attend a conference presentation on the exhibition floor from numerous vendors for a full demonstration.  At the recent conference of the Association of College & Research Libraries, the critical language of the Information Literacy was sometimes turned on librarianship and library technology itself ("authority is constructed and contextual"), such as critique of the term "resilient" (.pdf) and the growing usage of the term "wicked challenges" for those times we don't know what we don't know or even know how to ask what that would be.

Nevertheless, it would be equally historically ignorant to deny the considerable contributions made by information technology to contemporary librarianship, even when such contributions should be regarded cautiously.   There are still intereting new technologies which can contribute a great deal even when they are neither disruptive nor revolutionary.  The most interesting (by far) new kind of technology or process I saw at ACRL is Yewno, and I will discuss that in my third blog post.

"Undiscovered public knowledge" seems an oxymoron. If "public" than why "undiscovered" --means the knowledge that once was known by someone, recorded, properly interred in some documentary vault, and left unexamined.
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(This is the first of three posts about my semi-serendipitous summer reading; here are links to posts two and three.)

This last week I was seized by a strange mania: clean the office. I have been in my current desk and office since 2011 (when a major renovation disrupted it for some months).  It was time to clean --spurred by notice that boxes of papers would be picked up for the annual certified, assured shredding. I realized I had piles of FERPA-protected paperwork (exams, papers, 1-1 office hours memos, you name it).  Worse: my predecessor had left me large files that I hadn't look at in seven years, and that contained legal papers, employee annual performance reviews, old resumes, consultant reports, accreditation documentation, etc. Time for it all to go!  I collected six large official boxes (each twice the size of a paper ream), but didn't stop there: I also cleaned the desk; cleaned up the desktop; recycle odd electronic items, batteries, and lightbulbs; forwarded a very large number of vendor advertising pens to cache for our library users ("do you have a pen?"). On Thursday I was left with the moment-after: I cleared it all out: now what?

The "what" turned out to be various articles I had collected and printed for later reading, and then never actually read --some more recent, some a little older. (This doesn't count the articles I recycled as no longer relevant or particularly interesting; my office is not a bibliography in itself.) Unintentionally, several of these articles wove together concerns that have been growing in the back of my mind --and have been greatly pushed forward with the events of the past year (Orlando--Bernie Sanders--the CombOver--British M.P. Jo Cox--seem as distant and similar as events of the late Roman republic now, pace Mary Beard.)

"Undiscovered public knowledge" seems an oxymoron (but less one than "Attorney General Jeff Sessions").  If "public" than why "undiscovered"?  It means the knowledge that once was known by someone, recorded, properly interred in some documentary vault, and left unexamined and undiscovered by anyone else.  The expression is used in Adrienne LaFrance's Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines, published in The Atlantic, December 1, 2016.   Her leading example is the fascinating story of the Antikythera mechanism, some sort of ancient time-piece surfaced from an ancient, submerged wreck off Antikythera (a Greek island between the Peloponnese and Crete, known also as Aigila or Ogylos).  It sat in the crate outside the National Archaeological Museum in Athens for a year, and then was largely forgotten by all but a few dogged researchers, who pressed on for decades with the attempt to figure out exactly what it is.

The Antikythera mechanism has only come to be understood when widely separated knowledge has been combined by luck, persistence, intuition, and conjecture.  How did such an ancient time piece come about, who made it, based upon which thinking, from where?  It could not have been a one-off, but it seems to be a unique lucky find from the ancient world, unless other mechanisms or pieces are located elsewhere in undescribed or poorly described collections.  For example, a 10th-century Arabic manuscript suggests that such a mechanism may have influenced the development of modern clocks, and in turn built upon ancient Babylonian astronomical data.  (For more see Josephine Marchant's Decoding the heavens : a 2,000-year-old computer--and the century-long search to discover its secrets, Cambridge, Mass.: DaCapo Press, 2009: Worldcat ; Sacred Heart University Library). Is there "undiscovered public knowledge" that would include other mechanisms, other clues to its identity, construction, development, and influence?

"Undiscovered public knowledge" is a phrase made modestly famous by Don R. Swanson in an article by the same name in The Library Quarterly, 1986.  This interesting article is a great example of the way that library knowledge and practice tends to become isolated in the library silo, when it might have benefited many others located elsewhere. (It is also a testimony to the significant, short-sighted mistake made by the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and others, in closing their library science programs in the 1980s-1990s just when such knowledge was going public in Yahoo, Google, Amazon, GPS applications and countless other developments.)  Swanson's point is that "independently created fragments are logically related but never retrieved, brought together, and interpreted." The "essential incompleteness" of search (or now: discovery) makes "possible and plausible the existence of undiscovered public knowledge." (to quote the abstract --the article is highly relevant and well developed).  Where Swanson runs into trouble, however, is his use of Karl Popper's distinction between subjective and objective knowledge, the critical approach within science that distinguishes between "World 2" and "World 3."  (Popper's Three Worlds (.pdf), lectures at the University of Michigan in 1978, were a favorite of several of my professors at Columbia University School of Library Service; Swanson's article in turn was published and widely read while I was studying there.)

Popper's critical worlds (1: physical objects and events, including biological; 2: mental objects and events; 3: objective knowledge, a human but not Platonic zone) both enable the deep structures of information science as now practiced by our digital overlords as well and signal their fatal flaw.  They do this (enable the deep structures and algorithms of "discovery") by assuming the link between physical objects and events, mental objects, and objective knowledge symbolically notated (language, mathematics). Simultaneously Popper's linkage also signals their fatal flaw: such language (and mathematics) is or are used part-and-parcel in innumerable forms of human life and their languages "games," where the link between physical objects, mental objects, and so-called objective knowledge is puzzling, in addition to a never-ending source of philosophical delusion.

