“Most of society’s arguments are kept alive by a failure to acknowledge nuance. We tend to generate false dichotomies, then try to argue one point using two entirely different sets of assumptions, like two tennis players trying to win a match by hitting beautifully executed shots from either end of separate tennis courts.” - Tim Minchin
nuance
/ˈno͞oˌäns/
noun
- a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound.
That right there is a definition. By explicitly stating it, I am attempting to ensure that you and I are on the same page as to what that word means. I’m removing the nuance from nuance, if you will. It’s a worthwhile practice, but not one that we need or should do all the time - mostly because it would be impossible to effectively communicate anything of value. The thing about definitions is that they are made up of words which in and of themselves have definitions. It’s similar to the Wikipedia example from 01 - Why, but different in that it doesn’t converge down so a single word. There is no one word that serves as the starting point for all other words. That’s the funny thing about words; at some point you just have to kind of “get it”.
If you've ever watched a well structured debate between two intelligent people with opposing viewpoints, you likely will have seen instances where they ask each other to define the terms in which they are using. "What do you mean by (blank)?" This is because they recognize how futile the ensuing discussion would be if they have different definitions for the key words/topics they are debating. Different definitions? How is that possible? Doesn’t each word only have one definition? Theoretically, yes; but as individuals we don’t think of words by their definitions. We know this because if I were to ask two capable individuals to write down the definition for any given word, the vast majority of the time they would write down similar but not identical definitions. Does this mean that one of both of them is wrong? Not necessarily; different dictionaries define words slightly differently and no one makes a fuss about it. Why? Because everyone understands on some level that words are inherently imprecise.
As humans, we don’t think of words by their definitions. If you had a group of people watch a video of two people punching and kicking each other, and asked “describe this situation in one word”, the vast majority would say “fight”. People do not come to this word choice by trying to map their observations explicitly to a definition; no one would actually be describing the situation as a series of words, and then trying to find a word with that as its definition. We observe the situation and we just know it is a “fight”.
…
Language as a tool
Language, in this case as text, is something we humans have invented to bolster our ability to communicate with one another. However, the tradeoff we have been forced to accept is that each word of our various languages does not necessarily mean the same thing to everyone.
Imagine you are a child learning the ways of the world, and in one of your favourite juvenile past times, someone is reading you a book with various shapes and colours and when they point to one of them, they say “red”. Maybe one day you repeat it back, and your little baby brain begins to associate the colour with the word. Somewhere else in your community, one of your baby peers is going through a similar exercise, except they are being trained using objects. Someone has been showing them a toy and explaining to them that it too is, in fact, “red”. Then, a short while down the line, you and your toddler peer find yourself in the same classroom and the teacher hands you both a marker she labels as “red”. Your peer agrees, as the marker’s “red” is the same as their toy’s “red”. However you on the other hand are somewhat confused as your book’s “red” doesn’t quite look the same as your marker’s “red”. Its confusing at first, but as this process repeats itself you begin to understand that “red” has “shades”, and that the word “red” is just a symbol we use to denote anything that visually appears as “red-ish”. You also learn that these “shades” mean that sometimes something can look sort of “red”, and sort of “pink”. You can imagine that if you were to pick a shade somewhere along the red-pink spectrum and forced people to only use one word to describe the shade, you might get some that say it’s “red” and some that say its “pink”. This differing of opinion is not just limited to colours, in fact it applies to a whole class of words we call adjectives.
Nouns and Adjectives
I know I know, nobody (especially me) likes grammar - but bear with me. There’s really only two pieces of grammar to review:
- Noun: A noun is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.
- Adjective: An adjective is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
So when I say something like “He is a terrible person.”; the adjective is “terrible” and the noun is “person”. The important distinction that I will continue to come back to throughout this book is that adjectives are relative while nouns are (usually) binary. What I mean by this is that everyone has different definitions of what “terrible” is to them. Anything that is relative implies the usage of a gradient. For example, your personal definition of terrible consists of a gradient with the most terrible thing you can possibly think of at one end, and the least terrible thing you can think of at the other end. Then when I say the word “terrible”, you subconsciously relate back to this complex interplay of memories - this is to say what you associate with the word. The issue with adjectives/relative words is that everyone has different examples that make up their version of the spectrum. The most terrible thing you can think of is a product of your experiences up to this point.
Imagine you are a child who has just reached the age where they can understand and communicate using language. If I were to ask this child what the most terrible thing they can think of is, they might say something like “punching someone”. Then if I were to ask an adult the same question, they would probably say some sort of combination of rape, murder, genocide, torture, etc.
Now when we use a word like “terrible” without any relative comparison, people associate with the collective understanding of their definition of the word. Because language often moves so fast, we don’t stop to think about this fact. Because everyone has such different experiences, when compounded together, the same statement can have very different meaning to different people with different life experiences.
