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    showing versus telling in language

    There have been a number of discussions here at Newapps on various things that philosophical writing can legitimately aim for other than simply tell some truth or other. Here, I want to reflect on a distinction between telling and showing. In the simplest case, this distinction arises when we contrast being told some fact and seeing something for ourselves. So I can tell you about an apple, or show you one. I can tell you how to properly pull a sweep oar or show you.  And there are clearly important differences here.  For one, showing is "higher bandwidth".  That is, the amount of information transfered in a typical observation or physical engagement with an object is orders of magnitude more than the information stated in a claim – even a very complex, say book-length one.  And there may well be other important differences. One can talk about those in different ways – concrete embodiment in environmental-social context, phenomenal access, etc. I'm making no claims about what the difference is, merely pointing to the – I hope – uncontroversial claim that there is an important difference.  And I claim that this is a difference that makes an epistemological difference.  We can know more, know different things, have a different sort of understanding when something is shown to us than when we merely learn various facts about it.

    My thought that something very like the showing/telling distinction can arise in language; that is, we can make use of language to show things to one another in ways that carry with them the positive features of material showing.  That's to say that there are non-fact-stating features of speech acts that have the upshot of something very like showing.

    This is familiar in artistic contexts. Aristotle, among lots of others, talks about how the portrayal of a specific situation, in the right way, can generate an emotional reaction in the audience that constitutes an understanding of something much more general than what is specifically portrayed in the performance – that is that goes well beyond the specific descriptive content that could be reported in a summary of the plot.  Art that is, can show us what something is like.  Here are two examples.  The first is a song by Dar Williams that is a beautiful evocation of childhood. It shows us the way that, as a child we can be emotionally connected to someone like a favorite babysitter, the hard to articulate mixture of awe, understanding, utter lack of understanding, wisdom and naivete.  This is something most of us have lived through, but it is dreadfully hard to experience as an adult.  We simply know too much. We understand the hostile undertones of the boyfriend's interaction with the babysitter. We know that the first person focus of the song is missing so much and in the normal case, this greater context and knowledge means that we cannot experience the world as a child does.  But somehow this song pulls you back. Despite your external context as observer of the interaction, you are also somehow drawn into it as a child. So much goes into making this work – the words, of course, the simple melody and accompaniment, the tone of her voice – "Can't wait to give her the card!!!"  

    Or consider this brilliant song by James McMurtry that shows us a life that fails, not through a grand climactic failure, but through the slow buildup of tiny failures. Again, though every line in the song has a descriptive function – telling us a concrete and specific story – the whole does much more.  I want to say that it shows us a way it can go. And a horrifying possibility it is. Think of what is shown in the line: "And the storm door didn't catch; it blew back hard as she struck a match; but she cupped it just in time; and sent the ashtray flyin." 

    In literature, this showing function is common.  One of my personal favorite examples is the collection of essays by Tim Obrien in The Things They Carried.  What is special about this book is that it alternates between war stories – all of which have a primary showing function – and essays about this form of writing.  But the essays themselves interweave the very function they are describing: showing by telling us about showing.  If you haven't read it, at least have a look at "How To Tell A True War Story".  Here's an excerpt: 

    "You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

    For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out.
    One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
    Is it true?
    The answer matters.
    You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit
    of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did
    happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a
    true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Happeningness is irrelevant. A thing may
    happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example:
    Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a
    killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says,
    “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts
    to smile but he’s dead.
    That’s a true story that never happened."

    It's not that this is right in the sense of expressing a truth about how to express truths.It is, I think. But more than that it is showing us something.  And in the context of the essay it shows us much more.

    So here's the question for newapps readers: can philosophy do this? And if so, when and how should it? How does showing us things relate to the other sorts of things we do? What are some examples of it done well. (I particularly like Jonathan Bennett's "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn" which seems to me to show us – of course having Twain's wonderful prose to work with helps her – what moral affect is like in the midst of saying philosophical things about it. I once had the near impossible task of giving the summary remarks at a memoril conference for a beloved professor who died too young, under the conditions that she had forbidden us to talk about her life or to memorialize her.  So I sought to show what she was like by talking about the three papers we had just heard. These things are hard, but I think they are important.  

    Examples?

