Language is strange, if you think about it.
Usually, we don’t think about it much.
We think with it.
Or through it.
But we don’t really think about it.
Writers do. A little more than readers, I suppose. But even as a writer you don’t want to do it too much. Thinking about language too much usually results in pretty terrible writing. You want to feel your way to good writing.
Well, this is a post about thinking about language. Thinking a lot about it. Almost certainly too much. So you’re in for a treat of some pretty terrible reading experience. If you make it through, however, perhaps there is some insight waiting for you at the end…?
Language is ambiguous
I’m sure most of the words I wrote so far make sense to you. You wouldn’t read this if you weren’t able to understand English. And while I occasionally use some fancy technical term here that you may not be familiar with, most words you just understand.
And… well… that’s a problem.
Most of the time we pretend that the words we use mean the same thing to each of us. In conversation, and in writing. We just read over them, assuming that I mean them in exactly the way you understand them. However, that is almost never the case.
Luckily, it’s close enough in most cases. Otherwise it would be really difficult to communicate at all. But notice, as you read this sentence, how you make sense of each word in a subconscious, non-analytical way — as long as you don’t bump into one of those unfamiliar technical terms or some strange grammatical construction, what you read just makes sense to you. Intuitively.
“Intuitively.”
Intuitive — that’s a good word to take apart for the sake of this argument.
If you are new here and haven’t read any of my previous posts, then… well… first of all: Hello and welcome! Surely you understand the word “intuitive”. It’s unlikely that your subconscious language processing trips over this word and asks your conscious analytical thinking to consult a dictionary about it.
You just, you know, know what it means. Intuitively.
In the sense that you might feel put on the spot if I’d ask you to explain what it means right now. But I’m sure you’d come up with some reasonable explanation that’s close enough to what you would find in the dictionary.
It’s just not a word you would spend a lot of time thinking about.
Which is precisely my point.
It’s both a blessing and a curse that whether this is the first post of mine you have ever read or not, you will feel like you know what I mean and just read over it like almost any other word so far. I don’t have to define everything and go all academic on you, I can just trust that you know enough English that everything I wrote until here just makes sense to you. No dictionary required. Thanks, literacy.
If you have read most of my previous posts, you may have a good intuitive sense of what I mean when I use that particular word. I’ve written a lot about attention and insight and flow and implicit learning, and how all these things are connected to intuition and the kind of intuitive understanding I’m referring to. When I write “intuition”, for me it’s a “loaded” term, charged with context.
It’s not that I’m using “intuition” in some strange, different way from what most people’s common understanding of it is. But I’m using it here in an extremely specific, technical sense. It’s almost like a technical term masquerading as a more or less regular word that most people are familiar with. Enough so that they can read over it and the whole sentence it is part of still makes sense and they miss the implied depth and importance of it.
On the one hand this particular word choice makes sure people don’t trip over it and have to consult a dictionary, which makes for a much nicer reading experience. On the other hand it hides complexity and nuance that I have spent quite some time explaining in the past.
For me that word establishes that whole prior context with all its complexity about how intuition comes from implicit learning, how it helps us navigating potentially combinatorially explosive depths through relevance realization, how it is fundamental to transformative insight, how it is based in fast, intuitive S1 processing and in opposition to slow, analytical S2 processing, and why it plays an extremely important role in the creative process.
I just write “intuitive”, and mean all that.
But how do you know?
The time I spent exploring, studying, understanding all this complexity, shoving all those connections and meanings into the word “intuitive”, caused me to have now developed my own intuitive sense for what “intuition” means to me, and all these aspects are wrapped up in it. It is very unlikely that you just read that word and have all the same associations. But I do. Every time I use that word, all that context is recalled implicitly. And I can’t go back. I cannot un-know what I now know.
That is a problem. Primarily for me. I’ll have to deal with it. And as a writer I have to figure out a way to make you aware of this, when I want to make you aware of it, because I think the nuance is important. And when to just drop the word and leave it to your own interpretation, because the nuance would be overkill.
The last few paragraphs must have been grueling enough that I can assume that I managed to do this at this point.