To sum up:  Google thinks its algorithm is serving up discoveries of objective realities, when it is really extending the form of life called "algorithm" --no "mere" here, but in fact an ideological extension of language that conceals its power relations and manufactures the assumed sense that such discovery is "natural."  It is au contraire a highly developed, very human form of life parallel to, and participating in, innumerable other forms of life, and just as subject to their foibles, delusions, illogic, and mistakes as any other linguistic form of life. There is no "merely" (so-called "nothing-buttery") to Google's ideological extension: it is very powerful and seems, at the moment, to rule the world.  Like every delusion, however, it could fall "suddenly and inexplicably," like an algorithmic Berlin Wall, and "no one could have seen it coming" --because of the magnificent illusion of ideology (as in the Berlin Wall, ideology on both sides, as well, upheld by both the CIA and the KGB).

This is once again to rehearse the crucial difference between Popper's and Wittgenstein's understandings of science and knowledge.  A highly relevant text is the lucid, short Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers, (by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Harper Collins, 2001; Worldcat).  Wittgenstein: if we can understand the way language works from within language (our only vantage point), most philosophical problems will disappear, and we are left with puzzles and mis-understandings that arise when we use improperly the logic of our language.  Popper: Serious philosophical problems exist with real-world consequences, and a focus upon language only "cleans its spectacles" to enable the wearer to see the world more clearly.  (The metaphor is approximately Popper's; this quick summary will undoubtedly displease informed philosophers, and I beg their forgiveness, for the sake of brevity.)

For Wittgenstein, if I may boldly speculate, Google would only render a reflection of ourselves, our puzzles, mis-understandings, and mistakes. Example: search "white girls," then clear the browser of its cookies (this is important), and search "black girls."  Behold the racial bias. The difference in Google's search results points to machine-reproduced racism that would not have surprised Wittgenstein, but seems foreign to the Popper's three worlds.  Google aspires to Popper's claims of objectivity, but behaves very differently --at least, its algorithm does.  No wonder its algorithm has taken on the aura of an ancient deity: it serves weal and woe without concern for the fortunes of dependent mortals. Except . . . it's a human construct.

So, Swanson's article identifies and makes plausible "undiscovered public knowledge" because of the logical and essential incompleteness of discovery (what he called "search"): discovery signals a wide variety of human forms of life, and no algorithm can really anticipate them.  The Antikythera mechanism, far from an odd example, is a pregnant metaphor for the poignant frailties of human knowledge and humans' drive to push past their limits. Like the Archimedes palimpsest, "undiscovered public knowledge" is one of the elements that makes human life human --without which we become, like the Q Continuum in Star Trek: Next Generation, merely idle god-like creatures of whim and no moral gravitas whatsoever.  The frailty of knowledge --the it is made up of innumerable forms of human life, which have to be lived by humans rather than algorithms-- gives the human drive to know its edge, and its tragedy.  A tragic sense of life, however, is antithetical to the tech-solutionist ideology of the algorithm.

(Continued in the second post, Undiscovered Summer Reading)

More than a month ago, Joshua Kim asked eleven questions of his colleagues at the Association of College and Research Libraries Conference 2017 (Baltimore, March 22-25). I don't have answers -- but at an embarrassing long delay, here are my responses to his eleven questions.
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More than a month ago, Joshua Kim asked eleven questions of his colleagues at ACRL 2017 (Association of College and Research Libraries, Baltimore, March 22-25).  I simply cannot keep up the pace of writing and work that apparently characterizes Dr. Kim (I ask, as does Barbara Fister: "how does he do it?").  I don't have answers -- but at an embarrassing long delay, here are my responses to his eleven questions:

Question 1: What is keeping academic librarians up at night?

Allergy to book mold?  Seriously: the mis-match between 1) the transformations of libraries and librarians now in process, 2) unrealistic expectations, both within and outside academe, about the transformation of higher education by digital technology, and 3) available financial resources.  There is barely enough money to fund our members' needs day-to-day, much less the future needs of members who will bring very high, very different expectations to their education and research.  Training and re-training librarians, even younger, newer ones, will also be not only a significant expense, but an unavoidable one if they are to remain relevant and aligned with their institutional mission.

Question 2: What will the academic library look like in 2025?

Libraries will still living in a both-and world: some members will continue to want printed books, but will use them differently than the recent past (2015).  Some printed books will explicitly engage digital resources as supplements and complements.  Some members will never want to see or open a printed book.  Some members will be working far more with data sets and non-textual (or ostensibly non-textual) information visualizations.  Libraries will have fewer printed books on site, more workspaces (and more different kinds), less reader or member privacy, and more commercialization by monetized information organizations.  Members will still want a physical library space to be a place to get and stay "on task."  Some members will never interact physically with a library, or personally with librarians, but will use library services every day through the information configurations that librarians will tend and troubleshoot.

Question 3: How is the academic librarian profession changing?

Already there is far more emphasis upon communication, instructional, and design skills than ten years ago (even than five years ago).   Technical, back-office skills are rapidly changing from the provision and editing of information to aligning interactive and interoperable information systems.  Library leadership is especially challenged to visualize what could be, might be, or will be, to our stakeholders, and figure out how to achieve all that, and yet negotiate present-day campus political, financial, and legal arrangements that often reflect patterns and processes that are already obsolete.

Question 4: What is the role of the academic library in leading institutional transformation?

