Derrida, Part Deux

Edward has penned a great note regarding Derrida, who passed away over last Friday, but I can't let his death pass without comment from me. Frankly, I found Derrida to be a too-clever pain in the ass (a seven-point-five, for those using the Wittgenstein scale), but he was a fun pain in the ass -- in a mind-frag kinda way. And, some of the problems that Derrida skirted around (Derrida, seemingly on principle, never really got around to "addressing" them) actually have some modicum of relevance in the real world.

How? Well, consider patent law.

AutoGiro Co. v. United States, 384 F.2d 391 (Ct.Cl. 1967), an old and famous case (well, famous to patent lawyers) sums up the problem well. Indeed, it is the very problem identified in AutoGiro -- a problem that would make Derrida himself smile -- that first drew me to patent law. AutoGiro, in relevant part, states as follows:

The claims of the patent provide the concise formal definition of the invention. They are the numbered paragraphs which 'particularly (point) out and distinctly (claim) the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.' 35 U.S.C. § 112. It is to these wordings that one must look to determine whether there has been infringement. ... Courts can neither broaden nor narrow the claims to give the patentee something different than what he has set forth. ... No matter how great the temptations of fairness or policy making, courts do not rework claims. They only interpret them. Although courts are confined by the language of the claims, they are not, however, confined to the language of the claims in interpreting their meaning. [JMB note: That is to say, Courts may study certain other parts of the patent and its "prosecution history" -- and, sometimes, other things -- to try to understand the meaning of a claim.]

Courts occasionally have confined themselves to the language of the claims. When claims have been found clear and unambiguous, courts have not gone beyond them to determine their content. [Citations omitted.] Courts have also held that the fact that claims are free from ambiguity is no reason for limiting the material which may be inspected for the purpose of better understanding the meaning of claims. ...

We find both approaches to be hypothetical. Claims cannot be clear and unambiguous on their face. A comparison must exist. The lucidity of a claim is determined in light of what ideas it is trying to convey. Only by knowing the idea, can one decide how much shadow encumbers the reality.

The very nature of words would make a clear and unambiguous claim a rare occurrence. Writing on statutory interpretation, Justice Frankfurter commented on the inexactitude of words:

They are symbols of meaning. But unlike mathematical symbols, the phrasing of a document, especially a complicated enactment, seldom attains more than approximate precision. If individual words are inexact symbols, with shifting variables, their configuration can hardly achieve invariant meaning or assured definiteness.

Frankfurter, Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, 47 Col.L.Rev. 527, 528 (1947). See, also, A Re-Evaluation of the Use of Legislative History in the Federal Courts, 52 Col.L.Rev. 125 (1952).

The inability of words to achieve precision is none the less extant with patent claims than it is with statutes. The problem is likely more acute with claims. Statutes by definition are the reduction of ideas to print. Since the ability to verbalize is crucial in statutory enactment, legislators develop a facility with words not equally developed in inventors. An invention exists most importantly as a tangible structure or a series of drawings. A verbal portrayal is usually an afterthought written to satisfy the requirements of patent law. This conversion of machine to words allows for unintended idea gaps which cannot be satisfactorily filled. Often the invention is novel and words do not exist to describe it. The dictionary does not always keep abreast of the inventor. It cannot. Things are not made for the sake of words, but words for things. To overcome this lag, patent law allows the inventor to be his own lexicographer. ...

Allowing the patentee verbal license only augments the difficulty of understanding the claims. The sanction of new words or hybrids from old ones not only leaves one unsure what a rose is, but also unsure whether a rose is a rose. Thus we find that a claim cannot be interpreted without going beyond the claim itself. No matter how clear a claim appears to be, lurking in the background are documents that may completely disrupt initial views on its meaning.

Autogiro, 384 F.2d at 395-397.

The problems identified in AutoGiro are still being addressed in patent law today. And they are far (very far) from being resolved. And y'all thought Deconstructionism was dead.

