Before jumping to the conclusion that a rise in average grades must imply inflation (see my previous posting on this topic), we should be aware of the dangers that exist when we are dealing with averages. For example, suppose we consider a hypothetical institution that has just two departments A and B. Historically, students taking courses in A have had average grades of 2.5 while those in B have had 3.0. Even if there is no change at all in the abilities or effort of the students and no change in what the faculty teach or the way that faculty assess and grade, so that the average grades in each department remain unchanged, it is still possible for the average grades of the institution to rise, simply because the fraction of students taking courses in B has become larger.

There is evidence that this shifting around in the courses taken by students is just what is happening. Those who are convinced that grade inflation exists and that it is evil, tend to interpret this phenomenon as game playing by students, that they are manipulating the system, choosing courses on the basis of how easy it is to get high grades rather than by interest or challenge.

For example, the ERIC report says “In Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education (2003), professor Valen E. Johnson concludes that disparities in grading affect the way students complete course evaluation forms and result in inequitable faculty evaluations. . . Students are currently able to manipulate their grade point averages through the judicious choice of their classes rather than through moderating their efforts. Academic standards have been diminished and this diminution can be halted, he argues, only if more principled student grading practices are adopted and if faculty evaluations become more closely linked to student achievement.”

This looks bad and the author obviously wants to make it look bad, as can be seen from his choice of the word ‘manipulate’ to describe the students’ actions and the way he implies that faculty are becoming more unprincipled in their grading practices. But there is no evidence for the evil motivations attributed to such students and faculty. In fact, one can look at the phenomenon in a different way. It is undoubtedly true that students now have many more choices than they did in the past. There are more majors and more electives. When you offer more choices, students are more likely to choose courses they are interested in and thus are more likely to do better in them.

Furthermore, even if students are choosing courses partly based on their expectation of the grade they will receive in it, we should not be too harsh in our judgments. After all, we have created a system in which grades seem to be the basis for almost everything: admission to colleges and graduate schools, honors, scholarships, and financial aid. As I said, grades have become the currency of higher education. Is it any wonder that students factor in grades when making their choices? If a student tries to balance courses they really want to take with those that know they can get a high grade in order to be able to maintain the GPA they need to retain their scholarships, why is this to be condemned? This seems to me to be a sensible strategy. After all, faculty do that kind of thing all the time. When faculty learn that the NIH or NSF is shifting its grants funding emphasis to some new research area, many will shift their research programs accordingly. We do not pour scorn on them for this, telling them that they should choose research topics purely based on their interests. Instead, we commend them for being forward thinking.

It certainly would be wonderful if students chose courses purely on the basis of their interest or usefulness or challenge and not on grade expectations, but to put students in the current grade-focused environment and expect them to ignore grades altogether when making their course selection is to be hypocritical and send mixed messages.

What about the idea that faculty grading standards have declined and that part of the reason is that they are giving easy grades in order to get good evaluations? This is a very popular piece of folklore on college campuses. But this question has also been studied and the data simply do not support it. It does seem to be true that students tend to get higher grades in the courses in the courses they rate higher. But to infer a causal relationship, that if a faculty member gives higher grades they will get better evaluations, is wrong.

People who have studied this find that if a student likes a course and a professor (and thus gives good evaluations), then they will tend to work harder at that course and do better (and thus get higher grades) thus bringing about the grades-evaluations correlation that we see. But what tends to determine how much a student likes a course and professor seems to depend on whether they student feels like she or he is actually leaning interesting and useful stuff. Students, like anybody else, don’t like to feel they are wasting their time and money and do not enjoy being with a professor who does not care for them or respect them.

Remember that these studies report on general trends. It is quite likely that there exist individual professors who give high grades in a misguided attempt to bribe student to give good evaluations, and that there exist students willing to be so bribed. But such people are not the norm.

To be continued. . .

POST SCRIPT: And the winner is. . .