But this is not just a problem for me. It is for everyone trying to communicate anything a little more complex with language. You constantly walk a fine line between short, crisp, and ambiguous or exhaustive, academic, and precise. Which often translates directly into good vs. terrible writing.
It doesn’t help that the way most of us consume written content these days is covering up this problem leaving us completely unaware of it.
Reading for information
If you’re not reading for entertainment or, say, reading poetry for the love of language, I’d wager that most of us read informative material looking for information.
I know I did for most of my life, as I was looking for knowledge in all kinds of mostly non-fiction material. It’s like going on a hunt for new ideas you hadn’t heard of before. Stuff that somewhat surprises you. What’s the new bit of information that you didn’t have that this author has figured out? Often, there are few such bits, and we have to spend a lot of time and effort finding them.
A 20-page academic paper can collapse into one sentence of, “Oh, that’s what they were trying to say!” And then they backed it up with 17 pages of academic language and 3 pages of references. Or a popular science book folds into a single presentation slide with four bullet points and feels like it has been blown up just so it has enough pages to be sold as a book, promoted on podcasts, and earned its sticker that says “New York Times best seller”.
Reading for information feels like going through a lot to return with very little. Maybe we discover a valuable nugget of information that we believe was worth reading hundreds of pages for. But, let’s be honest, these days we often wish we just had an “executive summary” and, gosh, we didn’t need all those 23 detailed examples just to get that one point that was completely obvious in the first place.
As soon as I picked up how most popular non-fiction books are padded just to make them thick enough to justify their existence as book shelf plug-ins that look great in your Zoom background, I spent a lot of time not reading the book, and instead reading reviews and summaries. Or listen to podcast interviews with authors. As it’s mandatory for ambitious authors to do the podcast circuit, there’s a good chance they will tell you most of what’s in the book in an hour or less.
I also wouldn’t read anything more than once. Sure, I’m aware that we don’t retain everything the first time we read it, but I’d rather spend my time improving my reading skills and getting better at focusing to retain as much as possible on the first try. And if you get 60–80% of it the rest will probably not make that much of a difference anyway, right?
There is this strong desire for efficiency in finding that one important bit of information, to add it to my own body of knowledge, to — ultimately — get some utility out of it. This is why listicles are such a popular format. Everything that helps you get the gist through just scanning instead of reading feels more efficient. We don’t have time! So let’s just get straight to the point, shall we?
It all boils down to having the right information. And the best way to acquire it is to spend the least amount of time finding it. If valuable information usually comes wrapped in copious amounts of not so valuable narrative, everything that promises us accurate summaries, conclusive highlights, secret formulas, and distilled principles is incredibly valuable to us. We need to find the signal in the noise, the needle in the haystack, the gold nugget in the stream of sand.
And thanks to market dynamics of supply and demand, a lot of material out there is now written for this mode of reading for information, which I should’ve probably called scanning for information instead. And don’t even get me started on what generative artificial intelligence is going to do to us…
Reading for information is an extremely having mode and results-oriented way of processing information. Naturally, we fall into the trap of trying to optimize it for efficiency, utility, and convenience.
Of course, it is not the only way to approach potentially valuable material.
Language is a portal
When I arrange all these sentences and paragraphs in this particular narrative order, I swear I am not just trying to embellish some trivial point I’m trying to make. I’m not trying to wrap some small piece of information in some grand story telling. I’m not a good enough writer to do that. It doesn’t even occur to me as being an option.
I am, of course, trying to “make a point”. But I don’t really think it is transmitted as information encoded in these sentences and paragraphs, which you then have to process and filter to find it.
Believing that all knowledge can be codified in language and therefore transmitted through a sequence of symbols only makes sense if you accept propositional tyranny and ignore the existence of other ways of knowing. Deeper — procedural, perspectival, participatory — knowledge cannot be acquired through downloading data, information, and facts into your mind. It has to be experienced to become known, in an “Aha!” moment of transformative insight.
Good writing at least aspires to get you as close to such a moment of insight as possible, by arming you with all the propositional knowledge you need to put yourself into a position to experience insight. Once again, “put yourself into a position” sounds like a generic phrase that makes sense here, but is a very deliberate choice of words that tries to hint at a change in perspective, which is a key ingredient for transformative insight.
