Language is not a truth machine - it's a reality machine.

#languagematters

https://x.com/CodeRedEarth/status/1810365158054895633

In 2016 the term ‘post-truth’ was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year. To become so popular at that time the word must have been around the traps for a while, bubbling along in little niches here and there, with some folks trying it out to see if it was a good enough word to be formally invited into English. Words don’t podium from a standing start: they have to do the rounds first.

It makes me proud to see that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first attests ‘post-truth’ not only to Australia but to the state of Queensland where I was born and grew up. They found it’s initial usage in 1985, in Brisbane’s Sunday Mail. Back then, ‘post-truth’ meant something different - it described the emotional state generated after a painful disclosure of the truth. The OED’s cited example referred to the then state government, under the infamous rule of Joh Bjelke-Peterson, going into a ‘post-truth’ trauma because some hard truths had been revealed about the corrupt behaviour of one of its Ministers, whom the newspaper described as the ‘Minister for Two-Up and Other Means of Making a Quid’.

This usage is now classified as ‘rare’ by the dictionary, which means it’s endangered. It’s a shame, but I guess it had to move over for the new meaning to take hold. A few years later, ‘post-truth’ popped up in the US with its now popular meaning of ‘relating or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. This was 1992, so it took almost a quarter of a century from its debut to its word-of-the-year award.

Is the shift in public discourse that the word ‘post-truth’ captures a change in kind or in scale? I’d say it’s one of scale. While social media has changed the public discourse landscape - making it much bigger, more hands-on while algorithmically mediated - language has never been a truth machine. Language has evolved in and through human communities putting it to work constructing our many and varied microcosms. Modern humans evolved (with) language as the means to make sense of our experience. It did not simply appear in some lone human head¹, who then procreated and passed it down to their offspring, as the now ailing Chomsky would have you believe. It evolved because we pushed and pulled it, making ever more and every greater demands on it to be our reality generator.

So let’s be clear: language is not a truth machine, it’s a reality machine. This is why language is by its nature ideological. No word is innocent. No word is free from some kind of ideological investment. And here’s the thing: language doesn’t care what we do with it. ‘Truth’ is just another word - and plenty more where it came from. Language is agnostic with respect to whether truths are told, or whether great fat lying falsehoods with no basis in anyone’s reality are circulating. Language is highly elastic, and so it will both follow us and lead us in any of the crazy directions we want to go.

I know some of you are thinking: but Annabelle, 2+2 always equals 4! Sure - math/s is good for this kind of thinking. But 4 what? What are you counting? And what does 4 of those things you are counting mean - without knowing what is being counted, we don’t even know if 4 is big or small. We don’t know the meaning of 4. Once you apply maths to something in the world, you need language to create categories and interpret values, and you are back on its rollercoaster.

Creative Commons License 3.0: https://www.deviantart.com/frederatic/art/Emotional-Rollercoaster-748849599

If we had made language so that it only churned out ‘objective’ ‘facts’, human cultures - and therefore, our highly prized knowledge forms like science or history, not to mention our great literary works - would simply not exist. We don’t have science because language is good at objectivity. Science is another way of using language that evolved under social, historical and colonialist forces. It’s not that facts or science don’t matter. But they are always selective and shaped by language. We can see this in the cultural biases of science. We have female contraceptives, but not male contraceptives. We have ‘smart bombs’, but no simple app which makes housework visible and democratic.

Those saying that global warming is a hoax and working hard to stigmatize climate science are wrong . But my point is that language doesn’t care, because it’s not a truth machine. And this is not a ‘design fault’ in language, because language wasn’t designed by humans - it evolved with and through us, to create and recreate our realities. Its plasticity is essential. Those who are trying to make global warming and its consequences more visible need to understand its power.

Changing language, changing reality

So let’s not cry over language’s lack of ‘truthiness’. We need to get on and understand how it works if we want to change the way we are living with nature. We need to appreciate that changing language is changing reality. That reality is a human construct - that we can change the way we see ourselves and the world by changing the meanings we use to make sense of our experience.