Preface: If universities are like the proverbial elephant as regarded by the visually impaired, libraries are very well-positioned (almost uniquely) to see a great deal of the elephant. The daily life of a library interacts with faculty who are teaching and doing research right now, academic leadership, policy and planning, campus operations of all kinds, public safety and security, university financial offices, alumni/ae relationships, enrollment retention, student recruitment, faculty recruitment, information technology, instructional design, construction and facilities management, and sometimes even the food service.  As a library director, I have almost all of those people on speed-dial.

To answer this question: libraries are almost uniquely well-positioned to act as change agents by partnering with a wide variety of interests to achieve a cumulative social, educational, intellectual impact on campus beyond the abilities or purview of any one campus organization.  This requires vision, street smarts, and an ability to listen.  It requires seeing that library priorities are not always the institution's priorities, but when different they need to come into some kind of symbiosis.

Question 5: How do academic librarians think about learning innovation?

It's a broad term.  Librarians would love to collaborate with instructional designers, faculty members, and others to create pathways for learning that transcend previous classroom, lab, and practice settings.   Organizations, consultants, and academic specialists will all be part of that --but many academic librarians I know are increasingly suspicious of the corporate interests in the phrase "learning innovation."  The innovations to learning in higher education that will be most productive are those that will not be packaged and sold by corporate interests, but will be far more local, ad-hoc, and malleable by teachers and learners themselves.  When I view a video purporting to be about Learning Innovation, and the head of Thomas Friedman talks, then I begin to wonder whose interests are really going to be served.

Question 6:  What is the role of the academic library in leading institutional efforts [that will] drive progress in the iron triangle of costs, access, and quality?

Academic librarians have a lot of experience with the trade-offs of costs, access limitations, and quality (both of information per se, and of presentation and interface).  Part of my daily life is putting budget numbers and academic ways-and-means together.  I believe the academic library's role can be incubator, initiator, and assessor of costs for access and quality of outcomes but that role is not guaranteed.  I believe that academic librarians will also want to challenge the oft-encountered (perhaps dominant) idea that instructional quality is simply a cost that limits institutional net income.  The recent ACE paper Instructional Quality, Student Outcomes, and Institutional Finances (.pdf) points at research that needs to be done, and assumptions that should be interrogated.

Question 7: What does the academic library leadership pipeline look like?

I heard some real concerns at ACRL about how the field will mentor future leaders who will need the financial, political, academic, and social skills necessary to lead a complicated organization on a complicated campus (physical or digital).  The relative slow-down in professional movement, promotion, and retirements in the years after 2009, coupled with either outright downsizing or less (immediately) drastic holds on hiring, have produced a situation where there is not a sufficient number of opportunities for rising leaders to learn their craft.  The profession is greying, and I cannot blame recent college graduates who bypass library and information science programs in favor of fields in which they will be able to pay off their substantial student debts more readily.  Yet we really need those people, and we need creative, competent new professionals of every age who will contribute their perspectives and learn how business actually gets done in many institutions.

Question 8:  How is the academic library addressing challenges around diversity and inclusion?

This was also a major theme of the ACRL conference, and built up to the simply fabulous closing keynote by Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress.  These challenges play differently in contexts: large academic library systems can pursue strategies and mentorships that may not be practical for much smaller libraries --where challenges and real needs for diversity of perspectives, persons, and inclusions of all kinds of persons are still very much present and felt.  I think this is a real opportunity for ACRL: to lead a multi-sided approach with library and information schools, foundations and grantors, large and small academic libraries, national, state, and regional library associations (in particular with library technology, and leadership & management divisions), and academic administrative organizations (AAC&U, ACAD, and HERC), for a cumulative impact on the profession, the libraries, and the universities.  I think that the professional leadership education offered by the Harvard Graduate School of Education is also a vital and viable venue to put together the efforts of many organizations.

Question 9:  What are the big arguments and debates within the academic library discipline?

I find so many that I will inevitably leave some out of even a very long list.  But here's my short list:

  • Privacy, user security, and trust: maintaining the academic library digital and physical space as a non-commercial zone of exception, as much as possible; and the way that user's searches and downloads can become monetized data points for commercial services that offer a false equivalent to a real library--and whether librarians can really do anything about that, or respond to it usefully;
  • Evolving understandings or interpretations of the Information Literacy Framework: what it brings in, leaves out, interrogates, and strengthens, and the sometimes yawning gap between the aspirations of the Framework and the sometimes frightening realities of many young students' lack of curiosity and joy;
  • The persistent tensions between "resilience" as a good term for a kind of creative flexibility in the face of adversity, and "resilience" as a substitution of a personal response for a solution to a structural problem.  I heard one speaker use the work and then immediately apologize for it after a standing-room-only presentation called Resilience, Grit and Other Lies: Academic Libraries and the Myth of Risiliency (.pdf)

Other attendees are welcome to point out all the good fights I missed.

Question 10:  How is the relationship between academic libraries and centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) evolving?

I'm not sure there is a consensus, since there are so many variables in academic contexts. I know of one case where a beautifully renovated CTL in fact combined about 10 other services formerly located elsewhere in a large university.  That set of new partnerships has required so much team-building and re-negotiation that librarians in the same building have not had as much contact as they previously anticipated (this may be changing recently).  Where the CTL and librarian partners have sufficient contact and are not completely frustrated by funding limitations (or non-existence), I have heard that enormously fruitful partnerships evolving.  Open Educational Resources, Open Textbooks, and so many other hot topics really call for multi-sided collaborations.  My favorite anecdote is of an information technologist with a strong secondary background in instructional design who exclaimed, "Wow, there's a lot of information technology in the library!"  I believe that many libraries, especially on undergraduate-oriented campuses, were attempting to be centers for teaching and learning before the phrase was invented, and in those places where turf is not a source of conflict, creative partnerships are forming.

