Moving Beyond the Boundaries of a Literal Meaning
It’s the literal truth, we say, as if that “literal” conveyed an extra measure of authority.
Actually, literal meanings are frequently wrong, and often confusing.
A recent example is the “naked wife” virus that spread rapidly through cyberspace a few months ago. The Department of Energy found it couldn’t send out a warning about the virus because its prudish computer software interpreted “naked wife” literally--and censored the warning.
Literal means using a word in its exact sense, but is that how words are meant to be interpreted? As a kid, I used to fear that my mother would literally push me out of the car when she said she’d “drop me off” at a friend’s house.
Anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano concludes in his book, “Serving the Word: Literalism in America From the Pulpit to the Bench,” that literalism is “a widespread characteristic of American thought,” and a dangerous one at that. Literal thinking often leads to intolerance because it insists that that only one meaning can be right--leaving no room for interpretation, ambivalence or ambiguity.
Perhaps surprisingly, literal thinking has caused almost as many problems in science as it has in other realms of life. Consider, for example, the trouble physicists had trying to determine the nature of light when they were stuck with literal interpretations of the terms “wave” and “particle.” Light has obvious wave-like properties, and also obvious particle-like properties; but it is clearly literally neither.
In the end, physicists simply had to face the fact that light--like so many other physical phenomena--could not be strictly interpreted as either wave or particle. It required several interpretations, each dependent on context.
In fact, it’s striking how often physicists got stuck in ruts because of literal thinking. They spent centuries trying to determine the exact physical properties of the so-called luminiferous ether--an all but undetectable substance that was thought to pervade all space. Taking the ether literally required believing that a substance could be at the same time as elastic as steel and as transparent as air.
In the end, physicists came to the conclusion that the ether didn’t exist. But another very similar substance, known as the vacuum, is alive and well and at the center of physics.
Why does the vacuum persist while the ether was banished?
One reason is that everyone took the ether to mean one very specific thing, while the term “vacuum” evolved over time to embrace many phenomena, and thus eluded a narrow literal definition.
In the same way, one of Newton’s greatest triumphs was his recognition at the outset that his phenomenally successful theory of gravity could not possibly literally work as his equations implied--by attracting objects toward each other at a distance through empty space. It took Einstein to figure out how it did work: Massive objects warped space itself, causing nearby objects to “fall” in their direction.
In the end, Einstein was able to revolutionize physics precisely because he freed words that other people interpreted literally from their narrow definitions--in particular, space, time and speed.
Literalism is not just a disease of physics. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, biologists noticed that developing embryos of mammals, including humans, developed tails, gill slits and other fishy and reptilian features. They came to the conclusion that the embryo actually repeats the entire evolution of the species as it matures. This became known as the Biogenetic Law: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”
This “law” quickly fell from grace, however, when it became clear that embryos don’t become fully formed fish or lizards on their way to becoming people or pigs. The idea was abandoned until the 1970s, when biologists realized that partial repetition of evolution is an important aspect of the process of embryonic development.
While the details were wrong, a central part of the theory was right. But literal thinking caused the baby to be thrown out with the bathwater.
Just because a theory turns out to be only partly true doesn’t make it worthless. Paul Dirac did not discover “holes in nothing,” as he thought. But he did discover what turned out to be antimatter. Genes do not determine behavior. But they certainly play a role.
Part of the power of science comes from the fact that new ideas are always built on the foundation of old ones. If experiments suggest a theory is wrong, scientists can either throw the theory out, or patch it up. Remarkably often, patching up works quite well--for example, putting in a different context, or setting new kinds of limits.
It is people, not nature, who insist on absolutes.
Words, after all, are only what we make them. And remake them. So it isn’t all that surprising that we sometimes can’t agree on what the proper meaning is.
Or even what “mean” means, or “is” is.
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K.C. Cole can be reached at kc.cole@latimes.com.