Meanwhile, there are Americans who have already have decided which country the US should invade next in the global war on terror, even if they haven’t the faintest idea where that country is on the globe or why it should be invaded. Even Sri Lanka gets a shot at this particularly dubious honor.

Here’s an idea for a reality show, along the lines of American Idol. It will be called Who’s next?. The contestants will be the heads of states of each country and this time their goal will be to get voted off because the last remaining country gets bombed and invaded by the US. The judges could be Dick Cheney (to provide the sarcastic put-downs a la Simon Cowell. Sample: “You think we’re going to waste our smart bombs on your dumb country?”), Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice.

Fox television, my contract is ready and I’m waiting for your call.

There is nothing that gets the juices flowing in higher education academic circles than the topic of grade inflation. Part of the reason for this passion may be because grades and test scores, and not learning, seem to have become the currency of education, dominating the thinking of both students and faculty. Hence some people monitor grades as an important symptom of the health of universities.

But what is curious is that much of the discussion is done in the absence of any hard data. It seems as if perceptions or personal anecdotes are a sufficient basis to draw quite sweeping conclusions and prescriptions for action.

One of the interesting things about the discussion is how dismayed some faculty get simply by the prospect that average grades have risen over time. I do not quite understand this. Is education the only profession where evidence, at least on the surface, of a rise in quality is seen as a bad thing? I would hope that like in every other profession we teachers are getting better at what we do. I would hope that we now understand better the conditions under which students learn best and have incorporated the results of that knowledge into our classrooms, resulting in higher achievement by students. Any other profession or industry would welcome the news that fewer people are doing poorly or that fewer products are rejected for not meeting quality standards. But in higher education, rising grades are simply assumed to be bad.

Of course, if grades are rising because our assessment practices are becoming lax, then that is a cause for concern, just as if a manufacturer reduces the rejection rate of their product by lowering quality standards. This is why having an independent measure of student learning and achievement to compare grades with has to be an important part of the discussion.

Grade inflation is a concept that has an analogy with monetary inflation, and to infer that inflation (as opposed to just a rise) in grades has occurred implies that grades have risen without a corresponding increase in learning and student achievement. But in much of the discussion, this important conditional clause is dropped and a rise in grades is taken as sufficient evidence by itself that inflation has occurred.

Let’s take first the question of whether average grades have actually risen. At Case, as some of you may know, beginning January 2003, the GPA cutoffs to achieve honors were raised to 3.56 (cum laude), 3.75 (magna cum laude), and 3.88 (summa cum laude) so that only 35% of students would be eligible for honors. (The earlier values were 3.20, 3.50, and 3.80 respectively.) This measure was taken because the number of people who were graduating with honors had risen steadily over the years, well above the 35% originally anticipated when the earlier bars were set.

A look at grade point averages at Case shows that it was 2.99 in 1975 (the first year for which we have this data), dropped slowly and steadily to 2.70 in 1982, rose to 3.02 in 1987, stayed around that value until 1997, and since then has oscillated around 3.20 until 2005, with the highest reaching 3.27 in 2001. The overall average for the entire period was 3.01 and the standard deviation was about 0.70. (I am grateful for this and other Case data to Dr. Julie Petek, Director of Degree Audit and Data Services.)

It is hard to know what to make of this. On the one hand we could start at the lowest point in the grade curve and say that grades have risen by half a letter grade from 1982 to 2005. Or we could start at 1975 and say that grades are fluctuating in the range 2.70-3.30, or about half a standard deviation about the mean of 3.0.

What does the data say nationwide? Henry Rosovsky and Matthew Hartley, writing in a monograph for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are convinced that inflation has occurred. For evidence of grades increasing, they point to various nationwide surveys that show that average grades rose by 0.43 from 1960 to 1974; that in 1993 the number of grades of A- or higher was 26%, compared to 7% in 1969; and the number of C’s dropped from 25% to 9% in that same period; and that averages rose from 3.07 in the mid 1980s to 3.34 in the mid 1990s.