The recent Ithaka S+R survey of library directors found that "while [many] library directors agreed that librarians at their institutions contribute significantly to student learning in a variety of ways, only about half of the faculty members for the Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2015 recognized these contributions." (pages 3-4) I suspect that both Centers for Teaching and Learning and academic libraries face a common challenge to communicate what they can (and do) contribute to faculty who are genuinely skeptical or worried about maintaining their turf.

Question 11:  What questions should I be asking about the changing academic library?

The fact that you are asking any questions is remarkable for many academic librarians, who have so often felt marginalized (for reasons good and bad) by campus technology and technologists in the past couple of decades.  You don't take anything for granted.

I can only really respond by suggesting the question that I'm asking as I lead my organization through a process of listening, thinking and planning together: what is our core mission in plain language?  What is our value proposition for our institution?  How do we show that we are doing that?  How does our mission and value proposition align with our institution's proclaimed commitments and priorities?

In this process I have spoken with many people on my campus, and (following advice from a mentor) I asked each of them simply:  "What is your job?  What difference does your office make here?  What's your biggest challenge?"  Their responses were amazing, and almost all of them pointed in one direction: "how do we communicate to a skeptical world what an amazing difference real learning can make in a student's life?"  To the extent that our library can respond to that question with grace and authenticity, we can also state our value proposition and our mission, and our alignment with our university.

Even with all the challenges, controversies, and constraints, this is the best time ever to be an academic librarian.

Navigating the shoals of evaluative entanglement requires complex thinking and a certain level of lived experience. There is no app for this. But there is a course, and I recommend Including Ourselves in the Change Equation whole-heartedly to anyone who really wants to change.
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Back on January 5 (doesn't that seem like another age of Middle Earth by now?), Cal Newport wrote about what he termed "evaluation entanglement:

  • Evaluation entanglement. Keeping your productivity commitments all tangled in your head can cause problems when a strategy fails. Without more structure to the productivity portion of you life, it’s too easy for your brain to associate that single failure with a failure of your commitments as a whole, generating a systemic reduction in motivation.

Newport was writing in the context of New Year's "productivity tweaks," or what were once called resolutions. They usually go by the boards in a few days or weeks.

So far as I can tell, Newport borrowed "evaluation entanglement" from the physics of entangled states (Newport is a scientist) and description/evaluation entanglement in the work of Hilary Putnam (Newport is also a philosopher) --and both of these clusters disciplines are pertinent and informative for Newport's primary intellectual interest in computer science, distributed algorithms that help agents work together.  

Putnam's work on fact/value entanglement liberated "thick ethical concepts" that lie under sentences such as Nero is cruel from the straightjacket of notions of fact and value judgement, so that Nero is cruel can express a value judgement and a descriptive judgement at the same time.  The entanglement of facts and values is a characteristics of those many statements that" do not acquire value from the outside, from the subject's perspective, for example, but facts that, under certain conditions, have a recognizable and objective value." (Martinez Vidal, Cancela Silva, and Rivas Monroy, Following Putnam's Trail, ISBN 9789042023970, 2008, page 291)

Newport's point is simpler, but lies in the shadow of Putnam's entanglement of facts and values: a person can associate her or his single failure in one element or commitment (to productivity, in this context) with the failure of his or her commitments as a whole --and that this pervasive sense of value can generate "a systemic reduction in motivation."  In other words: I want to be productive in manners or projects A, B, C, and D, "and if I fail at C, I fail at the rest, and my life rots."  The fact of failure with C generates an evaluative entanglement that describes my whole life.

A life so described needs to be described in much thicker terms, however.  Such failure is very rarely simple, straightforward failure.

This is where the work of Robert Kagan and Lisa Laskow Lahey at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is very helpful.  They have focused on immunity to change: both individual's immunity, and organizational immunity.  In their book Immunity to Change, and their large online class (I hesitate to call it MOOC) Including Ourselves in the Change Equation,  they explore and describe the significant difference between undertaking technical means to solve adaptive challenges --when change is not simply a matter of altering well-known behaviors and thought, but involves adapting thinking and finding new mental and emotional complexities at work.  

Based upon adaptive theories of mind and organizational theories of change, Kagan and Lahey take their students on a journey of thinking new thoughts, or telling their stories in a new way --literally, changing the narrative in such as a manner that both visible commitments to change, and corresponding hidden, competing commitments that block change, can reveal a person's (or organization's) big assumptions about the world.  By holding up those big assumptions to the light of understanding and reflection, persons can question effectively and adaptively whether such assumptions in fact are valid.

I took this course last Fall, and found it to be a very rich experience.  I won't reveal what my own visible commitments, hidden competing commitments, and big assumptions were --only to say that I was working on a life-long issue that affects every relationship and commitment in my life.  My goal for change and understanding was something that definitely passed the "spouse test" --"oh yeah, that's you one hundred percent."

Kagan's and Lahey's metaphor one foot on the gas, the other foot on the brake pretty well summed up what I had been finding in attempting changes in my life and character.  That metaphor invokes neatly an "evaluation entanglement" -- both a descriptive judgement and value judgement in the same phrase.  The "thick ethical concept" is a philosophical way of telling a story --telling a narrative of your own life (or your organization's life) that frames the descriptions and the values in a certain way of thinking.  Adapting such thinking to new complexities, and changing the story by expanding and deepening it, is the core structure that liberates a person, and changes and organization, from taking one example of failure as "failure of your commitments as a whole." Such increasing mental complexity and adaptive thinking is critical to avoid "generating a systemic reduction in motivation."  There's nothing that defeats a person or an organization quite like the experience of seeking change but blocking change at the same time, one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.  What is produced is a great deal of heat, significant atmospheric pollution, very little traction, and no progress.

