Archive for August 1st, 2002

What’s In That Glass?

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

The linguists and scientists among you will hopefully find this of interest and/or amusement.

One recurring topic in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially the analytic branches of those fields, is the question of what determines the meaning of the words a speaker uses. It should be a pretty uncontroversial assumption that a speaker can’t make words mean just anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t get to have fun correcting people on their use of ‘it’s’ and ‘its,’ ‘affect’ and ‘effect,’ and so on. So what’s the piece of linguistic magic that connects a particular utterance to a particular set of things or phenomena? Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam argued in the 1970s that what the speaker intends or thinks the word means has no bearing on the actual meaning, and came up with a thought experiment designed to prove his case. It goes something like this:

Imagine a world somewhere that is exactly identical to Earth, right down to the population and languages spoken; call it Twin Earth. The only difference is that the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and is called ‘water’ by the Twin Earth equivalent of English-speakers, does not have a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen. Instead it has some bizarrely complex structure that we will abbreviate as XYZ. There is a substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen on Twin Earth, but it’s an incredibly rare substance that has a black color and a tar-like consistency.

Now imagine that you somehow manage to take a trip to Twin Earth, and you’re pretty thirsty from the long journey. You ask your host for a glass of water. What are you really asking for? According to Putnam, you’re asking for the tarry stuff. You come from the community of Earth-English speakers, and the words you say still mean what they would on Earth, not what they would on Twin Earth.

OK, you may say, fair enough, but how does that make me ask for the tarry stuff instead of the clear stuff? Especially since my hosts will give me a glass of the clear stuff and think nothing of it? According to Putnam, what ‘water’ really means is not ‘the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and so on.’ ‘Water’ means ‘the substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen,’ and that’s all there is to it. The former definition is a colloquial, secondhand kind of thing, one that’s vague and somewhat problematic at the edges. Add salt and food coloring to a glass of water, and it’s not colorless and tasteless anymore – is it still water? What about heavy water? Mineral water? We need something more precise.

What’s the essence of water, then, the thing that makes it what it is? According to our current scientific understanding, that would be its chemical structure. Relatively few of us have extensively studied the chemical composition of the stuff that comes out of our tap, so we defer to the experts who have, and when they tell us that water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen for every atom of oxygen, we defer to their knowledge and let it determine the extension of the word. (The extension of a word is the set of all the things and phenomena in the world that can be correctly referred to by that word.) Now, even before we knew the chemical composition of water, it had that chemical composition – its essence was always fixed, and so according to Putnam the meaning of the word ‘water’ was always fixed, and it was the job of our experts to determine what that essence was, not decide it for themselves.

The net result is that if our experts were to analyze the glass of liquid your Twin Earth hosts gave to you, they would discover that it was XYZ and not H2O, and they would tell you that, in fact, it wasn’t water. You were speaking a different language from your hosts, and it was a happy accident that the resulting error in translation resulted in you getting the kind of beverage you wanted. The funny thing is, since there are not in fact any experts analyzing the glass, both you and your hosts are unaware that you were really asking for the tarry stuff. Whatever was going on in your head – images of a glass of clear liquid, swimming pools, whatever – had absolutely nothing to do with the actual meaning of what you actually said. What mattered was the external conditions – the structure of the natural world, and the judgment of the experts who analyze that world. Putnam’s position, therefore, came to be known as externalism, and folks are still arguing about it today, even as it’s been refined and expanded through subsequent thought experiments. It all starts on Twin Earth with that glass of liquid, though, so that’s where I figured we’d kick off the conversation.

So what do you think?

Filed in Philosophy

Something to Cry About

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

It’s been almost five months since our daughter was born, and it’s truly been a wonderful experience. One thing I’m quickly learning is that once you’re a parent, you need to come up with answers to a whole bunch of questions that were once easy to dismiss, and the process of finding those answers can be a painful one. We got a very sharp lesson in that reality earlier this week.

Alex is for the most part a very well-behaved child. She’s friendly, smiles a lot, and can attract a flock of grandmothers in a diner from ten feet away. The one slight hitch is her sleep schedule – as is little surprise given her genes, she has none. She tends to fall asleep late, and she absolutely hates her crib. What’s worse, even while asleep, she can sense the moment you put her in the crib, wake up and start telling you, loudly, what a bad idea this was. Her three favorite places to sleep are her baby carrier, in someone’s arms, and in the bed next to Pattie or me. Since only the latter is a safe place while both of us are asleep, this has usually meant that Pattie and Alex sleep in the bedroom at night, while I take a nap on the couch and wait for her to go to work, so I can catch a few hours in bed with the baby. Not exactly what you’d call conducive to ‘putting the baby on a schedule,’ which is the one piece of advice we seem to get from all corners. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Once More – with FEELING!