In this last result, it is interesting to note in another study that grades rose on average only at selective liberal arts colleges and research universities, while they declined at general liberal arts colleges and 
comprehensive colleges and universities, and in the humanities and social sciences

The Rosovsky-Hartley monograph has been criticized for depending on research that itself depended on studies that used surveys, and such studies can be questioned on the fact that it is not clear how reliable the responses to such surveys are, depending as they do on self-reporting.

A 2003 ERIC Digest of the literature on this topic finds results that that cast doubt on the basic question of whether average grades have even risen. For example, “Clifford Adelman, a senior research analyst with the U.S. Department of Education, reviewed student transcripts from more than 3,000 colleges and universities and reported in 1995 that student grades have actually declined slightly over the last 20 years.” (my emphasis). His study of 16.5 million graduates from 1999-2000 also found that 14.5% of these students received As while 33.5% received grades of C or lower.

What is significant about the Adelman study is that he used actual student transcripts, not surveys, and thus seems to me to be more reliable.

It seems from this data and other studies that average grades have not increased across the board, but it is plausible that they have increased at selective liberal arts colleges and research universities. The Rosovsky-Hartley monograph says that “In 1966, 22 percent of all grades given to Harvard undergraduates were in the A range. By 1996 that percentage had risen to 46 percent and in that same year 82 percent of Harvard seniors graduated with academic honors. In 1973, 30.7 percent of all grades at Princeton were in the A range and by 1997 that percentage had risen to 42.5 percent.”
Even though it has not been conclusively established suppose that, for the sake of the argument, we concede that at least at selective liberal arts colleges and research universities (such as Case) have seen a rise in average grades. Is this automatically evidence of grade inflation? Or are there more benign causes, such as that we getting better prepared and more able students now, or our teaching methods have improved? Another important issue is whether Case’s experience of rising grades is part of a national trend or an exception.

To be continued. . .

POST SCRIPT: Where’s the balance?

Over at Hullabaloo, Tristero catches the Washington Post in a blatant act of bias in favor of atheistic science. The Post article says:

Scientists said yesterday they have found the best evidence yet supporting the theory that about 13.7 billion years ago, the universe suddenly expanded from the size of a marble to the size of the cosmos in less than a trillionth of a second.

Tristero points out that the article completely fails to mention the controversy around this question, that there is another side to this story, that the big bang is “only a theory” since no one was there to actually observe this event and prove that it happened.

And not a word of balance from the other side, as if the sincere faith of millions of Americans in a Christian God didn’t matter at all to the Post’s editors.

I just hate it when the media reports carefully vetted scientific data as fact and not as just one of many valid points of view. I’m not asking for them to ignore the opinions of these so-called scientists, but they really should report the fact there’s a lot of controversy about whether this kind of evidence is valid. Like, were you there, huh, Mr. Hotshot Washington Post?

The government’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is an invaluable source of information about the state of education in the US. Among other things, it periodically measures the state of literacy and determines what percentage of the population falls into four categories: below basic, basic, intermediate and proficient. These levels are defined (with samples of abilities and skill sets) are given below:

Below Basic indicates no more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.

Key abilities
• locating easily identifiable information in short, commonplace prose texts
• locating easily identifiable information and following written instructions in simple documents (e.g., charts or forms)
• locating numbers and using them to perform simple quantitative operations (primarily addition) when the mathematical information is very concrete and familiar

Sample tasks typical of level
• searching a short, simple text to find out what a patient is allowed to drink before a medical test
• signing a form
• adding the amounts on a bank deposit slip

Basic indicates skills necessary to perform simple and everyday literacy activities.

Key abilities
• reading and understanding information in short, commonplace prose texts
• reading and understanding information in simple documents
• locating easily identifiable quantitative information and using it to solve simple, one-step problems when the arithmetic operation is specified or easily inferred

Sample tasks typical of level
• finding in a pamphlet for prospective jurors an explanation of how people were selected for the jury pool
• using a television guide to find out what programs are on at a specific time
• comparing the ticket prices for two events

Intermediate indicates skills necessary to perform moderately challenging literacy activities.