Comments

[von]

My favorite line, by the way, is:

"Things are not made for the sake of words, but words for things."

[carsick]

Someone onced referred to Derrida as presenting "nihilism with a happy ending". That's about right to me though I also think happy endings are generally a construct of storytellers.

On another item mentioned in your post:

Moe also has great affection for Tacitus and your description of Derrida, "a too clever pain in the ass" seems to fit him as well.

[Moe Lane]

"Moe also has great affection for Tacitus and your description of Derrida, "a too clever pain in the ass" seems to fit him as well."

As attempts at troublemaking go, it's weak, and that awkward pronoun confusion isn't helping matters any.

[Moe Lane]

(After editing last comment) Ah, kharma.

[hilzoy]

In all seriousness, von, since I am apparently just immune to Derrida, I have never really been able to understand what's so novel about the thought that words don't have fully determinate meanings, and/or that authors sometimes undercut their own points. Not that he wasn't fun and all.

[liberal japonicus]

"As attempts at troublemaking go, it's weak..."

Thank god.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

"In all seriousness, von, since I am apparently just immune to Derrida, I have never really been able to understand what's so novel about the thought that words don't have fully determinate meanings, and/or that authors sometimes undercut their own points."

I couldn't agree more, and the distinction between a lack of perfect precision in meaning and a lack of meaning at all is often lost on his students.

[carsick]

Sebastian
I see you as more of a Walker Percy fan. Not a bad crew to hang with.

Moe
Kind of ironic that in a thread about a deconsructionist, you're pointing out "awkward pronoun confusion".

[kenB]

As a linguist, I wasn't able to get past Derrida's alternately simplistic and nonsensical assertions about language, speech, and writing. His attempt to reverse the speech-writing hierarchy depended on a complete redefinition of those two terms, to the extent that they were hardly recognizable. As far as I could tell, his argument was roughly equivalent to, "you linguists think that white is lighter than black, but if we redefine black so that it's even whiter than white, this shows that you're all wrong!"

At least that was my impression from a very brief foray into his writing. I didn't have the patience to fight through and see if there were any genuinely good and novel ideas amid all the noise.

[von]

In all seriousness, von, since I am apparently just immune to Derrida, I have never really been able to understand what's so novel about the thought that words don't have fully determinate meanings, and/or that authors sometimes undercut their own points.

Well, yeah. There's that. Still, one has to be impressed that what took you a single sintence to express, Derrida required hundreds of thousands of words. It's a talent. Of sorts.

[carsick]

Thinking about words and meaning reminds me of my high school philosophy lessons. Plato's sort of ideal of a thing that in reality is never really the ideal and then a word similarly fixed used to describe it.

[hilzoy]

von: I once had a colleague who did, completely off the cuff, a hilarious shtick about his grandmother, whose folky aphorisms (according to him) anticipated most of Derrida. If memory serves, he began by saying, in a quavery grandmotherly voice, "You can't always believe everything you read, young man..." and by the end of a minute or two, there Derrida's main ideas were.

[Anarch]

They are symbols of meaning. But unlike mathematical symbols, the phrasing of a document, especially a complicated enactment, seldom attains more than approximate precision.

And how. Just got back from an incredibly frustrating review session with my students having tried to teach them epsilon-delta calculus. It's not their fault they're not getting it -- no-one does -- but part of the problem when learning math is that mathematics does, insofar as it's possible, have absolute precision. It's just brutally, brutally hard for most people to strip away the imprecision with which they usually face the world and pare themselves down to the level of rigor required. In that, at least, Derrida et al. were completely correct.

[von]

It's just brutally, brutally hard for most people to strip away the imprecision with which they usually face the world and pare themselves down to the level of rigor required.

The law strives for the same precision -- that's why lawyers get so hung up on particularities. As evident from the Frankfurter quote and the AutoGiro case, however, it's never quite achieved due to the limitatiosn of language.

