Today I’ve run across an interesting case that seems to illustrate the little vortex mentioned in the previous post. The gist is summarized reasonably well by the subtitle, “The man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong”. This is a criticism of the concept of the tragedy of the commons as a way of understanding human social dynamics. The criticism of Hardin and his specific presentation of the concept isn’t of any real interest to me. I’m sure I’d heard Hardin’s name before this article, but if you’d asked me yesterday who he was I could not have told you a single thing about him. The particular article of his that led to the tragedy of the commons entering mainstream thought, likewise, I may well have encountered in some fashion but have no memory of. I’m certainly aware of the tragedy of the commons, though, and have devoted some real attention to it. The opinions I have on that matter may well be incorrect, but I do have opinions and can articulate something about them. So this gives us kind of an interesting context, in which the author of the article, Matto Mildenberger, is trying to say something about a concept that is of some interest to me by criticizing a particular person and essay that aren’t.

There’s a contrast here between the concept as concept and the concept as the result of a particular sequence of events that led it to have a place in my mind and the minds of others. Suppose, like me until reading this article, you had no conscious awareness of that particular sequence of events. Was the concept in your mind tainted by its origin, when the origin was not in your mind? I don’t think so.

Suppose commutativity was discovered by someone with morally abhorrent views of one kind or another. Given the prevalence of morally abhorrent views in most of human history, there’s a pretty good chance that this truly is the case. You, knowing nothing of this, employ the concept with only some understanding of its logical foundation and practical utility in mathematics. There certainly is some historical sequence of events that led to the concept arising and being adopted. In this hypothetical situation, a relationship between commutativity and moral abhorrence is a historical fact but you probably wouldn’t say that it commutativity is mathematically wrong. It has a logical foundation is in some sense independent of its historical origin. Put another way, if a murderer hands you an apple, it’s still an apple.

In this article about the tragedy of the commons, the link between the concept and Hardin’s racism is factual in one sense, but performative in another. We never reject an idea because a racist came up with it, but we may well reject an idea if we know that a racist came up with it. There is a historical sequence of events that runs parallel to the moral evaluation in our minds. If we aren’t aware of the historical sequence of events, our moral evaluation will not run parallel to it. Once that moral evaluation does enter our minds we want to say that it already existed, was already true in some sense, independently of our being aware of it. Both the moral evaluation and our intuition that the moral evaluation was already true are created not by the facts of the situation but by, in this particular case, Mildenberger.

I don’t know if this is just an idiosyncrasy on my part, but I tend to think of performative language as though it worked the same as descriptive language, as though the language reported on some event that had already occurred, or at least had occurred separately in some sense, rather than being simultaneously the event and the reporting of it. I look for the event that is being reported, there is no such event, and my mind proceeds to chase its tail in various unhelpful ways. Or, if I’m the person who is supposed to engage in performative speech, I feel like I’m supposed to wait for some event to happen so that I can then report that it happened. I think ritual plays a role here. Performative speech tends to be ritualized, or at least to adopt a very formal and stilted tone. “I now pronounce you man and wife,” for instance, when saying simply, “You are married,” does not differ appreciably in content but doesn’t have the gravitas we expect from performative speech. Or, even in an informal context, there is a particular pattern of words that has become ritualized as the performative form. If you ordered food at a restaurant the same way a priest performs a wedding, you might say something like, “I am now ordering a taco.” In this informal context we express it as though it were an abstract desire, something that we hope will come to pass through the beneficence of the universe. “I would like a taco.” In that phrasing, it seems to report on a desire that exists in a private reality, despite functioning performatively.

There’s a little black hole hidden in there somewhere into which my mind falls on occasion, and I can’t really pin it down. A feeling that there should be an external cause or justification when there simply isn’t. Whatever exactly this vortex is, it is not unique to performative language although this is the form in which it presents itself to me today and in which it seems to be at least a little more tractable than usual.

Today, it is brought to light because I decided to have a self-published journal for research articles. When I mentioned this idea a couple months ago, an online friend of mine said, “That sounds like a blog.” Yes, it does, except that it would seem very odd to write a blog post in the form of a research paper. Put the label “academic journal” on it, and suddenly uploading words to a website is in a totally different social context. The format is also performative. For instance, would you format a blog post in two columns? I’m sure someone has, but again this would be quite odd. For a research article, though, using two columns gives a set of words some extra unit of real research article-ness. Sure, some academic journals use a single column–but, come now, is that really any different than a blog post?

