Sporkful #1

That’s what I’d say now to the Scientologist who many years ago blithely read off a page the question, “Tell me in your own words what communication means to you.”

Looking back on it all, my position nowadays is this.

The situation is not merely that Hubbard’s theories of truth and communication are false as stated.

It’s that those theories are not even roughly right. They are pointed completely in the wrong direction. In the letter they are misstated. In the spirit they are misguided.

Communication is not an essentially private matter to be defined in terms of the inner mental or spiritual states of those who communicate. It is a public thing, whose explanation more likely lies in the external, objective notions of information and its comprehensibility – that’s to say, the possibility of it being understood. (Moreover much of what we naturally recognize as communication is apt to elude any neat-and-tidy artificial theory.)

Truth, correspondingly, is not strictly “for” the individual alone. The truths of various sentences are underpinned by various states of affairs which obtain in the world. The individual can come to know of these states of affairs. But the existence of those states of affairs themselves does not, as a rule, peculiarly depend on the individual. Nor do the truths of the relevant sentences usually depend on anything private to the individual.

More broadly, “seeking the truth” is not the sort of thing which could in principle be a solitary activity, some kind of interior whispering between the individual and his or her conscience, to which dialogue no one else could be an interested party. Such internal musings might help an individual decide what appears to him or her to be true. They could not by themselves suffice to determine whether those appearances are veracious.

No: truth is a public thing.

Returning now to my story and (finally!) the conclusion to this first Sporkful.

I snapped back into “present time’, as Scientologists say, to “confront” a living-room-cum-disaster area.

“The premise in Scn is that everything in the tech (plus anything Miscavige may have written even when it conflicts with Hubbard's stuff) is true, so if there are disagreements on the part of any student then, the theory goes, he is either not really there willing to learn or he does not understand. I don't believe I ever saw an "agree to disagree, yes, ok, you don't agree with the theory but as long as you know what the theory is, then we can go onward" communication on the part of any staff member when I was there.”
-- fluffy, ESMB

“You got off lucky. I usually had to do the "how is it that way", "how is it NOT that way" drill ad. nauseum if I had any disagreements.”
-- sandygirl, ESMB

“As a course supervisor, I would have gotten you to get it”
-- Grundy, ESK

As I read others’ stories I’m discovering how soft I had it on so many levels. I suspect that a superficial tolerance of my disagreements was allowed mainly because I was a public and a kid whose family was chucking money into the org (until it ran out). I’m sure a staffer or SO kid would never be allowed to voice such disagreement without being severely disciplined.

Looking back I also think my Course Supervisor must have had some sympathy for differences of opinion; he may not have believed the tech to be 100% accurate, or perhaps he secretly enjoyed hearing various points of view. Certainly he had a laid-back attitude as a Sup. I have memories of other public spending time in the little office adjoining the course room, no doubt expostulating with the Sup over all sorts of suspicious bits of “tech”. If the Sup had hated hearing it he wouldn’t have spent so much time listening to people – never answering with “verbal tech”, but seldom interrupting and (I can’t help but think) inwardly taking quite seriously the disagreements of others.

Again, reading others’ stories shows me how atypical this attitude is in Scientology.

Spork, it appears that your Sup may have been a "reasonable" man. Horrors! Reasonable is basically synonymous with logical. I imagine LRH had about the same level of affection for logicians as he did for Psychs.

“Take Ron's 'ARC Triangle', with its Affinity - Reality - Communication, which presupposes that Communication can only occur in lock-step with 'liking someone' and agreeing with them (shared reality) and every other combination of the three. ...
Then combine that belief with the stricture against 'Verbal Tech' and, you're left with two people with a basic drive to 'agree' with each other, but, per your analysis, unable to actually compare notes on what it is they're agreeing on. The 'data' becomes an abstract third element between them both which appears identical to both, yet quite possibly represents something very different to each.
...
So, say, Scn-A maintains the validity of Ron-Concept-C; and Scn-B also agrees with RC-C. They are in high ARC, like each other and share reality, and, can communicate with each other, *until* they begin paraphrasing and intrepreting and expressing *their* individual take on what RC-C actually *means*.

For the first time, the 'agreement' begins to break down and RC-C ceases to be able to be 'all things to all people', because by comparing notes [as they might do once they leave Scn and the stricture vs ‘verbal tech’ is lifted], Scn-A and Scn-B discover that their interpretations are not only different, but, can even be completely incompatible.”
--Zinjifar, ESMB


Apparently there’s a mechanism or theoretical provision in Scientology for maintaining the illusion of a shared meaning when in fact there is no shared meaning or (in extreme cases) no meaning at all.

The ARC triangle, Hubbard informs us, is the key to “understanding”. This is ambiguous. Does he mean mutual feeling between persons, e.g. when someone says sympathetically, “I understand exactly where you’re comin’ from, man”? Does he mean understanding in the narrow sense of the comprehension of verbal meanings? Or a mixture of both – Scn-A and Scn-B reach some either-mutual-feeling-or-joint-verbal-comprehension-understanding when they communicate (duplicate each other’s particles) in a friendly way which is “real” to both (i.e. is a matter on which they agree)?