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    18 responses to “showing versus telling in language”

    1. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      I have three hypotheses, and I am not particularly confident in any of them. I’ll put them forward just for the fun of it.
      1. The distinction between showing and telling seems to require some elaboration. Elizabeth Fricker tells us that telling is a kind of invitation to trust; I find that suggestion quite useful. Perhaps, then, we might contrast showing and telling along those lines. Perhaps (to take a first guess) showing might be understood as information sharing that is presumed to be trusted. Hence, when I “show” you my cards, my life story, the revealed truth, or whatever, in the showing I will have secured your credulity. When I only tell you my cards there is room for distrust, though clearly I have invited you to trust what I have got to say.
      2. On one radical view, the only thing that a decontextualized passage can show us are the conditions under which the passage are apt, irrespective of their truth. FWIW, I am strongly disinclined to regard the passage from Tim O’Brien as a “truth” if it never happened, though I can immediately see how it would be considered appropriate for the purpose of understanding a certain kind of experience. Most religious parables are at best apt, and rarely true. Their job is to kickstart the understanding, not necessarily to parse the world as it is.
      3. There is probably some connection between Russell’s knowledge by acquaintance/acquisition and showing/telling, but I would be intuitively disappointed if one pair simply reduced to another pair.

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    2. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Re 1, I didn’t mean to be using ‘telling’ in such a specific manner to imply a second person transaction. I should probably just have said asserting. In any event I think you are right that showing essentially involves a sort of telling in this way – an invitation to trust, and also a guarantee of it except in weird sleight of hand cases. But I don’t think this is the same distinction I’m getting at here. I’m more interested here not in the level of trust established, but in what is understood by accepting.
      re 2: Ok, I’m fine with saying that O’brien is literally mis-stating the result of his kind of story. Maybe we shouldn’t say it is true. But a more charitable reading is that he is after understanding – the sort that leads to an appropriate overall psychological orientation toward the phenomenon in general. And his claim is that a literally false story can achieve that much more accurately than a true one. Is it helpful to say that he is showing us the way one must relate to war? Not sure. But there is some phenomenon there. He accomplishes something by this sort of drifting, shifting, never literally true sequence of stories that I want to understand.
      re 3 – yeah, I don’t think it is the same distinction. To know of Jones that he is the killer does not require being shown Jones or the killing.

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    3. Elliot Goodine Avatar
      Elliot Goodine

      An example of really excellent showing in a philosophy article is in Gary Watson’s “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme.” Watson quotes at great length from an article about Robert Harris, which details the malice of Harris’s crimes, but which then goes on to describe the awful abuse Harris suffered throughout his childhood. Watson’s use of case does a lot of the work in the defense of compatibilism he’s driving at. It’s really striking the sort of ambivalence the case evokes: even when we pity Harris for his upbringing, we still abhor his crimes. A toy example (or an underdescribed case) wouldn’t have had nearly the same emotional force (and drawing on the reader’s emotions, in a paper about the reactive attitudes, seems entirely appropriate).

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    4. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      Sounds like my (2) hit closer to the mark than (1) or (3). I’m glad of that, since it was the hypothesis that seemed most attractive to me.
      I guess a natural question to ask is, “What kind of content have we recovered from the passage, if not a true proposition?” To me, it seems as though in that passage we are meant to take away a cluster of closely related proposals relating to general matters of fact: e.g., the tragedy of war, the way that tragedy echoes in ordinary life, the arbitrariness of altruism, and various and sundry existential connotations. We call the passage apt or appropriate when those proposals are conveyed, and the understanding is attentive to them, without the proposals ever having to be made explicit as literally true propositions.
      One of the interesting features of the passage is the sense that the reader is meant to intuitively fill in the pertinent details for themselves. That is, perhaps, what makes them unstable, drifting, shifting. Perhaps the passage’s ability to invoke these stable intuitive connotations is what makes the passage seem ‘truer than true’, even while the passage itself is not interested in making any explicit reference to facts and hence it is not true. The fact that we (the readers) are the ones who are doing all the interpretive work might be what accounts for the sense that these lessons feel as if they have been ‘shown’ or ‘presented’ to us in some unmediated way. And maybe that accounts for some of the cognitive difference.
      Still, presumably there must be at least some stable contents to the passage. If there was no stability in what was conveyed, then questions would linger about whether or not it had any contents at all. One might think of a few examples here — e.g., pretentious song lyrics, or particularly obtuse kinds of theological parables — where there is nothing shown or presented as apt, nor anything represented as true, because there is no (competent) resonance with the understanding of the audience.

