My wife, who is a damned fine linguist, assures me that this stuff has been done to death by the finest minds available, which is going to prevent me from having a go myself, will it not? Yes, it will not, by no manner of means.
The Plain English Campaign Foot in Mouth Award winner for 2003 is United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for comments in a press briefing. This is why he received the erudite kick in the pants.
'Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.'
What Mr Rumsfeld forgot to add is a category that gets us every time
"It ain't so much the things we know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so."
Incidentally, some people know that Artemus Ward originally created the quote; some people know that Josh Billings said it; some people know that Mark Twain said it; some people know that Will Rogers said it; some people know that Ralph Waldo Emerson said it. I looked it up in various places, the preponderance of assertions is that Will Rogers was the culprit. But I can't say I know that.
Now I'm not sure that he deserved the award, he just made plain something that we all take for granted and yet cannot explain simply or completely and never elegantly; knowledge is very tricky stuff because its based on information, and that's even slimier.
A couple of weeks ago, former Iraq Weapons inspector David Kay dropped that one on an unsuspecting world and threw the status of what we know, and how we get to what we know, into very sharp relief.
Some fundamentals for what I think of as information then:
1. All information can, in some measure, be verified. In other words, as far as I am concerned, the statement that carries the information doesn't contain it, it is more like a pointer to something than the thing itself.
2. Verifiability is an essential component of information
3. All statements carry information, but we don't know what that information is until we test it the statement. (Statements here can also apply to pictures, diagrams, photos, sculptures, sounds etc etc. Lets just stick to words at the moment though.)
Take the statement "that yellow rock is gold". Anyone want to buy the rock? Why not? Because none of us accepts that the disembodied statement does anything more than point to the information, nor can the truth of the statement be derived in any way from it, its just an assertion, but it carries information about something for sure, the problem we have to solve is exactly what that information is; it may not be about the rock.
First, we may want to know who said it.
Was it a prospector, grown wealthy from finding gold,
a prospector gone bankrupt through failure to find it,
or was it a con artists grown wealthy from telling people he was a prospector, grown wealthy from finding gold?
To close off a gallop over the hill in that direction, lets stipulate that we "know" which of the three people talking it is. Want to reach for your wallet yet?
If it is the first one, maybe, but you have to ask why he hasn't bought it already, and if either of the others, probably not at this stage. And, while knowing who said it may help us assess a risk about the veracity of the statement, it doesn't help us with the information itself.
For that we have to test the rock. Weigh it, throw it in a bath and if Archimedes hops out cryin "Eureka!", we know something about the rock, something which is now wholly independent of the statement that lead us there. The statement now becomes redunant except as a tally against the credibility of the oiriginal speaker. Nice.
But what really interests me is what happens when the rock is not gold, when it turns out that there isn't even a rock?
A who's who of British and American political life bet their credibility on the kind of statement that Mr Rumsfeld made prior to the invasion of Iraq. Not only did they know for certain what weapons Iraq had, they knew the quantities and the precise locations of them, their production facilities, sources of supply and so forth. They knew these things to a standard of proof that would support a pre-emptive war, the deaths of many thousands of people and billions upon billions of dollars worth of damage, repair and security costs. It was a millenial bet, and as Mr Kay has said, everything they knew for sure, was wrong.
It seems that those countries that refused to participate in Gulf War II had a better eye for information and how it becomes knowledge. While they could not prove that the weapons did not exist, they also felt that the information carried by the assertions was far from testing positive, and were not prepared to take that kind of risk.
It seems we have a great deal to learn about what we class as information, and how we use it to develop knowledge, I leave the emergence of military intelligence in that specialzone that it has always, sadly occupied, an oxymoron.
But that's not all, along with those who did not sufficiently trust the assertions to carry valid information, there was another player; one Saddam Hussein.
If you recall, he said that there were no illegal weapons in Iraq. Now I would not trust Saddam as far as my dog could kick him, and those who were tasked with finding these things out almost certainly didn't either, but it turns out that his staement was true, there were no such weapons in Iraq. Its a little like the fraudster who tells me that the yellow rock is gold, and it is. The statement carried information, and that information has been verified.
Even more bizarre is the possibility that Saddam's scientists and military people appear to have consitently lied to him about the status of his weapons programmes, taking his money and doing only enough to fool a megalomaniac who had no real skill in the field and who wanted desperately to believe in the power he was building.
Which means that, when Saddam said there were no weapons, he was lying, but telling the truth. The statement was factual, even though its intent was to deceive. I have no idea how a criminal court would deal with a statement that was intentionally deceptive and accidentally truthful, maybe "conspiracy to commit a crime" would cover it. However, we are now living in a time when it is important to understand the implications of Epimenides paradox, the celebrated Cretan lived in the sixth century BC and was reputedly the originator of the oldest of logical paradoxes. He is reputed to have said: "All Cretans are liars."
My bet is that the US, UK and Australia 'knew" that Saddam was an inveterate liar and therefore, the chance that he was hiding illegal weapons was very high. So they bet their geopolitical and ethical credibility on that knowledge. As Mr Blair and now Mr Bush are discovering, they could not have been on thinner ice.
Once upon a time it was a nice exercise in untangling the levels on meaning in language, in the last year, our inability to do so has resulted in many deaths and the possible destruction of American and British credibility for a long time. We are also witnessing the spectacle of many curious minds wanting to know with much more clarity what someone means when they say that they "know" something, that they have "information" about it and that that information is "undeniable"; its literally a matter of life and death.
We proselytisers of ICT keep saying that information is power, but its a weapon with two edges and a blade at both ends, we should learn to use it carefully.
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