Navigating the shoals of evaluative entanglement requires complex thinking and a certain level of lived experience.  There is no app for this.  But there is a course, and I recommend Including Ourselves in the Change Equation whole-heartedly to anyone who really wants to change.

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There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled – in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is neither that bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. This perspective from below must not become the partisan possession of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do justice to life in all its dimensions from a higher satisfaction, whose foundation is beyond any talk of ‘from below’ or ‘from above’. This is the way in which we may affirm it.

 

Es bleibt ein Erlebnis von unvergleichlichem Wert, da wir die großen Ereignisse der Weltgeschichte einmal von unten, aus der Perspektive der Ausgeschalteten, Beargwöhnten, Schlechtbehandelten, Machtlosen, Unterdrückten und Verhöhnten, kurz der Leidenden, sehen gelernt haben. Wenn nur in dieser Zeit nicht Bitterkeit oder Neid das Herz zerfressen hat, daß wir Großes und Kleines, Glück und Unglück, Stärke und Schwäche mit neuen Augen ansehen, daß unser Blick für Größe, Menschlichkeit, Recht und Barmherzigkeit klarer, freier, unbestechlicher geworden ist, ja, daß das persönliche Leiden ein tauglicherer Schlüssel, ein fruchtbareres Prinzip zur betrachtenden und tätigen Erschließung der Welt ist als persönliches Glück. Es kommt nur darauf an, daß diese Perspektive von unten nicht zur Parteinahme für die ewig Un-zufriedenen wird, sondern daß wir aus einer höheren Zufriedenheit, die eigentlich jenseits von unten und oben begründet ist, dem Leben in allen seinen Dimensionen gerecht werden, und es so bejahen. 

American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters "has brought together a diverse group of scholars to write letters to [the executive and his] administration, and our elected officials in the House and Senate. These letters articulate core American values that are rooted or reflected in our various faith traditions
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American Values Religious Voices: 100 Days. 100 Letters "has brought together a diverse group of scholars to write letters to [the executive and his] administration, and our elected officials in the House and Senate. These letters articulate core American values that are rooted or reflected in our various faith traditions."

The scholars joined the founder of this idea, Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss, Associate Professor of Bible at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City.  She felt that the words and actions of the campaign and its aftermath call into question fundamental values that has long defined this country and culture.  She and the writers are hopeful that their observations will spark ideas and insights about what it means to be an American, and to contribute to our national discourse.

The group is non-partisan, and characterized by a sense of relevancy and urgency.  The contributors show the kind of diversity that makes us who we are as a nation: religions, races, generations, genders, ages, political viewpoints, sexual orientations, and geographic location.

Join with me in subscribing to these letters (form in the footer of the campaign's home page.  As of today (January 22) three letters have been written and sent, by Rabbi Weiss, John Kutsko, Director of the Society of Biblical Literature and Professor of Biblical Studies at Emory University, and Eric Barreto, Weyerhauser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Will this campaign make any difference?  To the current incumbent, perhaps not.  It is vital for the rest of us to stand up, however, and show both the clarity and restraint that are the best values of all those who work in higher education, whether as teaching scholars or in other roles.

Please also write to express your support, to [email] -- this is a vital witness at a perilous time in our country's history, and time when we need to re-affirm the key values of religious diversity, principled argumentation, respect for facts, respect for differences of point of view, and humility.  (And see Frank Bruni in the January 22, 2017 New York Times regarding humility.)

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After more than forty years, Janik's and Toulmin's demanding Wittgenstein's Vienna (1972) holds up remarkably well. Their argument situates Wittgenstein's first major thoughts in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the milieu of the generalized crisis of communication, and the problem of the limits of language and expression that was felt across many disciplines, from architecture, design, music, literature, and drama (including opera).  

They move from the broad (a description and analysis of culture and politics in Hapsburg [or Habsburg] Vienna) to very fine-grained analyses of philosophical positions and projects undertaken by inheritors of Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard --especially Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz, Ludwig Boltzman, and Fritz Mauthner.  Janik and Toulmin see the Tractatus as fundamentally an ethical deed. The famous aphorisms found late in the text (especially Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen = Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent) were significantly misinterpreted by the positivists in the subsequent Vienna Circle (1920s) as meaning that such statements or expressions cannot be important: they "had equated the "important" with the the "verifiable" and dismissed all unverifiable propositionas "unimportant because unsayable" whereas the concluding section of the Tractatus insisted "though to deaf ears--that the unsayable alone has genuine value." (p. 220, the authors' emphases).

Janik and Toulmin then move outward from these fine-grained considerations back to the wider cultural impact --and in some cases mis-appropriation-- of Wittgenstein's first and second thoughts.  (His second thoughts being his return to philosophy from the late 1920s to his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations.)  Throughout his work, Wittgenstein maintained a strong ethical interest in mapping what can be said, and what can be considered truthful under which circumstances.  His fundamentally polemical tone and strong ethical interest --highly individualistic, and tending to disregard historical change and development-- were quite possibly his only effective way to communicate.  The professionalization of culture, which Viennese cultural originators (such as Wittgenstein, Loos, and Schoenberg) ironically and inadvertently set loose, created a new "orthodoxy" which in turn was susceptible of overthrow by cultural movements and developments which remain --despite discord-- also the legitimate heirs of fin de siècle revisionist critiques.