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    5. Tom Mulherin Avatar
      Tom Mulherin

      Adorno tries to do something like this in Aesthetic Theory, which is an attempt to model the structure of an aesthetic object while giving a theory of aesthetics. (It’s aesthetic theory both in the sense of being a theory of aesthetics and in the sense of being a theory that is aesthetic.) He does this because he thinks that aesthetic rationality is a non-dominating form of rationality, unlike instrumental reason. If you share his analysis of the contemporary form of rationality, you might think something like such a maneuver is necessary. Is it done well? I think so, but I’ve already drunk the kool-aid.

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    6. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      I think you are presuming here what I want to deny – that all understanding is understanding that such and so is the case. I think what the passage- better the whole essay – is aiming for is an emotionally valenced understanding of what it is like to be there. That’s a sense of the place in the same way that a person can know what love is like, or know what it is like to ride a bicycle in the midst of a peloton. The goal is a sort of overall engagement with a type of situation that amounts to something not reducible to a set of propositional claims. So basically I’m denying the dichotomy between conveying propositional contents and conveying nothing.
      Tom, thanks – interesting example. I don;’t know this stuff well – read a fair bit of Adorno fairly quickly a fairly long time ago. But what you say sounds quite plausible.

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    7. giulia Avatar
      giulia

      Intersections with the knowledge-that vs. knowledge how distinction? I know such a contrast is theory-laden and someone may find it out of context here…
      But I suspect there is a sense in which propositional telling vs. showing, and “understanding that such and so is the case” vs. “emotionally valenced understanding” relate to the first distinction. However, the first distinction does not primarily hold “inside language” – unlike the contrast the post was pointing at. But has anyone thoughts about how the understanding here suggested relates to so-called knowledge-how?

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    8. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the following might be one example of this non-propositional, epistemic “showing.” In introducing students to the Daoist notion of wu-wei (lit., not-doing, or non-action), which means something like spontaneity (as in acting non-self-consciously), skill-in-action or mastery of action, gracefulness, a certain state or quality of “heart-mind” (xin), acting in harmony with the natural world (see the Daode jing for specific examples), non-intentional action (at least not action willed in any direct sense, i.e., it may be ‘intentional’ insofar as it is part of a larger project, say, to be like the Sage), and so on. In my experience, this is a difficult concept for many students. I attempt to show them what it means with the example of a master surfer riding a wave, comparing this to the novice first getting up on a board and self-consciously, awkwardly, deliberately attempting to ride a wave (reminding them that the former was once the latter). Look! She gets up on the board gracefully, rides the wave “effortlessly,” becomes, so to speak, one with the wave, and so on. Wu-wei is like THAT, but in the myriad circumstances and situations of daily life: the Daoist Sage spontaneously, effortlessly, gracefully acts in a manner that is said to transcend ego-centric behavior, that is somehow in harmony with the forces of the natural world and thus even Dao itself (which is ‘nameless’). The apparent paradox of course is the fact that wu-wei as illustrated here entails prior effort, hard work, intentional action, willfulness, in other words, the surfer before she became the master surfer.
      In the case of Daoism, this means there is a necessary yet not sufficient condition for wu-wei: the cultivationof “quiet” (i.e., ‘non-worldly’) virtues like gentleness, frugality and self-effacement (and how to do that?!). The last line of chapter 45 states that “Purity and stillness rectify Heaven and Earth” (or, ‘can bring proper order to the world’). This celebratory saying is in reference to that stillness and purity of heart-mind (xin) attained through breathing exercises that, in turn, are part of a meditation practice that serves as a necessary but not sufficient condition for the mystical, non-rational or supra-rational (hence non-propositonal) awareness of Dao, for acting in harmony (wu-wei) with the dao of the natural and “heavenly” worlds. The third verse of chapter 15 (only part of which follows) asks: “Who can, through stillness, gradually make muddied water clear?” This is often taken to be a reference to meditation practice. Proper cultivation of “stillness” brings about a “hidden” or “empty” state of heart-mind capable of penetrating “into the most obscure, the marvelous, the mysterious,” thereby attaining a “depth beyond understanding” (i.e., beyond propositional knowledge and rational understanding, a reference to the difference between knowledge and wisdom; for a more detailed treatment of preparatory exercises [often referred to as ascetic practices] within medieval Daoism, see Livia Kohn: 2003). As Moeller (2004) says in his discussion of the fishnet allegory in the Zhuangzi, “‘to get the meaning’ (de yi) in a Daoist sense means, paradoxically, to be perfectly content (de yi) by no longer having any mental contents’ (57). This can be fruitfully compared with the celebration of the “empty mind” in some forms of Buddhism and earlier in Pantajali’s Yoga philosophy (the apparent paradox here being that the absence of consciousness–which is nonetheless an awareness of sorts but involves the absence of mental objects–cannot be brought about by an act of consciousness).
      Asking the students to picture the master surfer riding a wave (and to imagine all the effort involved in getting to that point), is about the closest I can come to communicating what it might mean to exemplify or embody wu-wei in the Daoist tradition(s). Conversely, I use Jon Elster’s brilliant discussion (in his Sour Grapes: studied in the subversion of rationality, 1983) of the paradoxes or pragmatic contradictions entailed in “willing what cannot be willed,” that is, the attempt to will certain states of affairs or mental states directly through intentional action (such states being rather on the order of by-products) to illustrate what occurs if one attempts to either bypass the aforementioned necessary condition or view it as sufficient in itself, as some sort of guarantee that one will attain the state of wu-wei. Elster, after the psychologist Leslie Farber, cites wisdom, spontaneity, sleep, virtue, faith, and understanding, as examples of paradigmatic states that cannot be willed, yet we nonetheless attain or realize them, the question therefore one revolving around precisely how such states come about or are realized. Wu-wei involves similar questions (and perhaps answers) like THAT.