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

1996
Yours truly was a humble editor of low-budget TV commercials at a low-power TV station in a low-ranking market. It was an interesting enough line of work, trying to find new and different ways to show used-car salesmen waving at the camera and bleating a hearty “come on down!�

There weren’t that many new and different ways to do this, mind you. And of course, our lovely account reps expected all of it to be done 15 minutes after they handed in the paperwork — regardless of whether or not the actual shoot for the commercial was scheduled for three days later. “Are you working on my spot yet?â€? they’d ask, poking their head into the somewhat cluttered production office repeatedly. And we laughed, oh, how we laughed. Until we realized they were dead serious. At that point, it became readily apparent that there weren’t nearly enough tape boxes and other heavy objects in the room to throw at them.

And into this arena stepped our youngest and most inexperienced salesperson, who had been tapped by someone to whom I will refer only as Agency Lady to produce a commercial for her newest client, a high-class restaurant in a city we’ll just call Fayetteville, Arkansas (to protect the innocent).

Agency Lady was essentially a one-woman advertising agency, or at least she liked to think so. She had no production facilities of her own, no one else working for her — just her trusty cell phone and an office on wheels. At best, she’s a broker; at worst, an overpaid consultant.

Agency Lady wanted us to come and meet her and her client to discuss a very fancy commercial. And after many a hearty “come on down,� I have to admit that the very prospect was intriguing. What we weren’t expecting was a group of people to whom I’ll refer, for the purposes of this article, as The Committee Of Clueless Individuals Who Should Never Have Had A Say In The Damn Thing. (Or TCOCIWSNHHASITDT for short.)

The Committee was comprised of the following Clueless Individuals.

  • Agency Lady.
  • The Chef, also part-owner of the new restaurant, who had an alarming and most disturbing habit of twisting the filters off of filtered cigarettes and chain-smoking them. As a result, the teeth of this man, who — by default, since he’s presumably preparing many meals a night — one would presume might wish to at least appear sanitary, were black as night.
  • The Chef’s Agent. (We don’t know why he’d need one either.)

Together, these Clueless Individuals were mapping out a grand plan for the newly opened restaurant, including an elaborate commercial beyond the usual expectations for this area. We didn’t mind that. What we did mind, however, was the fact that none of the three members of TCOCIWSNHHASITDT could agree on what, exactly, the commercial in question should be like.

For example, some think that doing the entire spot in black & white would be a powerful and classy statement. Other discussions center on whether there should be a spokesperson on screen, or simply a voice-over. And so on.

We go back a week later to shoot the spot. We spend all day there. Instead of The Chef feeding us some of his fine and likely nicotine-stained cuisine, we have to go foot our own bill for burgers. So much for gratitude.

Then we return home to edit the spot. Lots of dissolves and moody lighting – in color, I might add – and The Chef even graces our production studio to provide the voice-over himself. Everything looks good. Everyone likes it. Everyone seems to agree that this is one of the better productions we’ve turned in.

And then the Committee swings into action.

They decide it needs to be different somehow, with Agency Lady, The Chef and The Chef’s Agent all issuing completely different directives as to how to “improveâ€? the spot which, only a week ago, everyone thought was grand. The Chef’s Agent thinks it should be redone in black & white with spot color on things like candles and flames from the grill. Agency Lady wants it reshot on film. (Few TV stations, if any, use film anymore. Even the top market stations don’t bother — and why should they, when they can rent the equipment?)

And so on. In all, at least a dozen revisions are made and handed in. The Chef’s voice-over is replaced, the spot goes from black and white to color and back again (and again), the music is changed nearly every time, and people keep making suggestions.

And then the damn place goes out of business while revisions are still being made.

Maybe it was the fact that they couldn’t agree on the bloody TV commercial and never got around to putting it on the air more than once or twice.

The saga ends with Agency Lady contacting the station’s sales manager, blaming we, the production guys, for the whole folly, and demanding that the production — which went far above and beyond the typical “come on down!â€? spot — should be pro bono since it was such a fiasco. Numerous 80-mile trips between Fort Smith and Fayetteville, several long days on the clock, and countless hours of post production…and she doesn’t want us to bill her for it.

