This nonsense from Clark Hoyt cracked me up. The NYT reported that James O’Keefe “made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group Acorn.” O’Keefe dressed as a pimp. O’Keefe trained his secret camera on counselors. When he filmed, though, he dressed in khakis and an oxford.
[Hoyt replied to this criticism by saying]—with emphasis in the original— that “The story says O’Keefe dressed up as a pimp and trained his hidden camera on Acorn counselors. It does not say he did those two things at the same time.”
Really brings me back. In grad school, I taught introductory logic courses, and one of the standard things we did was cover basic propositional logic and natural deduction. The idea is to teach formal logic by showing students how to work in an artificial language made of up of atomic propositions (symbolized with p, q, etc.) and truth-functional connectives (&, v, -, etc.). A connective is truth-functional just in case the truth value of a compound sentence made with this connective is determined entirely by the truth values of the component sentences and the way the connective works. For example, suppose we’re dealing with “&” in our artificial language. p&q is true just in case p is true and q is true: that is, all you need to know is the truth values of p and q, and you’ll know what the truth value of p&q is.
And here the Hoyt-type examples come in. I used to use examples where temporal relations mattered to suggest that the artificial language “&” is not really the same as the ordinary-language “and.” It’s kind of like a crude approximation. A classic:
(i) John and Mary got married and had a baby
is different from
(ii) John and Mary had a baby and got married
The natural language version either says or suggests that the events happened in that order, while our “&” doesn’t care about that– all that matters is the truth values of “John and Mary got married” and “John and Mary had a baby.” The lesson to take from this is that our artificial language is different from spoken English in just this way: only the artificial connectives are truth-functional. It’s great to see this old chestnut of a point in the news. Next: Clark Hoyt wonders about justified true belief!
(There are some debates about whether the ordering is just an implicature or part of the truth conditions of the ordinary language sentence. Some people will die in the last ditch arguing for the the truth-functionality of the English “and,” but, if the best the public editor can do is to say “we didn’t print something false; we printed something that was, strictly speaking, true, that we knew ordinary readers would misunderstand,” well, he’s still lousy.)
29 comments
February 24, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Jason B.
Thanks for this. These things tend to get overlooked (as in the analysis at Yglesias) but you’ve made the nonsense plain.
February 24, 2010 at 8:03 pm
kevin
The comments on that story are priceless:
I heard that last year Hoyt got drunk and drove home in his car with his kids in the back seat.
What? I didn’t say he did those two things at the same time.
February 25, 2010 at 7:25 am
elizardbreath
The difference between natural language ‘or’ and logical ‘or’ is even bigger — I can’t remember the context I ran up against this in, some lawyering thing, but natural language ‘or’ is usually exclusive: one or the other but probably not both. And that can turn into a big difference in meaning, and some very frustrating arguments with people claiming that the logical ‘or’ is what the natural language ‘or’ really means.
February 25, 2010 at 7:49 am
politicalfootball
Yglesias also catches the larger point: What a disappointment newspaper ombudsmen have been.
February 25, 2010 at 9:58 am
snarkout
So far, the New York Times has featured Daniel Okrent, who announced that the Times was a liberal paper and picked a fight with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman about economics based on the writings of the stupidest man alive; Byron Calame, who went after Judith Miller but was mostly notable for being inane; and Clark Hoyt, who is embarrassing himself to justify being spun like a top on ACORN. And yet, even not counting rotisserie baseball, they’re collectively not as bad as Deborah Howell.
February 25, 2010 at 10:31 am
heydave
Mr. Hoyt went to the petting zoo and goats were fucked.
February 25, 2010 at 10:50 am
kid bitzer
mr. hoyt’s wife is still talking about the time last year when he fucked and petted goats.
February 25, 2010 at 11:18 am
kid bitzer
actually, i suppose “the time” might push it too far towards simultaneity.
mr. hoyt’s wife confirmed that he made a big splash last year when he fucked and petted goats.
February 25, 2010 at 1:08 pm
NM
The english-or vs. logical-or thing’s canonical example is:
“Would you like fries or mashed potatoes with that?”
“Yes, both.”
The exclusive or is the inclusive or + “and not both,” so: (p v q) & -(p & q).
Fun to teach! I hope Clark Hoyt will take on the material conditional at some point. The whole ACORN thing looks more and more like, yup, we got rolled.
February 25, 2010 at 1:28 pm
politicalfootball
Or, kb, mr hoyt’s wife confirmed that he made a big splash last year the times …
February 25, 2010 at 3:48 pm
mr earl
Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?
February 25, 2010 at 4:10 pm
ben
I heard that Mrs. Hoyt celebrated her eighth birthday and Mr. Hoyt had sex with her.
What’s more, the temporal relation is correct!
February 25, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Jason B.
I was told that Mr. Hoyt graduated high school and his children were born.
February 25, 2010 at 5:16 pm
ben
I was told that Mr. Hoyt didn’t hit his wife last week and he hasn’t done so in over a month, even.
February 25, 2010 at 5:41 pm
dana
It’s been bothering me more than it should, trying to figure out if there’s a way to stick this into pragmatics. My guess is, maybe, but probably irrelevant, since English is not logic. One can grice away a lot with “be relevant.”