Key abilities
• reading and understanding moderately dense, less commonplace prose texts as well as summarizing, making simple inferences, determining cause and effect, and recognizing the author’s purpose
• locating information in dense, complex documents and making simple inferences about the information
• locating less familiar quantitative information and using it to solve problems when the arithmetic operation is not specified or easily inferred

Sample tasks typical of level
• consulting reference materials to determine which foods contain a particular vitamin
• identifying a specific location on a map
• calculating the total cost of ordering specific office supplies from a catalog

Proficient indicates skills necessary to perform more complex and challenging literacy activities.

Key abilities
• reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences
• integrating, synthesizing, and analyzing multiple pieces of information located in complex documents
• locating more abstract quantitative information and using it to solve multistep problems when the arithmetic operations are not easily inferred and the problems are more complex

Sample tasks typical of level
• comparing viewpoints in two editorials
• interpreting a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity
• computing and comparing the cost per ounce of food items

The 2003 results can be found on page 4 of the NCES document.

For prose literacy, the population breaks up as 14% below basic, 29% basic, 44% intermediate, and 13% proficient.

For documents literacy, 12% are below basic, 22% basic, 53% intermediate, and 13% proficient.

For quantitative literacy, 22% are below basic, 33% basic, 33% intermediate, and 13% proficient.

It does not surprise me that the literacy levels go down for quantitative skills. What does surprise me is that the bars are set so low. Maybe I am living in a dream world (after all, I do work in a university!) but it seems like the tasks required of people at the proficient level are the minimal ones needed to function effectively in modern society, if you are to have a sense that one is aware of what is going on around.

For example, last week I was preparing my tax returns and it seemed to me that to be able to do them requires proficiency level (at least as far as prose and document literacy went), since there was a lot of “if-then’ reasoning involved. And my taxes are fairly simple since my finances are straightforward, as is the case for most people whose income comes mainly in the form of salary or wages.

To think that only 13% reach proficiency level in all three categories is troubling. How do the rest even do their taxes, let alone make sense of the complexities of the modern world?

In previous postings (see here and here), I discussed why college rankings vary so much depending on who does the survey. One of the reasons is that different criteria are used to arrive at the rankings, making it difficult to arrive at apples-to-apples comparisons. In this posting, I will discuss why I think that rankings may actually be harmful, even if the measures used to arrive at them are good.

The main problem with rankings is that it requires a single summary score obtained by combining scores from a variety of individual measures, and it seems as if people focus exclusively on that final score and not pay too much attention to the scores on individual measures that went into the summary.

This is a general problem. For example, in course evaluations by students of their teachers, there are usually many questions that ask students to evaluate their teachers on important and specific issues, for example, whether the teacher encourages discussions, is respectful to students, etc.

But there is usually also a question that asks students to give an overall evaluation of the teacher and when such questions exist, those people who usually read the results of the surveys (students, teachers, and department chairs) tend to focus almost exclusively on this summary score and not pay much attention to the other questions. But it is the other questions that provide useful feedback on what kinds of actions need to be taken to improve. For example, a poor score on “encouraging students to discuss” tells a teacher where to look to make improvements. But an overall evaluation of “good” or “poor” for teaching does not tell the teacher anything useful on which to base specific actions.

Teachers face the same problems with course grades. To arrive at a grade for a student, a teacher will make judgments about writing, participation, content knowledge, etc. using a variety of measures. Each of those measures gives useful feedback to the students on their strengths and weaknesses. But as soon as you combine them into a single course grade using a weighted average, then people tend to look only at the grade, even though that really does not tell you anything useful about what a student’s capabilities are. But teachers are required to give grades so we cannot avoid this.