That incident made me decide to leave commercial production and focus more on promotions, something which always intrigued me anyway. I had, by this point, done numerous promos and found them interesting and entertaining to work on. And if I was entertained, there was a good chance that the viewers would be too. Plus…no Committee of Clueless Individuals. With promos, you’re working directly for the station.

Never again, I said. I started looking for a promo job and eventually got one. It was fun beyond my wildest dreams. And at long last, I forgot about Agency Lady and the TV commercial from hell that had driven me out of the lucrative field of TV commercial production.

Bliss.

2002
Having been to Green Bay and back, I’m now working news promotions at Fort Smith’s ABC station. Not quite as much fun, and very frequently frustrating, but also very challenging. I’ve been here for two and a half years now.

In June, a project from hell slowly begins to coalesce in our Fayetteville office, a project which will bring me back in contact with one of my arch-nemeses from the Committee. They’re still out there – and they’re secretly plotting my destruction. Or perhaps just trying to drive me insane.

The project is an awards presentation video for a homebuilders’ association, and the account rep contacted at our station is assured that this will be a quick edit, only about five minutes long, nothing to it. But there is something to it, something dark and sinister. For our account rep has been contacted by Agency Lady, still doing her one-woman show posing as an advertising agency. The plot thickens.

By the time the sales department contacts my boss in creative services, he already has misgivings about doing a presentation video. This is usually the sort of thing that the commercial production department does. The first time I catch a whiff of Agency Lady’s name in connection with this, I voice misgivings, and remind everyone of her involvement with the Chef’s doomed restaurant. Nobody listens.

(It’s worth a mention here that just once in my life, I’ve always wanted to stage-whisper the words “I tried to warn them…but they didn’t listen.� I just always expected those words to coincide with a tragic blimp accident or something similarly momentous, not a TV project.)

The project keeps getting pushed back because Agency Lady is having a hard time getting her crap together. Once there has been a great gathering of crap, in sufficient amounts to fuel the presentation video on pure fertilizer power alone, Agency Lady will appear and issue instructions. At least this is what they tell me will happen. The crap collection procedure continues until the Friday afternoon before the Wednesday night awards dinner.

Agency Lady arrives, waving a newspaper special supplement recently published to promote the event. In this supplement are no fewer than 44 houses which need to be included, one by one, in this video presentation. Each of these houses is represented not by a photo, but by a very fine-line architectural side-elevation drawing. The kind of very fine-line architectural side-elevation drawing which, when knocked down to TV resolution, results in eye-boggling moire patterns. There are also nearly two dozen sponsors, and at one point Agency Lady asks if the entire newspaper supplement page, which must measure all of 10 x 12 inches in irritatingly tiny type, can be compressed onto the screen.

I respond, truthfully, by telling her that it would look very, very bad — and would be completely illegible. To this, she replies, “Okay, never mind about putting the page on the screen then.â€?

This is a very important thing, as you’ll see later.

That night, after my other duties are finished (around 7:30pm), I set about the extremely arduous tack of copying down, from the newspaper circular, the address and builder of each house/subdivision. All 44 of these things are clustered six to a page in the circular, again in very small type, and I don’t even get all of these things typed up that night. Oh, and once the voice track for the presentation was edited and timed out, it was not five minutes. It was closer to twenty.

Over the weekend, I spend 24 hours getting the project to a point where it’s about 85% completed. I made it look as good as possible, and aside from all the moire patterns on those blasted line-art renderings, it almost did look presentable.

On Monday morning, the client — i.e. Agency Lady — wants to see the project, finished or not. She wants to see it now. Now, keeping in mind that this is Monday and we have our routine duties to perform once again, Agency Lady is politely told that she’ll be able to see it Monday night or Tuesday morning, because we won’t be able to get around to dubbing it off until then. The project is dubbed off that afternoon, and is prepared to be sent up to the Fayetteville office via our microwave link that night at around 7pm.

Tuesday morning I walk in, and discover that I’m being accused of gross incompetence. Apparently Agency Lady wanted all of the houses’ visuals to be nothing more than the newspaper pages. She wanted everything to be exactly as seen in the newspaper circular, in fact. She wanted the newspaper circular’s pages transferred to television in whole chunks.

But did she ever explicitly tell me this? No. Guess my gross incompetence is in the area of telepathy.