The ambiguity of language enables you to connect to the author by making sense of their words, even if they don’t quite mean exactly the same to you than they mean to them. If they make sense to you, you at least share a weak connection with the author. Maybe they even resonate with you, you have a more vigorous sense that something significant is going on, and you share an even stronger connection. This, however, is just a starting point. If you want to open yourself up for deep insight, you’re not done here.
How dare I suggest this self-serving approach to publishing information?! Calling out the reader as the one who needs to put in the work when it is clearly the author’s mission to do their job well enough to present the information in the best possible way.
I’m not trying to pass responsibility on to the reader. We authors still need to do the best job we can to provide the best possible version and vision of our ideas and perspective. But while we may be able to present you with new and valuable propositions that you can add to your belief system easily, we cannot transform you. You can only transform yourself.
But I can only show you the door.
You’re the one that has to walk through it.
Language can also be a portal into the mind of the author. If you are willing to let go of your own perspective for just a moment, leave your own interpretations and meanings behind, and try to understand how and why they use these words in that way, you may be able to see the world through their eyes.
More than the words themselves, it is often the relationships between them, which reveal how the author makes sense of the world. They offer you the key to a door which leads to a different point of view. And sometimes that shift in perspective causes the change in your salience landscape that leads to a deep, transformative insight — an “Aha!” moment you will never be able to recover from.
It is up to you to decide if it’s worth doing that, and for most authors it will not be, as they publish for a world that prefers reading for information. But some authors seem to be trying their best to get you to see something that they can now see, trying to share the insights they had and that have transformed their perspective.
For those authors reading for perspective is the mode of reading I am aiming for. This determines the material I seek out to read. I want to use their often massive tomes and long lectures as a portal into their mind, hoping to get a glimpse of how they make sense of the world to transform the way I do.
Reading for perspective
Reading for perspective is a being mode and process-oriented way of processing information. It is not about finding valuable bits of information to add them to your mental database of beliefs as efficiently and conveniently as possible. It is about paying attention to how the author sees the world.
It may be enough to use your own interpretations of their words to make sense of them, safely staying in your comfortable position looking at it from your point of view. However, if you manage to understand what they mean, what it looks like from their perspective, it can reveal what is salient and obvious to them, and what might not yet be salient and obvious to you.
If the source material is deep and dense enough, if it provides enough context to fully inhabit their point of view, this can lead to a cascade of insight. Like a puzzle, it is hard to find the starting point, the first few pieces that go together. But once you changed your salience landscape once, as soon as the first two pieces snap together, it will become easier. And now suddenly re-reading the same passages over and over reveals more and more meaning you didn’t catch last time, because now you see what you couldn’t see before.
Good material that has the density and elegance needed can become an inexhaustible source of insight feeding you with developmental wonder every time you approach it again.
As much as I wish that what you are reading right now satisfies these criteria, my writing is not a good example. I am determined to learn how to create material like that, but I know that I still have a long way to go. For now, you will have to take my crude hints I sprinkle in the forms of links all over my posts to spot the words and find the connections that I believe are the ones that help the most trying to see the world as I see it right now.
However, I have found that the material I base most of my writing on, for instance Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order and John Vervaeke’s Awakening from the Meaning Crisis to be great examples that do have the depth, density, and beauty to cause transformational insight. If you can overcome the desire for fast and efficient content consumption and take the time to try and see the world through their eyes, your patience and endurance will be rewarded.
Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.
Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.
If you are new to this series, start here: On simplicity…
The previous series starts here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.
Also check out my presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.
This was very interesting. I’m now second guessing every word I use and why.
Also loved this observation on non-fiction reads (it’s exactly why I tend to steer away from non fiction unless I’m heavily invested in the topic!
“As soon as I picked up how most popular non-fiction books are padded just to make them thick enough to justify their existence as book shelf plug-ins that look great in your Zoom background, I spent a lot of time not reading the book, and instead reading reviews and summaries.”
A great read, Steffan 😊