[Slartibartfast]

Mathematics has its own inadequacies. How about we think of mathematics as a sort of Olympic timed event, while language is more like ice dancing?

Ice, because it's slippery out there.

[Anarch]

Mathematics has its own inadequacies.

And god bless it for doing so, because otherwise I'd be out of a job.

[Have I mentioned that I'm a logician?]

[Slartibartfast]

If so, I missed it. What exactly does a logician do, Anarch?

I'm pink, therefore I'm Spam.

- Decarte's pesky kid brother

[Dave Schuler]

Thank you, kenB, for your comment. As someone who was once trained (in the mists of the distant past) as a linguist I've had precisely the same reactions.

[judson]

If you're saying Wittgenstein is a 10, I'd agree. And would prefer to talk 'bout him.

If we can't talk we could always point...

[kenB]

Dave,

Ne za chto. And thank you, too. Surely we can't both be wrong.

von,

however, it's never quite achieved due to the limitations of language.

Oh, sure, blame it on language. Certainly can't be the lawyers' fault, can it? :-)

[von]

Oh, sure, blame it on language. Certainly can't be the lawyers' fault, can it? :-)

Well, if it's not the language, it's probably the client. Or perhaps those "activist judges."

[von]

If you're saying Wittgenstein is a 10, I'd agree. And would prefer to talk 'bout him.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

[Anarch]

If so, I missed it. What exactly does a logician do, Anarch?

Well *this* logician fritters far too much time away surfing the blogosphere, so I'll have to cast my net a little wider and speak from impersonal experience... ;)

The short answer is that we look at the limits of truth and provability. Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem (which is what you linked, IIRC) begins the subject: for any "sufficiently powerful", "sufficiently well-defined" set of axioms T, there will be a sentence of (ordinary) arithmetic that is true but not provable from T. This inevitably leads itself to a bunch of different questions:

1. What does it mean to be "true"? What does it mean to be "provable"?
2. What is "sufficiently powerful"? What is "sufficiently well-defined"?
3. What does this "true but not provable sentence" look like?
4. What, in general, are the limits of axiomatization? What can be axiomatized and what can't? Given a particular set of axioms, what can you conclude about the structures which model them?

Answering these questions lead you to the three main branches of mathematical logic:

1. Computability Theory (formerly Recursion Theory until Bob Soare, I believe, single-handedly forced everyone to change it), which deals with questions of effectiveness, of what could be computed on an (ideal) comptuer, and of relative complexities.
2. Model Theory (which has a number of different hoppin' subbranches, including Stability Theory and Simplicity Theory), which asks what one can conclude about structures which model a particular set of axioms.
3. Set Theory (my field), which studies the axioms that generate the "mathematical universe" itself. It (sort of) splits into two subfields: (infinitary) combinatorics, which studies the way that "very large" infinite sets can be split apart and put back together; and consistency theory, which studies what happens if you add (or subtract) axioms to the standard ZFC universe, usually with Paul Cohen's method of forcing.

In addition, there are the lesser-studied branches of

• Differently-valued Logics -- what happens if we allow more truth-values than just "true" and "false" (including continuous logics, Boolean-valued logics, and intuitionist/Heyting-valued logics)
• Infinitary logics -- what if we allow "infinitely long" sentences? How does this change our notions of true (easy) and provable (not so much)?
• Non-standard Models -- a subfield of model theory, this takes the standard structures of the natural or real numbers and asks what happens if we allow "infinitely large" (and, over the hyperreals, "infinitely small") numbers. Non-standard analysis turns out to be a really useful way of formalizing our intuitive notions about limits, continuity and differentiability (e.g. the Leibniz notation dy/dx is literally how the non-standard derivative is defined) and allows much easier proofs of certain theorems.

Being mathematics, all of these branches are intimately related with one another. For example, my current research involves set theory, consistency proofs, forcing, large cardinals & combinatorics, infinitary logics and infinitary/non-standard model theory.

Gotta run -- student in need! *dundun!*