The conditions of Austria "illustrate the ways in which famiiar processes of communal life manifest themselves, so to say, under conditions of abnormal pressure and temperature," and those conditions were provided --and amped up-- by the reactionary assumptions and policies of the Hapsburgs from Francis I, Metternich, and Francis Joseph (Franz Josef).  The double-talk, avoidance, and utter fallacies of Austro-Hungarian politics and culture have an eerie ring in the contemporary world, especially in America, and the rising of a strong man to sweep all that aside is uncomfortably close to the Austrian politics of the 1920s and 1930s.  Janik and Toulman write,

If the experience of our own times gives us a new feeling for the Habsburg situation, so too --conversely-- a greater familiarity with the life and times of men like [Karl] Kraus and Wittgenstein can help us see our own situation more clearly.  Nowadays as much as in the years before 1914, political dishonesty and deviousness quickly find expression in debased language, which blunts the sensitivity of the political agent himself [sic] to the character of his own actions and politics.  So the intention to deceive others ends by generating self-deceit. (p. 269)

Is there any better description of American politics of the 21st century?  Janik and Toulmin go on:

In other respects, too the Krausian problems about communication have counterparts in contemporary America.  However much the United States sets out to b a melting pot in which the children of former Europeans --and, to a lesser extent Asians and Africans--would learn to live together as a single American nation, this idealistic hope has been relaized in practice only in part.  The ethnic rivalries of Central Europe . . . [and] the prejudices of the Europeans toward [others] . . . all of these have been muted rather than forgotten, and every economic setback has the power to revive ethnic bitterness and racial feeling.  So, in the United States today, we often seem to be watching, while only half understanding, a bungled remake of some political drama originally played out in the last days of the Habsburg Empire. (p. 270)

This was published in 1972! --during the political dishonesty of the Nixon years.  How little seems to have changed --and the prejudices now are not even muted.  If there are any general lessons, the first the Janik and Toulmin find is: "a culture which erects insuperable barriers to meaningful discussion and real and urgent problems becomes, in a certain sense, pathological.  The pretense that things are other than they are cannot be kept up indefinitely. . . . Wherever constitutional theory and political practice part company for long enough from the realities of an actual situation, similar pathological syndromes can be expected." (pp. 272-273)  Further comment is hardly necessary: global climate change.

Karl Marx' famous observation that "all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce" must be extended in 2017.  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte assumed dictatorial powers in France in 1851, a farce of the original Napoleon, the tragic.  We might add that tragedy of Hapsburg Europe, re-enacted as tragical farce by Richard Nixon in the United States, now returns . . . as a bungled re-make.  A bungled re-make that is comprised of equal parts of stupidity, incompetence, and malevolence: in a word, pathological.  Perhaps the only way forward now --while fully conscious of the a-historical, too-individualistic tendencies of the original --is to subject language and language games to vigorous and sharp critique, so that "language games "might have genuine force and application, only to the extent that they are themselves rooted in authentic forms of life." (p. 273)

What authentic forms of life are possible now?  How can we avoid a reactive revolution that will merely install a new false consciousness? How can language games rooted in authentic forms of life avoid deception --and self-deception, the kind of self-deception at the root of the pathological American politics of the present time?

The Hapsburg, Viennese (1900s) central problems of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression are all involved --in a remarkably similar manner-- in the political and social events that crystalized in 2016 in America.
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Events during 2016 (and not just the US election) have caused me to re-assess my work and many of the assumptions of my life, from the ground up.  What do I mean when I say I'm a Christian, and how does that really come out in my life?  What are my fundamental commitments?  How do I identify myself as a reflective, thoughtful person in a culture that has no room for reflection, thoughtfulness, and a most casual disregard for basic matters of truth?

So I began to start again, to re-examine authors and composers that have affected me the most from my beginnings: with the Greeks; the Greek New Testament; the writings of John Calvin and Karl Barth; George Herbert, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot; J. R. R. Tolkien; Søren Kierkegaard, Ludwig Wittgenstein; J. S. Bach; Johannes Brahms, to name a few.  (I am very aware that those are entirely European and male, but I have to be honest about how and what I learned, and when, and who I am.)

As regards Wittgenstein, I also have returned to renew my reading of German, with Hermann Hesse's Demian in a dual-language edition, and to the intellectual world of 19th- and early 20th-century German-language writers and thinkers, especially in Vienna.  Hence I returned to Wittgenstein's Vienna, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin (Simon & Schuster, 1973), a book that still holds up well more than 40 years later.

The authors mount a multi-pronged argument, that difficulties regarding communication, language, and expression arose in late Hapsburg, fin de siècle Vienna that became ripe for philosophical investigation, and that these difficulties were shared across a wide spectrum of artists, musicians, writers, physicians (including psychoanalysts) and scholars --almost all of whom knew each other, at least socially.  The central figure is the now-not-so-well-known Karl Kraus and his scathing critique of Viennese bourgeois and aristocratic life and social realities (almost all of which were officially denied), and the loose circle of Krausians such as Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos (architecture), Artur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Robert Musil (literature), Arnold Schoenberg (music), Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoscha and Egon Schiele (art).  Musil satirically dubbed a semi-fiction empire of his fiction in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities) "Kakania," a play on the  kaiserlich-königlich or kaiserlich und königlich, expressions that provided status indicators in the complicated social hierarchy of the time, and equally concealed the dishonesty and deceit at the core of the Hapsburg state.

