What's in a name? Labels hide

Yesterday I suggested that we shouldn’t take the names of things too seriously. That names are but social facts, that they tell us not about the thing named but rather about how the society we’re in has chosen to label it. 

I went as far as hinting that names chosen might not only not always serve our best interests but that might even have been chosen to work against us.

Crazy, I’m aware. But I’ll show it. 

To do that, I first have to introduce an esoteric philosophical distinction but, as a reward, in the end we’ll understand why this whole ruse had to necessarily be built upon an esoteric philosophical distinction.

This distinction is the use/mention distinction. From Wikipedia:

The distinction between use and mention can be illustrated with the word "cheese":

1. Cheese is derived from milk.

2. "Cheese" is derived from the Old English word ċēse.

The first sentence is a statement about the substance called "cheese": it uses the word "cheese" to refer to that substance. The second is a statement about the word "cheese" as a signifier: it mentions the word without using it to refer to anything other than itself.

“Duh”, right? The name of a thing is not what the thing is. The word “rose” isn’t a rose. Yet how many times have you seen people say love is just a word? Jasmine Thompson even made a song about it. Love isn’t just a word, the word “love” is a word.

And it’s not only Jasmine Thompson: once you get a nose for it you’ll be shocked just how well this conflation works and just how many things are named to take advantage of it.

A short list:

• Microaggressions

• Social justice

• Non-Governmental Organizations

• OpenAI

• Hate speech

• The Democratic People's Republic of Korea

The purpose these serve, I propose to you, is that they make certain questions hard to ask. For example: 

• Are microaggressions aggressions?

• Can there be justice without social justice?

• Can non-governmental organizations be involved in the Government?

• Is OpenAI open?

• Is hate speech hateful?

• Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea democratic?

Not only is it hard to ask these questions but it’s hard to think them. It feels like we’re veering into logical contradiction territory. How could hate speech not be hateful, or OpenAI not be open?

But those are legitimate questions made harder by the effort of magicians diverting your attention. 

Notice what happens if we just add some quotation marks.

• Are “microaggressions” aggressions?

• Can there be justice without “social justice”?

• Can “non-governmental organizations” be involved in the Government?

• Is “OpenAI” open?

• Is “hate speech” hateful?

• Is the “Democratic People's Republic of Korea” democratic?

Now it seems like there are real, non-contradictory, questions at hand here, right? But we can take it even further and turn the names into real black boxes.

• Are “MAs” aggressions?

• Can there be justice without “SJ”?

• Can “NOGOS” be involved in the Government?

• Is “OAI” open?

• Is “HS” hateful?

• Is the “DK” democratic?

And now the answer to each of them is… idk?? Like it feels like mayyyybe the second question can be solved analytically, like maybe the concept of justice entails sj—whatever that is—but that remains to be proven once we actually define “sj”. 

All others feel like they require empirical investigation: we need to go out and look, look at specific MAs to see whether or not they’re aggressions, at specific NOGOS to see if they’re involved with the Government or not, and well, okay we feel pretty confident about DK but you know what I mean, right?

In each of these cases things were named so that we were led to think questioning them was nigh a logical contradiction, and that was not clearly to our benefit.

And, in each case this is solved with functionalism: temporarily setting aside the label and actually looking at what we’re talking about. 

Oh, I almost forgot, this had to depend on an esoteric philosophical distinction because if it was a distinction that everyone knows about and holds as second-nature it just wouldn’t work.

In case I have failed to imprint on you the power of this conflation here is Jon Stewart and Elon Musk—some of the world’s best memers—on it.

The first single-handedly changes the narrative on Covid by appealing to the name of the lab and the second says naming matters so much he’d drop the lawsuit against OpenAI if only changed their name.