Descriptivism

and binary thinking

(I’m not a linguist in any way shape or form, so if you are, and my misuse of linguistic ideas here is bothersome, I apologize in advance. It just seemed like an interesting way to make a particular point).

I was listening to a podcast about language this week. The speaker (who is a linguist) came out with a very strong statement about an idea called “descriptivism” (if I have this right). The idea is that, essentially, “any way any English speaker says something is absolutely correct always”. He was against this idea, and he was taking a very dogmatic and binary position - not that there is some merit to the idea, or some nuance, but that it was flat out wrong. In fact, he had this reaction when he first saw it in college and largely built his career on the idea of giving no quarter to this idea.

From my naïve position, this seems like a good example of someone taking a “continuous” problem and trying to fit it into a binary, “either/or” model - and this tendency is something that I see at the root of a lot of team dysfunction and argument. It’s not usually helpful.

Here’s my very simplistic take - it is true that any language is fundamentally defined by how it’s spoken by its speakers. But each of those terms - “spoken” and “speakers” seems like a single, well-bounded, well-defined thing (and this leads us to the binary argument), but it’s not. “Spoken” has a hugely probabilistic spread across time and space - even a single person might say something differently in different contexts, moods, spaces. And who a “speaker” is may evolve over time - are you an ‘English’ speaker if you also speak Spanish to your mom and sometimes mix them? Yes? Maybe? It’s complicated? Is your particular usage improper? Absolutely not! Is it standard? Not yet, but it might be. ( I do agree it’s ‘correct’ in the sense of you can talk to your mom any damn way you want to, of course, but that doesn’t make it broadly used or agreed-upon).

So my (again, non-linguist, don’t @ me) take on this is that the real answer is “it’s complicated”. There isn’t really a “right” way to speak any language, but there is an ever shifting, distributed and probabilistic way it will be spoken at any time, and we can talk about “common” use as that probability increases for a given usage.

I see this pattern in technical arguments all the time - engineers like to simplify complex patterns into binary choices. It happens in other realms too - certainly in the public sphere with politics, we all like to strip issues down to “either/or”. But the reality is that most problems in life, teams, and engineering have at least some aspect of “it’s complicated” to them, like this one does.

It’s hard to talk about this complexity effectively - we do have to make choices and decisions, after all, and the “either/or” heuristic does help sometimes with that. But it’s important to realize that the heuristic (or analogy if you like) is just that - it’s the map, not the territory, and it’s only useful as long as it’s useful. If you find yourself in an argument where both sides seem to be talking past each other, or seem to be hopelessly stuck in a binary conversation (gee, does that happen these days?), it might be because you have collectively over simplified.

Finding a way to get more richness and nuance into the conversation is hard, but important. “either/or” means someone has to win, someone has to lose. “It’s complicated” opens the door to conversation, negotiation, tradeoffs, and progress.