Janik and Toulin articulate their central thesis most clearly:

We have spotlighted the problem of language in Hoffmannsthal, because this serves to introduce and illustrate our own central hypothesis about Viennese culture --namely that to be a fin de siècle Viennese artist or intellectual, conscious of the social realities of Kakania, one had to face the problem of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication. . . . . By the year 1900, the linked problems of communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression had been faced in parallel in all the major fields of thought and art. . . . So the stage was set for a philosophical critique of language, given in completely general terms. (page 117 and 119, with authors' emphasis)

Janik and Toulmin then examine how this task presented itself to thinkers such as Ernst Mach, the Kantian traditionalists, and the "anti-philosophers" following Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and (to some extent) Mauthner.  They will then place Wittgenstein (the early, of the Tractatus) in this context.

These central problems of the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication, authenticity, and symbolic expression are all involved --in a remarkably similar manner-- in the political and social events that crystalized in 2016, although tendencies toward strident nationalism, racism, and the remarkable coarsening of political and social communication were well apparent decades before.  Social media have created a post-factual communication of deceit which is routinely denied by the networks' owners' who benefit from the confusion and monetarized deceit.  American society faces a number of problems that simply cannot be addressed given the terms of communication and expression before and in 2016.  Like the creaking, only-semi-functional Kakanian state, the American state and culture is a shaken, badly sagging structure (and infrastructure), and it does not require unusual foresight to anticipate any number of future disasters, whether ecological, political, social, cultural, or military.

Like the blissfully ignorant inhabits of Kakania in the early 1900s, we 21st-century Americans may all have completely missed the ominous and destructive potential of our times, in large part as a function of inauthentic language, expression, and communication gone wild.  Our language and media have lost their mooring in authentic use and useful social understanding of justice.  I will be reading more Wittgenstein, and more about him, and writing here.  We may be facing, as found Karl Kraus' writings, Die Letzte Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Humanity).

Wolf proposes and defends a “fitting fulfillment” view, that what can truly give meaning to one's life is an activity that one feels answers a deep internal need for engagement and has a certain kind of objective worth to others. Why does it matter? --because meaning can give shape and direction to one’s life that transcends simple self-interest or universal, objective good. Wolf proposes that such a life can have objective value, but also recognizes a need for modesty (“Who’s to say? The elites?”).
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Meaning In Life cover imageMeaning in Life, and Why It Matters, by Susan Wolf.  With Commentary by John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly, and Jonathan Haidt.  Princeton University Press, 2010.  143 pages.  ISBN 978-0-691-14524-2.  Sacred Heart University Library BD431.W77 2010

A colleague who noticed Meaning in Life on my desk asked, “Really? Is there any?”  Influenced by this book, I responded, “Yes there can be, but you have to think carefully.”  Susan Wolf carefully formulates an enlightening and at least partially persuasive case that yes, there can be meaning in life, and if you feel your life has none, you should reflect on that.  This long review takes a careful look at her thinking, because her questions cut to the core of a liberal arts education (see the closing remarks, below).
 
The book is a kind of symposium.  Wolf’s two essays (“Meaning in Life,” and “Why It Matters”) are followed by responses from four distinguished scholars: John Koethe, Robert M. Adams, Nomy Arpaly (philosophy), and Jonathan Haidt (psychology), to whom Wolf then replies.  This give the entire work a texture, range, and collective impact beyond any one or two essays.
 
Wolf starts by righty questioning the two predominant models that we often have in the background when we evaluate our actions (or the actions of others): the egoistic perspective (it’s in my self-interest) or impersonal perspective, “from the point of view of the universe.”  But there are situations where either model or both are unconvincing, and as models of motivation and practical reason they seem to leave out a lot of the many motives and reasons that shape our lives.  These could be “reasons of love” or “reasons of pleasure” that will be distorted if pressed into an iron grid of self-interest or universal disinterestedness.  A proper reason of love will be directed towards a worthy object of love, and when the idea of meaningfulness is introduced, can give reasons for finding meaning beyond duty or love.
 
“Love” as “being gripped by” or actively engaging with a valuable object, to promote and protect it, is an apt example of Aristotle’s endoxic method, agreed-upon “things which are accepted by everyone, or by most people or by the wise.”  But what are those things? 
 
One prominent “fulfillment” view (popularized by Steve Jobs, whom Wolf does not mention) is that it does not matter what you do with your life as long as it is something you love: “Follow your passion,” figure out what turns you on, and go for it. (p. 10)
 
A second view says that a truly satisfying life involves something that is “larger than oneself,” a two-fold view of something independent of oneself and has its source outside of oneself.  Wolf uses excellent examples: Sisyphus has a meaningless existence objectively even if he magically believes that he is fulfilled by eternally rolling a rock uphill.  Spending a life smoking pot, conceivably an independent good with its source outside of oneself, does not contribute any benefits to anyone else.
 
Wolf proposes and defends a “fitting fulfillment” view, that what can truly give meaning to one's life is an activity that one feels answers a deep internal need for engagement and has a certain kind of objective worth to others.  The feeling of being occupied with something of independent value, that takes one out of oneself, is vital to our social natures and a certain human tendency to try to see oneself of an external point of view. (Nagel’s “view from nowhere” or Gods-eye point of view). This subjective desire is balanced with a sense of objective value: meaningfulness is a matter of active and loving engagement in projects of worth.
 
Why does it matter?  --because meaning can give shape and direction to one’s life that transcends simple self-interest or universal, objective good.  Wolf proposes that such a life can have objective value, but also recognizes a need for modesty (“Who’s to say? The elites?”) and she acknowledges that great care and reserve must be taken when assessing aesthetic, idealistic, and essentially private projects.  Weeding a garden might be very meaningful to a dedicated gardener but meaningless to someone who finds it a chore. 
 