‘Reality’ originally meant ‘possession’ and ‘property’ - hence our modern concept of ‘real estate’. In its meaning of ‘that which is real’, it is only 500 years old. For reference, that’s just a bit before Shakespeare. The modern era feels like it is characterised by contesting and contested realities - like everyone is shouting at each other all the time. The sociologist Siniša Malešević argues that in the process of reorganizing communities and empires into nation states, we put ideology into overdrive and pumped it full of steroids (I’m paraphrasing his elegant prose). It seems likely to me that the rise of national languages to accompany new nation states was a big factor in this process. So there’s a basis for feeling like we live in more ideological times - just one more reason to try out best to understand how language works. It is the chief means for constructing ideologies, and is itself always ideological.

Image from: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide

Our human realities will, however, never win a fight with our atmosphere. As we continue to pollute it with greenhouse gases, the atmosphere will continue to fire off its increasingly more deadly warning shots. As we know, scientists can and do measure the content of CO2 in our atmosphere - CO2 was recorded at an average of 419 parts per million in 2023. And as we increase this and other greenhouse gases, we are warming our planet and changing our climate.

We can also measure some dimensions of human realities. The Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO) team, a collaboration across 11 universities as well as the US Departments of Energy and of Geological Survey, lead by Professor Max Boykoff of the University of Boulder in Colarado, publishes a monthly newsletter with a measure of how much climate is featuring in news around the globe. Check out this link to see how the data are sampled and collected.

While we keep on growing the CO2 pollution in our atmosphere, the quantity of media stories we report on climate goes up and down. Here’s a summary comment on the latest figures from the MECCO research team:

June media coverage of climate change or global warming in newspapers around the globe increased 8% from May 2024. Meanwhile, coverage in June 2024 dropped 13% from June 2023 levels.

These numbers don’t control for whether the news articles are reporting on global warming and its consequences, or fostering climate disinformation. Much of our media is owned by moguls, who are often owned by or own fossil fuel corporations. According to some climate scientists, Australia’s own US citizen Rupert Murdoch and his news empire may have done more to prevent humanity acting on the science of climate than any other single human in history. And just as some nations, companies and individuals contribute much more to CO2 pollution than others, a study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue came to much the same conclusion about how much human media climates are influenced by a small number of players:

Our analysis has shown how a small but dedicated community of actors boast disproportionate reach and engagement across social media, reaching millions of people worldwide and bolstered by legacy print, broadcast and radio outlets.

Media matters so deeply: check this study from back in 2011 which found a ‘a negative association between Fox News viewership and acceptance of global warming’. Words change minds, as I wrote a few weeks back. I keep finding environmental scientists - like Max Boykoff whom I introduced above, and Geoff Supran I mentioned in a previous post - who’ve turned their talents to the analysis of climate and climate disinformation. This is the big battle front where the planet’s future is being shaped.

Language doesn’t care: but it remembers

The tweet up at the top of this post grieves over a crucial missed opportunity. The term ‘climate change’ is too gentle. Its associations are too mild. It doesn’t bring enough charisma, nor a call to action. In my last post, I described the linguistic concept of ‘hyponymy’ - it’s political power is that it withholds information. A word like ‘change’ is almost empty - so many things, like global warming, fall under its very capacious umbrella. So I agree - ‘climate change’ is not a strategic term.

Language doesn’t care - but it remembers. It keeps the score. That old saying - ‘It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it’ - is only half right. It’s not only the way you say it, it’s how often it is said, by how many people, over how many different eras and locations. ‘Climate change’ is the overwhelmingly dominant concept for describing this complex process where constant burning of fossil fuels impacts our atmosphere by adding more and more heat-trapping gases. In my graph below, the numbers show the scale of the problem. If we want to challenge the extremely dominant place in our public discourse of this too-vague-term ‘climate change’, we need to get behind one new term, then try to spread it as far as we can. Changing language changes minds. Changing language changes reality.

1. See e.g. p 14 of Noam Chomsky, The Science of Language: Interviews with James McGilvray.