Floppy vs Stiff Concepts
I’m a bit puzzled by how changing culture can change our deep values. If cultures mainly change our status markers and norms, (i.e., game theoretic equilibria re social rules), don’t we need some other channel of influence over deep values? Unless maybe we really do mostly only care about status and avoiding censure?
One other channel is concepts. In my last post, I told how our usual abstract concepts that describe status, norms, humanities, and the arts naturally change over time. This is like how law changes via precedent, but even more so. We often want and celebrate such concept changes, and the people who cause them.
Let me call concepts that can change a lot via such processes “floppy”, and contrast them to “stiff” concepts that don’t change so much. For example, our concepts of mass, time and space, and many concepts built on these, are pretty stiff. As are most accounting concepts of cost and revenue. These are also pretty concrete concepts; stiffness here is largely obtained by staying pretty close to concrete observations.
We also have large STEM areas built on systems with many related more abstract concepts. In these systems, stiffness is obtained via a dense network of tight (often mathematical) interconnections between these abstract concepts, and also some concrete concepts. You can’t change any one of these concepts much without changing many others around them. Floppy concepts, in contrast, can be changed individually, requiring only minor matching changes to related concepts.
Non-STEM folks in the humanities and the arts are often proud to see themselves as having special social roles re status, norms, and values, roles for which they see STEM as less-suited. And we probably actually accept them in such roles because our usual status and norm concepts are in fact floppy. But they don’t obviously have to be.
One instructive example is the academic field of law and economics. This is the study of law that uses economic analysis to recommend legal processes and rulings that appear to maximize the concept of economic efficiency. As economics offers a stiffer set of concepts than do other frameworks for analyzing legal processes and rulings, these recommendations are more stable and less vulnerable to drifting as much as law usually does via its usual changes embodied in precedent.
Of course law and economics is disliked by many (most?) legal scholars, maybe exactly because of its lower degree of floppiness. A legal world dominated by law and economics would change less, with less room for celebrating legal activists who cause change. But suggests a vision of a way to cut cultural drift: fill the world of status, norms, and values with stiffer concepts, maybe drawn in part from economics.
This wouldn’t eliminate change, but would slow it down a lot. The difference would be like the rate at which ordinary languages change, compared to the rate at which computer languages change. Committees in charge of such language do sometimes make changes, but rarely.
I don't disagree, but I want to share a comic irony:
"For example, our concepts of mass, time and space, and many concepts built on these, are pretty stiff."
One of the original triggers of cultural floppiness, on a par with Marx, Nietzsche, and quantum mechanics, was the change in our concepts of mass, time and space.
There's another irony here, in that what Einstein's relativity actually did was /eliminate/ relativity from physics (which is why he hated it when people started calling it "relativity theory"). It didn't show that the laws of physics are subjective. Very recent observations had /seemed/ to prove that they were; and Einstein restored objectivity to physics by proving that Newton's conceptions of mass, time, and space were /objectively/ wrong. Yes, he showed "time" and "space" aren't real in the Platonic sense. /And provided better alternatives./
The more-important thing Einstein did, with far greater consequences, was to prove that the nominalist view of the meaning of words is superior to all logocentric views such as realism, essentialism, and Platonism. AFAIK, not a single person in the humanities* has understood either of these points in the 119 years since.
* I count economics as a science.
Originalism as a philosophy of legal interpretation that itself is bolstered by 'stiff' commitment has the effect of stiffening law over time as it tries to anchor and lock in to what was thought at a particular time, place, and context, usually long enough in the past such that those involved in the drafting are deceased and some track record of case law near to that time and context helps to establish that original meaning with minimal wiggle room for latter day jurists who want to interpret that particular law in a floppy way.