Wolf returns to her insight that “much of what we do is not obviously justified by either morality or self-interest.”  She names various activities that by those criteria only would appear irrational or mistaken.  She then rejoins, “Yet to regard them as morally valuable, much less as morally better than alternatives, is to puff them up in a way that seems both pompous and hard to sustain.” (p. 50)   By comparing and contrasting meaning with self-interest and morality, Wolf sustains “reasons of love,” but with great modesty, and recognizes that her argument needs an idea of objective value.  “One can find the question, What has objective value? intelligible and important while remaining properly humble about one’s limited ability to discover the answer and properly cautious about the uses to which one’s partial and tentative answer may be put.” (p. 63)
 
The subsequent four comments focus upon particular questions, applications, and examples.  Koethe asks whether artists can have meaningful lives even when they are almost unknown, possibly delusional, or troubled by disturbing psychological compulsions.  “It is difficult to distinguish (from the viewpoint of an artist) between successful achievement of serious aesthetic aims and the delusion that one has them, and they’ve been achieved.” (p. 71) Is that life meaningful or wasted?  If it is art, is it significant?  “Even if (delusion or self-deception) jeopardizes my ability to derive satisfaction and comfort from a life based on aesthetic commitments . . . it is simply a predicament I have to live with.” (p. 73)
 
Adams raises the complex and morally important example of Claus von Stauffenberg’s project of rescuing Germany from Nazism, culminating in his attempt to assassinate Hitler and lead a coup d’état in July, 1944.  He failed, but “did Stauffenberg himself, in the end, find his life meaningful because of his project, despite its failure?”  It was certainly an objective value independent of himself, recognized by others,
but it did lead to feelings of fulfillment?  He was described on that evening as looking “indescribably sad.”  Stauffenberg recognized the moral ambiguity of patriotic love, which has inspired both admirable achievements and enormous wrongs and follies. (p. 82) He could see a path that held at least a slight hope of leading to a better future.  Those who shared his insights (and, in some measure, the plot) also recognized meaningfulness even in defeat, most famously Dietrich Bonhoeffer, peripherally involved but nonetheless convicted and executed (my example, not Adams’).  On the day of his death, Bonhoeffer was reported to have said, “This is the end –for me the beginning of life,” not simply a proclamation of Christian faith, but an assessment of his own life at the moment he faced torture and death.  It is important to recognize “a very important kind of positive meaningfulness in life that responds to objective goods with motives of love that are not impartially moral motives.”
 
Nomy Arpaly questions the necessary role Wolf claims objective worth has in providing meaning in life.  What appears as worthless (a “goldfish nut” wholly devoted to her goldfish) may be more circumstantial: a mentally disabled person may find great meaning in such activity. A plethora of values complicates the case, there is no “top” moral value among values. Is there a truth about which love to value when loves conflict?
 
Jonathan Haidt asks whether the ideas of vital engagement and hive psychology can help solve the problem of objective meaning.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has written about vital engagement as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance.”  The quality of the connection is vital; but does Wolf really need a theory of objective value?  Hive psychology suggests that social sciences (and philosophy) have been plagued by methodological individualism, but if the fundamental unit of psychology is not the individual but the group, then perhaps the modern, independent sense of self is an anomaly.  As Enlightenment bees we busted out of the hive and burned it down, and the great challenge of modernity is to find hives for ourselves. “We can co-create or join into, something larger than ourselves.”  The challenge we face is to choose the right kind of hive, and why it matters that we choose rightly. (pp. 100-101)
 
Wolf’s response is nuanced.  She maintains an interest in objective meaning, but recognizes its difficulties, and that no one is thereby authorized to assess it decisively on behalf either of oneself or others.  Haidt’s response suggests that there may be a reconciliation of objective value and subjective interest in the larger structures and sets of activities that a meaningful life can create (examples: sports, games, the arts).  Value emerges from from the interests and commitments of people who share such activities, and this recognizes a continuum of value upon which a sense of a meaningful life may lie.  Through concepts of objective value and subjective fulfillment we can come to understand some of our longings and sources of satisfaction, and properly assess some of our moral and evaluative intuitions, ask questions, and form hypotheses.  These concepts allow us to move closer to examining what kinds of projects and what kinds of lives are (or can be) meaningful.
 
Christopher Eisgruber, the President of Princeton University, asked each incoming first year student (class of 2018) to read Wolf’s book in the summer of 2014.  He then discussed this “pre-read” with students in Princeton’s residential colleges through the subsequent year.  He chose it for two reasons, because “it is a superb example of engaged, ethical writing, and I hope that it will introduce the freshmen to the kinds of scholarship they will encounter at Princeton,” and because “a key point in Wolf's argument pertains to the objectivity of value and why it matters; that question is important, and it inspires lively argument among undergraduates.”
 
The question of meaning in life, and why it matters, is at the heart of a liberal arts education, whether at Princeton or elsewhere.  It would be interesting to converse with Wolf in the context of the “Catholic Intellectual Tradition” examined and queried at Sacred Heart University, because there are important points of convergence and divergence.  Certainly, that tradition is concerned with assessing the whole of life, and might also be in need of Wolf’s salutary reminder to reflect modestly when assessing what might make another’s life meaningful (or wasted), and prudent caution about the uses to which one’s partial or tentative answer might be put.   Theories of objective value can be linked superficially with theological claims of revealed value, a confusion that does neither intellectual tradition any good. Wolf’s question is important from any Christian point of view, whether Catholic or other, and this book is a remarkable conversation both in its scope and its lack of pretension.  Her book engages questions that many undergraduates seem inclined to avoid, but could nevertheless frame the engaged insight that is the point of the liberal arts.