February 25, 2010 at 6:17 pm
kid bitzer
one reason to think it’s probly pragmatic rather than semantic is that the same phenomena happen with asyndeta.
john and mary met in high school. they got married. they had a baby.
as opposed to ordering sentences 2&3 in reverse, which will suggest the other sequence of events.
we’re narrative creatures. started talking back on the veldt and all. and tended to note earlier occurences in earlier utterances, later ones later.
February 25, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Jason B.
Ah, the veldt. Those were the days.
February 25, 2010 at 6:43 pm
kid bitzer
the sequence of events is not in doubt.
once, we lived in an innocent paradise. at some later point, clark hoyt was born. then hiroshima, the vietnam war, the aids virus, and 9/11.
February 25, 2010 at 7:35 pm
grackle
grice?
February 25, 2010 at 7:51 pm
kid bitzer
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gricean_maxims
February 25, 2010 at 8:00 pm
Charlieford
So, it seems you’re missing the real issue here: if O’Keefe didn’t dress as a pimp to film the ACORN folk, what was he doing when he was dressed as a pimp?
February 25, 2010 at 11:11 pm
ben
It’s been bothering me more than it should, trying to figure out if there’s a way to stick this into pragmatics.
Although you acknowledge that English isn’t logic later in your comment, allow me to register my annoyance with the program on which everything inconvenient to the attempt to construe English as basically logic-like at its core is shunted off into pragmatics, where it can be ignored.
February 26, 2010 at 7:16 am
matt w
Charlieford asked the question that had been bothering me.
I agree with Ben about the annoyance — there’s a saying that pragmatics is the garbage can of semantics, which I think expresses that basic view — but I still think that this:
if the best the public editor can do is to say “we didn’t print something false; we printed something that was, strictly speaking, true, that we knew ordinary readers would misunderstand,” well, he’s still lousy
is really important for the much-needed field of philosophy of journalism. Because newspapers are often in the business of printing stuff that’s clearly technically true but misleading as all get-out. Think of all the times they print “According to U.S. officials, p,” without noting that there’s a ton of independent evidence against p and the U.S. officials in question have been known to lie like a rug on this topic.
Anyway, I think that the way you would try to pragmaticize the temporal sequence of “and” would be through the Maxim of Manner. Someone who really knows a lot of this stuff once tried to explain to me why the Maxim of Manner isn’t just something that gets invoked whenever someone thinks, “Gosh, this is clearly a pragmatic effect, but I’m damned if I can see why,” but I’ve forgotten the explanation.
(I don’t know if relevance really works in these cases, because both the facts that are cited clearly are relevant — if “they got married and had a baby” is relelvant, so is “they had a baby and got married.” And O’Keefe’s cinematic and sartorial escapades were both relevant to the splash he made.)
February 26, 2010 at 7:20 am
matt w
Ah, I see: O’Keefe was wearing the pimp costume in shots that were deceptively edited into his videotape in order to make it look like he was dressed as a pimp in the ACORN offices, when he wasn’t.
So the NYT really was getting spun like a top, and Hoyt is being an incredible asshole.
February 26, 2010 at 9:50 am
NM
Yeah, the pimp-suit appearances were him walking up the steps or something, then the next scene is in the office when he’s dressed in normal clothes.
On the one hand, O’Keefe was exactly right in thinking that the pimp outfit made the story more likely to be a thing. On the other hand, honky please. It takes a special kind of asshole to dig into the back of the racial stereotypes costume closet.
(I suppose if he’d worn the costume indoors, it would be further indication of ACORN employees’ willingness to overlook lawbreaking, but then the costume change is misleading the audience in a way that affects the real argument.)
February 26, 2010 at 9:52 am
NM
Also, to follow up on the philosophy of journalism, I think a basic rule of newspaper operations should be: the reader’s relationship with the paper he pays to read is fundamentally different from the relationship he would have with a lawyer who’s out to screw him.
February 26, 2010 at 11:20 am
Vance
the paper he pays to read
Rhetorical overreach, I’m afraid. Even before the internet, more of the paper’s income came from advertisers. And this is one way it shows. Hoyt et al. have only an indirect incentive to make their product attractive to us.
February 26, 2010 at 12:25 pm
politicalfootball
Even in the most cynical of renderings, the reason for ombudsmen is to create the appearance (at least) of self-examination and engagement with the readers. Hoyt’s comment has the exact opposite effect.
February 26, 2010 at 6:02 pm
matt w
Depends on which readers you mean, football. On a more cynical rendering than you may have imagined, the reason for this ombudsman is to try to deflect criticism from the right. I’m not saying that that’s really what’s happening, but that would be one way you would arrive at the stance that (a) the newspaper should respond more quickly to the stories that the right-wing media is pushing and (b) the newspaper should rely on transparently ridiculous pretexts to avoid issuing corrections when those stories turn out to be bullshit.
(Actually, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think that what’s happening is more like this: guy gets suckered, refuses to admit it, shoots messenger. Though the fact that the suckerers have a big megaphone and the messenger doesn’t perhaps plays a role.)
Of course, even on my most cynical reading, the goal is still futile, because the American right will never be pleased. Never, never, never. Listen to Abe, and remember that trying to satisfy them was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.