Zinjifar effectively points out that, if truth and meaning are relativized to persons, A, R and C are not jointly sufficient for mutual comprehension of verbal meanings between persons. Zinj explains how A, R and C can be present but Scn-A and Scn-B can have no idea what the other is talking about. He calls our attention to the “verbal tech” stricture, which helps ensure that Scn-A and Scn-B never “compare notes” on what they think they mean. Instead they cheerfully carry on “agreeing” about completely different things, until they finally leave Scientology and discover that their understanding was illusory.

However, the Scientologist has a response here, namely to retort that in Zinj’s example the “C” is actually absent. Scn-A and Scn-B, it might be said, _believe_ they’re duplicating each other but they’re wrong: their particles have misfired or what-have-you; they never had true ARC from the beginning (it only seemed that way) since they failed to communicate.

To this Zinj could rejoin: what then is the criterion for deciding when a duplication has actually occurred (as opposed to merely seeming to occur)? On pain of circularity the answer can’t be, “When there’s ARC between Scn-A and Scn-B” or “When there’s understanding”.

I think that at this point we’re back to square one. There can’t be any appeal to the ARC = U equation to differentiate a merely apparent duplication from a real one. Interestingly, this problem is suspiciously similar to the one raised by Zinj: how to differentiate a merely apparent case of understanding from a real one.

So far Zinj has got the upper hand. ARC looks like a smokescreen. It is useless to explain how mutual understanding, in the narrow sense of the comprehension of verbal meanings, can occur, since the latter boils down to the question of mutual duplications (partly in the terms of which ARC itself is ultimately defined). Truly, from the theoretical as well as the practical point of view, ARC is capable of producing no more than an illusion or impression of understanding (in the narrow sense).

“One of the things I've realized since leaving Scientology is that words really don't have any intrinsic definition to them. Everybody is going to have a different interpretation on what a word means. Therefore... 100% duplication really isn't possible when these "communication particles" go from a source-point to a receipt-point. “
-- RLSteve, ESK


RLSteve ups the ante on this line of objection (Reply 3) by noting that many words in Scientology have no fixed meaning. There are neologisms in the Technical Dictionary whose official definitions actually fail to secure any referent. Sometimes in place of a proper, literal definition (one which gives satisfaction conditions for the expression being defined) there’s an allusive metaphor; other times a single example of a correct use. Much of Scientology nomenclature is quite meaningless.

To pick up the slack the reader is instructed to supply a meaning him/herself. Make some clay demos! Ponder and reflect awhile until you “cognite” what the word means! Etc. Such subjective procedures are likely to result in the assignment of a highly subjective sense to the otherwise empty piece of nomenclature in question. “Everybody,” says RLSteve, “is going to have a different interpretation on what a word means.”

Nobody, however, is going to have the _right_ interpretation of what such a word means. There is no such “right” interpretation for certain Scientology words since none is originally specified successfully. There are attempts. However, in such cases – shockingly – _there is no_ “tech”. There are only disparate subjective versions of it as impressed on the minds of various persons by the assorted clay demos, cognitions etc.

It’s a hard thing to have studied a subject for years before eventually discovering that many of its core concepts were empty and its special terms entirely without meaning. In the place of meaning Hubbard allowed for private interpretations of what he meant, a poor, hollow substitute.

Down the road ex-Scn-A and ex-Scn-B will pull back the curtain to discover a staring vacuity in their understandings. Not only did they differ in what they meant by various bits of Scientologese, in much of the “tech” there was never anything to mean or understand correctly at all.

“Anyhow, what I really wanted to note was the use of "What's true for you is true." I don't actually agree that it's simply a "whatever" phrase. Such a rewrite doesn't cover all the elements properly, because in addition to being a conversation stopper it is also a clear sign that you are getting too close to seriously upsetting someones spiritual/religious values. A more appropriate rewrite (and one that most people will understand) is; "God works in mysterious ways". This phrase does not only show that you have won the argument, insofar as the other person no longer having any, but it will also show that you are getting rather close to upsetting the persons beliefs, pissing the person off if you continue the line of thought any further. (Although it's never actually stopped me from continuing.)”
-- Orderous, ESK

”The thing with the 'Whatever' statement is that to me, the way it is used does imply a rightness and wrongness. If it is not true for you, there is a condescending implication that it is just beyond you right now. Maybe when you've reached a higher level, you'll be able to understand that this *is* true. “
--NoSOat10, ESK

“It occured to me when reading your "Whatever" discussion that this is really a question of hermeneutics. Per Wikipedia: "Essentially, hermeneutics involves cultivating the ability to understand things from somebody else's point of view, and to appreciate the cultural and social forces that may have influenced their outlook. " It sounds like LRH was not open to doing the work, (which, needless to say is anti-thetical to the "help people" message offered by Scientologists.) “
--SntigyNewb, ESK


Pace SntigyNewb, I think the evaluation of the Whatever Phrase is best left to these two areas of linguistics and the philosophy of language:

Discipline (1): Speech act theory / the pragmatics of utterance.
(That concerned with speaker’s meaning; the conversational uses of words and phrases; idiomatic significance as against literal meaning etc.)