I often hear faculty complain that they give extensive and detailed feedback on students’ written work, only to see students take a quick look at the grade for the paper and then put it away in the their folders. Faculty wonder if students ever read the comments. I too give students a lot of feedback on their writing and have been considering the following idea to try to deal with this issue. Instead of writing the final grade for the paper on the paper itself, I am toying with the idea of omitting that last step and ask the students to estimate the grade that I gave the paper based on their reading of my comments. I am hoping that this will make them examine their own writing more carefully in the light of the feedback they get from others. Then when they have shared with me what grade they think they got and why, I’ll tell them their grade. I am willing to even change it if they make a good case for a change.

I am a little worried that this process seems a little artificial somehow, but perhaps because that is because it is not common practice yet and anything new always feels a little strange. I am going to try it this semester.

Back to college ratings, those can be harmful for another reason and that is that the goals of a school might not mesh with the way that scores are weighted. For example, the US News & World Report rankings take into account incoming students scores on things like the SAT and ACT. But a school that feels that such scores do not measure anything meaningful in terms of student qualities (and a good case can be made for this view) might wish to look at other things it values, like creativity, ingenuity, citizenship, writing, problem solving, etc. Such a school is doomed to sink in the USN&WR rankings, even though it might be able to provide a great college experience for its students.

I am a great believer that getting useful feedback, in whatever area of activity, is an excellent springboard for improving one’s performance and capabilities. In order to do so, one needs criteria, and targeted and valid measures of achievement. But all that useful information can be completely undermined when one takes that last step and combines these various measures in order to get a single score for ranking or overall summary purposes.

In a previous post, I spoke about how the college rankings put out by the magazine its Washington Monthly differed considerably from those put out by US News & World Report.

There is a fundamental problem involved in ranking things in some order. In order to do so, it becomes necessary to reduce all the quality measures used to a single number so that they can be compared along a single scale.

This raises three issues that have to be decided. What are the criteria to be used? How can the selected criteria be translated into quantifiable measures? How are the different measures to be weighted in the mix in order to arrive at the final number?

All these questions rarely have unique answers and there is seldom consensus on how to answer any of these questions, and the two college rankings mentioned above are examples of disagreements in answering just the first question alone.

The Washington Monthly said that they felt that, “Universities should be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth; and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service” and they devised measures accordingly.

US News & World Report mainly looks instead at the resources that universities have and their prestige among their peers. For example, I think that 25% of their final score is based on the “peer assessment score,” which is how people rate the universities. Such a measure is going to guarantee a high ranking for those universities that are already well known and regarded. The ratings also look at the scores of entering students, graduation and retention rates, the size of the endowment, the amount of money the schools have, the amount that alumni give to the schools, etc. All these things are also related to the prestige perception (high scoring students are likely to apply to high prestige institutions, and are more likely to graduate, get well-paying jobs, and earn more money, and so forth.) There is very little that an institution can do in the short term to change any of these things, which is why the USN&WR ratings tend to be quite stable from year to year.

The problem with both sets of ratings is that they do not really measure how well students are taught or how well they learned and grew intellectually, socially, and emotionally. In other words, neither survey tells us how much and what kind of growth the students experience during their school years. To me, that is a really important thing to know about a school.

There is one survey that I think does give useful information about some of these things and that is the NSSE, which stands for National Survey of Student Engagement. This is a research-based study that looks at how much students experience good educational practices during their college years. It does this by surveying students in their first and final years of school. Many schools (including Case) do these surveys in their first and fourth years and they provide each school with important information on their strengths and weaknesses in various areas. The results of the surveys are provided confidentially to schools for internal diagnostic purposes and are not compiled into a single overall school score for ranking purposes.

Should NSSE also produce a single quality score to enable schools to be compared? In a future posting, I will argue why such rankings may actually do more harm than good, even if the measures used to arrive at them are valid.