Take for example the following sentence (fun fact: this sentence contains every letter of the alphabet):
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Within this sentence there are four adjectives (quick, brown, jumps, lazy) and two nouns (fox, dog). Imagine you had crafted this sentence to describe a short video clip you watched. Now imagine 100 other people watched this same clip and were asked to provide their one sentence description of what they saw. You might get things like “The fast orange fox stepped over the sleeping dog” or “The speedy red fox leaped over the tired dog”. Who is right? Is the fox orange, red, or brown? Try and define a color without using other colors. Did it step, jump, or leap? What is the difference between a step and a jump? Is a leap a bigger jump or are they the same thing? Is the dog lazy, sleeping, or tired? Does lazy imply that the dog should be doing something else instead of resting?
You can begin to see how such a simple clip could be described and understood in so many different ways. Sure, we could try and take the time to align on a common definition of the distinction between red and orange or jumping and leaping, but we don’t because it would be both boring and highly inefficient - and thats okay. I’m not advocating for painstakingly defining every adjective you use, but I am advocating for the continual reminder that you are using subjective and imprecise adjectives all the time. Thoughout this book I will do my best to remind you of my use of these fickle adjectives whenever it seems important. However, that will be a near impossible task because, well, what is the definition of the adjective “important”? Important to me or important to you? Do you get my point?
Gradient Analysis
Hopefully by now it is clear that adjectives fall onto a gradient, and that different people may have different gradients for these adjectives. This probably wasn’t all that surprising because as I said at the beginning of the chapter, I think it is something we all know but just often forget. And thats okay, because like I said, it would be highly impractical to try and align our gradients/definitions every time.
However, now that we understand adjectives, I want to consider for a second its partner in crime: the noun. I said above that nouns are (usually) binary, and here is where I want to dive into that sneaky “usually”. In the example sentence above we said that our two nouns were “fox” and “dog”. If we dig into the definitions of these two nouns we will quickly find that neither of them have very precise definitions either.
To make this point, we have to embark on a brief journey into the realm of evolutionary theory which is heavily present in the subsequent chapters (most notably 05 - The Immortal Replicator).
Evolution is a Gradient (duh)
With our newfound understanding of nouns/binaries and adjectives/gradients, I want you to think about the concept of evolution. I think its pretty clear to most people that evolution is surely a gradient. The primary image that comes up when you search “evolution” is that of an array of animals morphing from apes to humans. While we may have names (nouns) to try and classify these various animals, these names are just attempts at putting lines in the spectrum for the purposes of productive communication (as is all language). As humans we are a “species”; however if you look into the definition of “species” you will see that there is no definite way to define it, and how could there be? If you agree that evolution is a spectrum, then it’s inconceivable to think that a species just evolves into another species instantaneously. Instead, there was small mutations over time that, when compounded onto each other, eventually created something that was different enough from the previous thing that we decided it should get its own name. However “different enough” is entirely subjective. Point me to the exact nucleotide along the range of mutations that resulted in the distinction between one species and the other. You can’t, and thats okay, I’m not insisting that you do; I’m simply making the point that evolution is a continuous spectrum and that “species” are just labels someone somewhere came up with to distinguish between animals that are “different enough” from one another.
With this in mind, let’s return to our nouns from the example above: fox and dog. Can we really define a fox or dog in such a manner that something either is or isn’t a fox or a dog? Remember, to do so would require drawing a line at a specific pair of nucleotides in a specific gene, and even if you were to do this, you would then have to provide a new name (noun) for the fox-like animal who, for example, has a nose that is 1% smaller then the true fox. What would you call it? “Not-a-fox type A”? If so, then if you were to change one more pair of nucleotides then is that “Not-a-fox type B”? Or is it “Fox type A”? Do you get my point?
Everything is a Gradient
I call this framework of thinking Gradient Analysis and if you take one thing away from this book, let it be this. Once you understand Gradient Analysis, you’ll see that the world is made up entirely of gradients, and that it is only the result of language that we think of things as binary. If its still not clear to you, here are a few more examples:
- At what point is it “snowing”? Is it when there is one snowflake in the air per cubic meter? Or two? Or five?
- Furthermore, at what point is something “ice” or “snow” instead of “water”? Is it when two water molecules in a volume become a solid? Or is it five? Or is it when all adjoining molecules are solidified?
- At what point does someone “have cancer”? Is it when there is one cancerous cell in their body? Or five? Or is it just when the cancer begins to have adverse effects? In that case, what is the definition of “adverse”?
- When can you say someone “has ADHD”? Is it when you give someone a standardized ADHD test and they score 50%? In that case, does that mean someone who scored 49% does not have ADHD? What about 48%? 51%?
Once again, the purpose of this analysis is not to be a smart-ass, the point is that we need to keep in mind that everything in this wonderful world, both nouns and adjectives, is a gradient. It is our language that limits us, and thats okay - I am not pretending that I know of a better way of communicating.
Gradient Analysis truly is the key concept for the remainder of this book. When we apply Gradient Analysis to the evolutionary history of humans we arrive at some fascinating conclusions into human motivation and answer the question of why.
Next chapter: 04 - The Theory of Relativity
Previous chapter: 02 - The Beauty in Understanding