What follows might appear to be me doubling down on my pasquinading the Dean of Arts and Science at the University of Lethbridge. But it’s not. It’s just a standard exercise in the Philosophy of Language. To wit:

After his infamous Kamloops letter, suppose I’d said – and I was certainly inclined to – that Matt Letts is not the sharpest pencil in the box. More recently, in what the Administration calls a ‘letter of guidance’, he has upbraided me for describing an instructor from Women Studies as, well, that. The Kamloops letter was cringeworthy. This one was just risible. But let’s see in what sense, if any, it could be taken seriously.

I take it that Letts isn’t stupid enough to think I’m stupid enough to think that a person is a pencil, and a box of pencils is a boxed set of persons. Neither of us is that far out on the spectrum. So a pencil in the box is a metonym for an individual member of a faculty, and the sharpness of the pencil is a metonym for the intelligence of that member. So saying that she isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box, I must be saying that there exists at least one member of faculty more intelligent than her. That might be false. But it’s highly unlikely. To accuse me of uttering a falsehood Letts would have to be claiming that the member in question is the sharpest pencil in the box, a claim it’s highly unlikely he’d want to make. So, it would seem, he’s upbraiding me for observing that there’s at least one member of the faculty – perhaps it’s Letts himself – who’s more intelligent that she is.

Note that I didn’t say – because I’d hardly be qualified to say – that she’s the dullest pencil in the box. Nor that Letts is. That would make either her or Letts less intelligent than me. But I said nothing of the sort. 

Note too that I did not say she, or Letts for that matter, is dumber than a bag of nails. The only way anyone could be dumber than a bag of nails is if the bag of nails subscribed to Abraham Lincoln’s admonition that “‘Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool than open your mouth and remove all doubt!” But I don’t think that’s why bags of nails hold their tongues. So no, not the sharpest pencil in the box and dumber than a bag of nails are not equivalent claims. Spoken of anyone, the latter is undoubtedly false. The former is very probably true.

But here’s the rub. It’s precisely because neither Letts nor I would say, “She’s the sharpest pencil in the box,” even if we did think she’s the most intelligent member of the faculty, that suggests that “she isn’t” isn’t just the denial of that “she is”. The expression, “She’s not the sharpest pencil in the box!” is only used to claim she’s at or near the bottom of the heap.

But I’m not sure that saves Letts. Even on this more charitable interpretation, to deny she’s not the sharpest pencil in the box is to claim that she’s not at or near the bottom of the heap. But that’s to suggest many if not most other members of faculty are. Does Letts really want it to be known that this is what he thinks of his own faculty? So I think he has to claim that my saying she’s not the sharpest pencil in the box just is my saying she’s dumber than a bag of nails. But apart from the fact that unlike a bag of nails both she and Letts say stupid things, I categorically deny I said anything of the sort about either of them.

But as I said at the outset, this entry isn’t about Matt Letts’ lack of critical thinking skills. It’s about natural languages, and the peculiarity of them. I’ve long since complained – but now my point is I shouldn’t have – that words don’t mean what it’s not unreasonable to think they mean. So, for example, We Believe You doesn’t mean we do, Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean they do, hate speech has nothing to do with hate, decolonising the classroom does not mean reversing the effects of colonisation, indigenising the university doesn’t mean anything at all, each of equity, diversity and inclusion mean whatever Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty says they mean, any criticism of the State of Israel is antisemitism, and she’s not the sharpest pencil in the box doesn’t mean there are people in the faculty more intelligent than her. Worse yet, for the immigrant trying to learn our language, if she asks me what the n-word refers to, I’m not allowed to tell her.   

To be fair, natural languages are peculiar things. How would you explain the difference between “He’s my Jewish friend!” and “He’s my Jew friend!”? You couldn’t. And yet most of us – not all but most of us – can tell the difference. How is this possible?

Part of the answer lies in our being embedded in a linguistic culture, and a linguistic culture, in turn, is embedded in a moral culture and in a history. We Believe You means we should pretend we do to encourage you to file a report with the appropriate authorities. Black Lives Matter encourages cops to think before they shoot, and so on. Many of these words or expressions have no cognitive content, nor are they intended to. Rather they have what speech act theorists call perlocutionary content. That is, not unlike Virtue Ethics, they skip the why and go directly to the what to do.

And again to be fair, imagine trying to explain to someone why it’s wrong to masturbate on a sleeping infant. It could be done, I suppose, but isn’t it simpler to just say “Don’t!”? Likewise, then, to ask after the meaning of the word indigenous, or to ask, Diversity of what?, or to wonder how inclusion of some doesn’t logically entail the exclusion of others, is to undermine – and let’s be honest, to knowingly undermine – the objectives of indigenisation or Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

So let’s bring this discussion home. To say she’s not the sharpest pencil in the box is to say nothing more than she said something stupid. But to upbraid me for saying she’s not the sharpest pencil in the box is to engage in a political act. It’s to say – and back this up with threat of sanction – that whether she’s said something stupid or not, one is not to say so. I can say with impunity that she’s the most intelligent person in the faculty, but I can’t, on pain of reprimand, say she’s not. A bag of nails knows not to say it, even if it could. So what does that say about me?     

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Humour

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, antisemitism, bag of nails, Black Lives Matter, decolonisation, hate speech, Humpty Dumpty, indigenisation, Lewis Carroll, Matt Letts, metonyms, pencils in a box, perlocutionary, We Believe You