I was walking around the campus yesterday and it was wonderful. The day was cool and sunny and the campus was green and inviting, reinforcing my feeling that over the last fifteen years Case has transformed itself from an ugly-building and surface-parking-lot dominated landscape to one of the most attractive urban campuses in the nation. This is especially so this year with the new dorms that have opened up (I went on the tour last week and was really impressed by their spaciousness and tastefulness) and the new playing fields.
[Read more…]

To illustrate the problems of simplifying original texts, we can look at examples from Shakespeare and the Bible. I came across a site that seeks to make Shakespeare’s plays easier to understand by re-writing them:

Here is the original text from HAMLET Act III, Scene i, lines 57-91

To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them?
….
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

Here is the simplified text:

The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all?

….

Fear of death makes us all cowards, and our natural boldness becomes weak with too much thinking. Actions that should be carried out at once get misdirected, and stop being actions at all.

Do the two passages have the same meaning? They convey different senses to me.
Or take the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 9:11 of the Bible. Here is the familiar King James Version:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

And here is the simplified modern language of the New Living Translation:

I have observed something else in this world of ours. The fastest runner doesn’t always win the race, and the strongest warrior doesn’t always win the battle. The wise are often poor, and the skillful are not necessarily wealthy. And those who are educated don’t always lead successful lives. It is all decided by chance, by being at the right place at the right time.

Again, does the simplified passage capture the meaning of the original?

I am not criticizing the quality of the simplifications, although there may be better ones around. If you asked me what Shakespeare’s passages mean, I probably would have come out with a more confused meaning than what was given above. But the point is that it is in the process of struggling to understand the author’s original meaning that we make individual sense of the passage. I think that the best we can hope for is a shared consensus of the meaning, and we can never hope to exactly enter into the author’s mind.

This problem is always present when the US Supreme Court tries to rule on the constitutionality of present day issues using a document written over two hundred years ago. People who call themselves “strict constructionists” say that the constitution should be interpreted according to the text and the intent of the frames. But how can you glean intent? The text of the document, by itself, is not sufficient, because words can never capture exact meanings. Literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish has an interesting article that is worth reading. In it he says:

It follows that any conclusion you reach about the intention behind a text can always be challenged by someone else who marshals different evidence for an alternative intention. Thus interpretations of the Constitution, no matter how well established or long settled, are inherently susceptible to correction and can always (but not inevitably) be upset by new arguments persuasively made in the right venues by skilled advocates.

This does not mean, however, that interpreting the Constitution is a free-form activity in which anything goes. The activism that cannot be eliminated from interpretation is not an activism without constraint. It is constrained by the knowledge of what its object is – the specifying of authorial intention. An activism that abandons that constraint and just works the text over until it yields a meaning chosen in advance is not a form of interpretation at all, but a form of rewriting.

This is why I am so much a fan of collaborative learning and discussions to tease out meaning. I think you get more out of having a group of people reading the original, (difficult) text, and then arguing about what it means, than by reading a simplified text alone, however ‘clear’ the latter might be.

Here is a Zen koan:

Hyakujo wished to send a monk to open a new monastery. He told his pupils that whoever answered a question most ably would be appointed. Placing a water vase on the ground, he asked: “Who can say what this is without calling its name?”
The chief monk said: “No one can call it a wooden shoe.”
Isan, the cooking monk, tipped over the vase with his foot and went out.
Hyakujo smiled and said: “The chief monk loses.” And Isan became the master of the new monastery.

What is the message this koan is trying to convey? The words are simple but the ideas are deep and captured succinctly. I think that it illustrates the point I am making here and I can try and tell you what it means to me, using a lot more words than in the original. But what does it mean to you?

Some time ago, Aaron Shaffer in his blog expressed his disappointment with the texts he was reading in his philosophy class, particularly the fact that the writers seemed to not take the trouble to be concise, with individual sentences running as long as paragraphs. He felt that this poor writing diminished them in his eyes, since the ability to express one’s ideas briefly and concisely demonstrates intellect.