Discipline (2): Philosophical semantics / formal semantics as applied to natural languages.
(The task of stating a theory of meaning for a language; specifying the meaning of the predicate “is true”; the study of related semantic properties such as reference a.k.a. denotation.)

Orderous and NoSOat10 contend that my account of the pragmatics of “What’s true is what’s true for you” is over-simple. Orderous says in effect that the use of the Whatever Phrase often involves the appeal to ignorance (a fallacy of argument) in a special insinuating, aggravating way which he describes. NoSOat10 suggests that the Whatever Phrase can amount to a covert denial, as though it were said, “You’re wrong and just too dumb or too low on the Bridge to see it.” That’s not what the Whatever Phrase literally says, but it could be put to just that conversational use.

I raise my glass to Orderous and NoSOat10. They are considering the pragmatics of the Whatever Phrase with much more circumspection and care than I did in Sporkful #1, which is mostly concerned with assessing the phrase as it falls to Discipline (2).

“I really have to say this...

Yogi Berra really is a better philospher at time than LRH ever was.

You see Yogi Berra would look at your statement, kind of like how I looked at it, and he would have said his usual bit of philosophical remark...

"It's amazing what you can see just by looking"

"Communication need not involve any distance." “
-- Rene Descartes, ESMB

“P.S. Spork, if you get to see this...as regards your earlier posts that seemed to be about the nature of "agreement": are you into Bishop George Berkeley at all?”
--Moonchild, ESMB


“We made too many wrong mistakes.”

That Yogi-ism just about sums up my childhood experience as a student of the bizarre opinions of Scientology.

Hubbard’s mistake-riddled theories too often give way to the most obvious counterexamples and objections. Even the mistakes, as mistakes go, are lousy. I wish I could say that Hubbard’s account of communication is an illuminating failure, a wrong but respectable dish of philosopher fodder. It is not.

Overridingly, what one finds in the writings of L. Ron Hubbard is not philosophy but pseudophilosophy. Hubbard does address some traditional philosophical subject matter—reality, truth, certainty, morality, the nature of the mind and the self. But he goes about it with an ineptitude unsurpassed by any modern Western philosopher in my reading.

Though Hubbard’s musings do not conform to an acceptable standard of philosophic rigour, perhaps some amusement can still be had, theory by theory, in ascertaining how and why. Sporkful #1 tries to give two concrete examples of this. Through the essay parts and especially the narration I tried to build in (and hope I’ve managed to convey) some feeling for the simple joy lurking in an abstract question.

Anyone who reads Hubbard’s theories with a view to gaining some special perception or peculiar insight into the nature of things is in for disappointment. The same of course is true for legitimate philosophy. One need not do philosophy for anything but its own sake. “Applied” so-called philosophies – ones which purport to contain some practical dimension which will radically transform the reader’s life -- are de trop. If the intrinsic joy of philosophical activity isn’t reward enough, probably nothing will be.

Moonchild picked up on the Berkeleian aspect I wasn’t quite able to disguise. In the _Three Dialogues_ there’s a classic moment where Philonous impatiently bellows to a timid Hylas: “Odd, say you!” The pure philosophical hilarity of this exclamation, its delightfully abrupt shift of tone in the dialogue, and the feeling that here Berkeley suddenly speaks to us more directly than ever, I couldn’t force out of my mind as I wrote Part 28.

I hope that addresses the main issues in most of the comments so far. Thanks everyone for the feedback and for reading!

I’m going to take some time off these boards to deal with RL stuff (won’t be online much til the autumn).

Wishing everyone a great summer,
Spork

I had a huge post typed up, but on reconsideration I decided it was easier to just write the following three points:

1. Modelling communication on a quantized (particle) basis is flawed to begin with because that implies that first, the transmission distance is always three dimensional (rather than time related, which is a property of transmission in particles).

2. The Whatever phrase as you call it was a rather fundamental attempt to allow water to bounce of a ducks back, so to speak. It's designed to allow Scientologists to withstand criticisms about beliefs that are ridiculous by nature and allow them to maintain a kind of relativism about it all. However in attempting to quantize the process of communication (and pretty poorly I might add) Hubbard shot himself in the foot when faced with basic logical reasoning.

3. What we do know about the natural world is that certain constants are in place. By deciding to arbitrarily assign truth to every human relativistically communication IS IMPOSSIBLE IN EVERY MEDIUM. If it were possible to arbitrarily assign truth then it would also be possible on a universal scale. Which would make for some interesting physical constants.

So well done. That's quite an impressive debunking. I'd love to chat with you when you're back.