One of the particular examples I ran across is accepting an article for publication. One of the sticking points that really does matter for self-published research is that it needs to be accessible and archived in a form that will be widely accessible into the foreseeable future. The obvious venue in biology is bioRxiv, and realizing that bioRxiv can fulfill this role is what led me down the self-publishing path. I realized it was possible, and then it started to seem like a good idea. In any case, bioRxiv kind of occupies a weird space in relation to performative language and “real” academic journals. BioRxiv is, basically, a publisher of unpublished papers. If you compare bioRxiv to online publication of an academic journal, it’s hard to nail down a definitive distinction between the two except that the academic journal puts a pdf online and labels it a published article, while bioRxiv puts a pdf online and labels it a pre-print article. You might think–ah, but the academic journal has peer review and institutional legitimacy and all that! Well, first, bioRxiv doesn’t publish just any old pdf. There is a review process, even if it is very rudimentary and the bar for acceptance is explicitly very low. The review process is more about making sure this looks approximately like research rather than looking like porn, and explicitly not about making sure it looks like good research. And, on the academic journal side, there is a cottage industry that sells the appearance of being a real academic journal. The whole point of these journals is that they look exactly like journals and have the words on the website saying they are peer-reviewed and everything. There probably even is a peer review process, although it probably isn’t much more rigorous than the review process for bioRxiv. Some of them even have impact factors, a measure of academic importance that looks incredibly silly once you know that the kind of publication run by someone sends spam emails saying, “Hey, I saw your paper on an obscure plant, would you like to submit your next paper to our prestigious journal on cancer research?” can rank higher than the kind of publication that is run by people who have dedicated the last few decades to studying obscure plants. By any quantitative measure of research quality used by universities to evaluate faculty, you could basically publish your bellybutton lint to one of the spam journals, and if it had “coronavirus” in the title it would rank higher than the work of someone who has spent the last two decades studying taxonomy of the genus Fissidens. Which is to say, academic culture is clickbait culture in many ways but–for god’s sake–at least with two columns if you want to be taken at all seriously.

I got rather sidetracked there, but maybe it’s an amusing rabbit trail so I will leave it. In any case, bioRxiv is a preprint archive. So, when you upload a paper, at one point you must click the box to affirm, “I know this is a preprint server, and I solemnly swear that this paper has not already been accepted and published.” For a self-published journal this is a bit of a quandary. I have some idea in my mind about whether the paper is ready to be published, sure, but can we let performative thought in the door? Surely not. So, what constitutes “being accepted for publication”? Well, getting an email from the editor of the journal saying that your paper has been accepted. I thought ahead at least far enough to create an email address for the editor of my journal. So, I can click that box in good faith until such time as an email has been sent from that address stating that the paper has been accepted.

That’s a lot of words for what is, basically, a joke that is mildly amusing to a very small set of people. This touches at least tangentially on some mysteries that preoccupy me, though. I doubt any light has been shed here, but sometimes I think that if I keep going long enough mere duration can perform the work of insight.

I encountered an unusual paragraph from T.F. Stuessy (Rhodora 74(797): 1-70):

The first description of Melampodium appeared in Linnaeus’ Hortus Cliffortianus (1738) which was the reference cited in the Species Plantarum of 1753. Linnaeus in his Critica Botánica of 1737 (p. 76) clearly indicated that the name he gave to the genus was derived from “Melampus medicus graecus.” Apparently overlooking this explanation, many later workers (e.g., Gray, 1884; Cockerell, 1905) erroneously have believed the name to come from the Greek words meaning “black-foot.”

Melampodium is usually called “blackfoot daisy” in English, and of course most people familiar with the genus who know at least a few of the common roots used in Greek and Latin plant names believe that Melampodium means “black foot”. At first glance, then, Stuessy is overturning common knowledge. However, Stuessy has presented us with a false dichotomy, that Melampodium is either named for Melampus or means “black foot”. Melampodium is named for a mythological Greek healer, Melampus, whose name comes from the Greek words meaning “black foot”.

You deceive yourself, but not when you decide to deceive yourself.

Related: Have you ever read a book about cognitive biases, and thought that now, knowing better, you are less likely to fall prey to them?