By Tuesday afternoon, the project has been taken away from our station, and the station has lost its sponsorship of the awards dinner (for which the presentation video was to be our contribution, in lieu of money). Given that I clocked in over 24 hours of time-and-a-half, I’m sure that in a few days accounting will be lamenting the fact that the sponsorship wasn’t just bought outright. Having me at the station all weekend on the clock will almost certainly prove to be more expensive.

And the capper to the situation? Agency Lady, in a huff, tells us that she’ll be going to a video production house in Fayetteville to get the presentation done right.

So let’s check the score at halfway through the fourth quarter here, shall we?

It took me over 24 hours — spread out over three days — to put together the now-rejected presentation. At the time Agency Lady called to tell us we were being dumped and she was going to “start from scratch,â€? about 27 hours remained before the awards dinner began.

And I learned later in the day that, being a busy production house, the place she had chosen to redo the entire presentation could only allot four hours of prep and edit time. It would’ve taken me about 90 minutes to bring the presentation, as I had edited it, to a state of completion — but she had now burned that bridge with the station’s management.

In short, she had four hours to replicate a project I had taken well over a full day to do.

I’m not a vengeful man, nor do I pride myself on such. Sometimes, however, I do get a little bit of satisfaction from a perfectly natural come-uppance in which I had to take no action.

As I put the finishing touches on this piece, I look at the clock and note that the awards dinner began about an hour ago, and so too, presumably, did the video. If, in fact, Agency Lady, my arch nemesis, got one done. I almost wish I could see what it looked like.

Bliss.

Filed in Life in Practice

When Statutes of Limitations Limit Too Much

Posted August 1, 2002 By Pattie Gillett

It may be hard to imagine that any good could come from the recent scandals involving the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy, but, slowly and quietly, there has been some change for the better. That change is that many state legislatures are recognizing that the statutes of limitations for civil and criminal action in these cases need to be extended. Or, in my opinion, eliminated altogether.

Statutes of limitations, which are rarely discussed outside episodes of Law and Order, determine the length of time a state or an individual has to bring criminal or civil charges against someone else for a crime or damaging act. These statues often vary from state to state for every nearly every crime (except murder) and they vary widely in sexual abuse and molestation cases. For example, New Jersey has no statues of limitations on child abuse cases while Massachusetts, ground zero of the recent scandal, has a 15-year limit for child rape and a six-year limit for “sexual touching�. There are now twelve states with no time limits on prosecuting sexual offenses against children. More states, including Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and California have several bills in their legislatures to or extend or eliminate their statutes. Hopefully, before the scandal fades from public memory, there will be many more states that do the same.

The question I ask in all this is: Why do we need statutes on these crimes at all? I do understand the need for statues of limitations in theory. Former Massachusetts Assistant District Attorney Barton Aronson writes:

[S]tatutes . . . ensure that prosecutorial resources are well used. Prosecutions are not like wine: they generally get worse, not better, with age. When a prosecutor first learns of a crime is when he or she is in the best position to investigate and decide whether to prosecute. That is the moment when memories are freshest and evidence most accessible. If the case isn’t worth prosecuting right away, it usually isn’t worth prosecuting at all.

But Aronson is also quick to point out that this is precisely why statues of limitations don’t work in child abuse cases. Prosecutors often don’t learn of child sex abuse cases right away. Most children who have been abused often do not fully realize that what has been done to them is a crime. In other cases, the children are threatened so that they do not reveal the abuse. In still other cases, the children block out the memories of abuse only to “recover� these memories years or even decades later. These frequent delays make it difficult to pinpoint exactly when the “clock� on a statute starts running. In some states, the clock starts with the crime itself; in others it starts with the discovery of the crime, or when the child in question tells another adult what has happened.

In the recent clergy abuse scandal, the Catholic Church was instrumental in hiding evidence of sexual abuse with a tangled web of payouts to families, clergy transfers, hidden files and other acts of deceit. A strict interpretation of the law means the statues have run out on hundreds of these cases. But victims and their families argue that the abusers shouldn’t benefit from the church’s deceit. And, due in part to the public pressure surrounding this case, legislators are listening to their arguments. They are recognizing that the lengths of the original statutes in child abuse cases had little to do with the actual length of a victim’s pain and suffering.

What the writers of those statues and, evidently, many church officials did not realize is that abusing a child robs him of the innocence and trust he desperately needs in his formative years. A child abuser takes what is wonderful about being a child and, in effect, murders it. And, as we all know, there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Filed in Public Policy