The man with a carrot face sits at his computer. He is composing a theory of propositional truth, which should be a rubric of what is true when one says this, as if it were true, or one says that. He wisely avoids any thought to questions of Truth-with-a-capital-T. And yet – he sits typing, and thinking, and typing, and drinking his coffee, never looking anywhere other than the screen – and he writes nothing but numbers and procedures in the form of a programming code, not even a language, but the abstraction of language into the most skeletal arrangements of predicates inverted. Give him hard facts and ask if they are true. The Battle of Antietam was fought on September 17, 1862 (not February 9, 1943!). The nucleus of the carbon atom has six protons (not 36!). The computer says “1”, for “true”. Success! Ask him questions: What color is the sky? When will I die? Does she love me? After much clanging and cogitating over code, he produces a table of numbers. There are no replies to these questions and statements, he says, in terms of words, but here – these numbers! – they tell the truth of the matter. Make other propositions, ask other questions. Numbers, possibly variables, maybe operations among them, and equations, everything, a physics of information. See! he says, reality is only the computation of reality, the information imbibed physically in the calculation of what it means to represent. If there is a prediction, found to be accurate at least once, what else exists but the function we used to make it? He exhales, irritated at having to explain himself. His nose twitches, his hair wilts. He washes and peels his head. The computer must eat its veggies.
The poet objects. He says, a theory which predicts but does not explain – this is no theory at all. It is a train schedule. Mr. Carrot-Face is a mechanic, not a philosopher, not even an inventor, and he should stop pretending. But what is wrong with train schedules, exactly? The poet also sits at a computer. He types a little, and thinks. He drinks coffee. He calculates – beats, stresses, lines, rhymes, clauses. He says nothing of propositions, but, as with all poets, he expounds endlessly on his theories of poetry. And truth – does he write only that which is true? Does he know the difference? He says, there is only Truth-with-a-capital-T and what is True must be unknowable; we could ask rather where is Truth or when is Truth; we could devise a schedule…
Let’s take a moment before we encountered Señor Cara de Zanahoria. In a darkened room, the poet is hanging upside down from the ceiling and can barely touch the keyboard on the table below. He types out something painstakingly and cackles like a bat. The poem is posted on some website that nobody ever reads. He believes in himself and his words; is living proof that the social world will never suffice if the mind is the mind. Yet the poet is a liar. Nothing there is he says that has been: only in his telling was what could be. One might suppose several possible reasons for this, such as amorality. He does not disregard propositions and propositional truths; the poet may include them in his texts (among other forms of ululating) – he simply does not concern himself with propositions as such, and they become merely a poetic pose to be taken up or ignored at will. Appraisals that are propositional in their fundamental nature, like morality, do not matter.
One is adjured, subsequently, to consider the proposition without such interlocutors. It is a peculiar kind of entailment. The predicate of a statement, taken to be general in its scope, sets forth the conditions under which an entailed predicate, which is more specific, may be treated as fact, if its specificity obtains in some observation, or as irrelevant, if its specificity does not. The first statement is a premise, while the second is an exemplar. For a premise, one might declare, “Artificial intelligence is hype.” In conditioning any statement which might follow, of interest is not the subject, “artificial intelligence” in our example, which will turn up again as the subject of the entailed statement, but the predicate, this matter of something being “hype”. “Is hype” is extensively unspecified as an isolated phrase; there are a range of more detailed predicates that, if part of a propositional entailment, could fill out its meaning, and one or more these, in turn, may be checked against reality, where a congruence would lead us to confirm the entailed predicate as fact. For instance, let’s say one observes in the next decade that artificial intelligence has not thrown millions of people out of work, or that it does not induce any radical improvement in economic productivity, nor does it appreciably improve the quality of people’s lives. One might also remark that an “artificial intelligence” program is an abstraction of peculiar human representations, from limited corpora of such representations, and therefore it has no capabilities beyond the narrow band of forms feeding this abstraction; while AI systems might be able to handle impressive complexity, they are derivative systems that will never attain the flexibility, extensibility or subjectivity of actual humans. In all of these cases, should these observations be validated, we have determined a fact about “artificial intelligence” that confirms a more general premise – its hypèdness.
As a mere statement, the premise can neither be true nor false, and neither, in isolation, can the exemplar; rather, the former may qualify an abstract logical connection between subject and predicate, while the latter may be qualified by its connection to reality, or lack thereof. The proposition as a whole, i.e., the entire entailment, can be true or false insofar as it confirms a logical connection between the premise’s subject and predicate in context – it is the foundering of a logic that constitutes fictitiousness, not factibility in some “objective” sense. This process is recursive, as the entailed predicate could entail yet another, more specific or more concrete predicate, yielding a fact within a fact. We can take even a further step, and regard the proposition’s entailment retrospectively, moving from the specific to the general, abstracting from fact to hypothesis; and therein, exclaim, gadzooks! we have discovered – inference! Such marvels! The proposition contains a world of words crumbling, eventually, to reveal a world of facts. It allows the speaker to set up certain expectations about what follows what in the way of events, and the quantity of form we find recognizable, as moment leads to moment in memory. Such marvels!
But what of the things that the premise fails to mention? Reality is enormous. These absences provide no facts, and yet, their existence is not made absent by this comprehensive nullity, the proposition’s final insistence. A void of meaning, as an abstraction, could be said to represent anything or everything, but the substance of reality ignored, beyond the facts that it does not accumulate, is not what it is, but what it could be, and for that we have no propositions to importune the mind, by rule, to make reality a smooth conformity. We must confront what is dark and unspoken, or, if words are the thing, any entailment of words becomes a non-sequitur, about which all inferences are fantastic. This is not the fiction of a premise which fails to prove its instantiation, but a different representation of reality, and a new sort of knowledge, something like a poem.
And the poem must surprise!