I have been thinking about his comment for some time. I too, on occasion, try to read some philosophy and tend to find it heavy going. The somewhat dense and obscure style of some branches of the arts and humanities (especially the post-modernist philosophers and the area known as cultural studies) led to a notable hoax being pulled by physicist Alan Sokal, who deliberately wrote a paper whose conscious meaninglessness was disguised using dense language and the jargon common to the field of cultural studies. His article Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity was published in the journal Social Text on the same day he wrote a newspaper article exposing his hoax. (I will write about the Sokal hoax in a later posting. As is usually the case, the issue was more complicated than it might first appear, and raises serious ethical issues.)

Of course, physicists are not in a good position to throw stones at philosophers because it has long been the case that physics papers have stopped being intelligible to anyone other than those in the same sub-sub-field. But the reason for this is that scientists long ago made the transition from writing for the general public in the form of books, to writing for fellow scientists, using the form of the short paper. Once the link to the public was broken, there was no necessity to try to make oneself intelligible since other scientists know your jargon. Some argue that scientists have carried this too far, which is why the public generally has such a poor idea of what scientists actually do.

But philosophers are still, by and large, writing for a general audience, so why is their writing so hard to understand? Part of the answer is that philosophers are dealing with a difficult subject, very abstract, and this requires very skilful writing to make clear to the non-specialist. Bertrand Russell was pretty good at this but he was an exception.

Some people have tried to tackle this problem by rewriting philosophical works to make them easier to understand. Some time ago, I received an email from a professor of philosophy about his project to simplify the works of philosophers by rewriting them, to remove redundancies, simplify language, etc. But this raises the issue: Can you rewrite someone else’s work without introducing distortions?

If we look at the path that ideas take, we can start with an idea in an author’s brain. The author’s meaning is translated into words, then the words are read by the reader and their meaning recreated in the reader’s brain. Ideally we would like the process:

author’s meaning —> written words —> reader’s meaning

to occur with no loss of precision. I think that this ideal cannot be attained because it is intrinsically impossible for words to exactly capture ideas. At best they come close and make a good approximation. The reason that an author may think he/she has expressed an idea exactly is because of the implicit meanings we individually assign to words, in addition to the explicit and agreed upon meanings that we all share.

The reader also uses implicit meanings of words in reconstructing the ideas but there is no guarantee that the reader’s implicit meanings are the same as that of the writer’s. Hence we end up with distortions. The author, if conscientious, tries to find the words and phrases that minimizes the amount of implicit meaning and best captures the idea, but this cannot be done with 100% accuracy. The more you try to replace implicit meanings with words, the wordier the writing gets.

So when someone tries to “clarify” the ideas of another author, that introduces a third filter of implicit meanings, and possibly greater distortions. This does not mean that it is not a worthwhile exercise. A good translator might be able to infer the original meaning of the author better than the novice reader can, and render those ideas in a form that makes it easier for the novice reader to understand. But there will always be some element of ambiguity that is intrinsic to the original work. And there is always the danger that the “simplified” work introduces new ideas that the original author did not intend.

In some areas, revisionist writings completely replace the original. For example, in teaching science, we almost never use the original papers of (say) Newton and Einstein. We use textbooks instead that explain the ideas originated by them. The difference for this may be that in modern science, the community works with consensus meanings. The original idea is usually elaborated on and expanded by many others before it becomes the paradigm which the community accepts. This paradigm then represents a kind of consensus scientific view of the field and people can set about trying to present the ideas in a simplified form, suitable for novices, which is how textbooks originate. We just give a nod to the originator of the idea but the idea has ceased to be his or hers alone. When we talk of “Newton’s theory” or “Einstein’s theory”, what we are referring to is not usually exactly what those people may have intended.

But in other areas (such as philosophy) there is no consensus paradigm to the field so there is no consensus belief structure. Hence we keep going back to the original sources, trying to tease out what the author intended. So while in physics, we never refer to someone using quantum mechanics as an “Einsteinian” or “Bohrian” (two people who had competing interpretations of quantum mechanics) but simply refer to the current consensus view, in other fields such as philosophy it is quite common to refer to someone as a “Kantian” or a “Lockian”, and this implies adherence to that person’s original views.

I’ll write more about this tomorrow.