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    9. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Giulia: Yes, that is certainly close to the surface in what I’m thinking about. In some sense, what showing is aiming for – if it aims for more than telling can give us – must be knowledge how. If it were just knowledge that, then by definition it could be achieved by believing an assertion of the relevant propositions. So yes, it is that – though I’m very much interested in a richer understanding of non-propositional knowledge how than one typically sees in analytic philosophy. The “inside language” part: Right, it is often claimed that knowledge-how is non-linguistic. I actually think this is always wrong – there is no understanding amonog us conceptual creatures that is not essentially tied to our linguistic competence. (cf McDowell on this.) But the main thing I was interested in is how quite overtly linguistic speech acts can generate the kind of practical understanding that we typically associate with things like practicing something. The fact that the result is not (just) propositional does not mean that the cause of it cannot be linguistic.
      Patrick: Wonderful illustration and exactly on point. There are many specific features of wu-wei as you characterize it here, but much of what you say is characteristic of any form of expertise. One begins with practice based around rules, and eventually these become invisible, one becomes “one with the practice”, one actually violates the rules one used to get there, etc. When I played trumpet professionally, I did not see the trumpet as different from me. We felt like one thing. I didn’t think about fingering or breathing, or any of the other techniques. I was, when it was going well, one with the music. This is just as true of chess players and, here is a point that is often ignored in such things, speakers. One is as much one with English when speaking it expertly – unaware of the rules of grammar or the principles of argumentation. Explicit knowledge is knowledge how to move within the space of reasons. (Or so I here dogmatically assert.) And the one of the awesome things is that one of the things a master teacher like yourself can pull off is the ability to use that linguistic skill to give people at least some of the engaged sense of other practical skills they have not mastered.

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    10. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      A couple of spelling errors above, here’s one I should correct: Patañjali

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    11. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      Mark, I’ve actually used learning to play and mastering the piano as an example as well, which I enjoy because then I can bring up jazz greats like Art Tatum: in which case I indeed cite “the violation of rules one used to get there,” as with improvisation. This may be my own idiosyncratic pet peeve, but as I, turning into an old fart, I find myself continually imploring my students not to be so impatient with (many or most) “rules,” to not violate them willy-nilly or get caught up in that transgression-for transgression’s sake sort of thing, which is not the same thing as the sort of spontaneity, freedom and, yes, even joy, that often follows mastery of rules….

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    12. Patrick S. O'Donnell Avatar
      Patrick S. O’Donnell

      erratum: “but I (turning into an old fart) find myself….”

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    13. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Absolutely. The relation to rules of a master is nothing remotely like random rebellion. Chess teaching is also good for this. You learn all manner of rule as you get better, rules that start simple – pawns in the center, develop pieces, knights before bishops – later get more complex – development matters in open positions, but less so in closed – and eventually becomes – make the best move in the position. But no master just ignores development for no reason. I think some of the most interesting cases are the cases of actual creative brilliance that seem like transgression-for-trasngression’s sake moves: saw Picasso, or Hendricks, or hell, Nietzsche. Understanding how these are not random transgressions is evidence of seriously getting it.

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    14. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      I’m sorry I gave that impression, though I can see why you’d say that.
      I do think that some propositional (truth-conditional) content could be taken out of a passage, by way of recovering the non-propositional spirit of the passage (aptness-conditions) and then interpreting the spirit of the passage in literal form. So I do say in the O’Brien example that we are meant to take away some proposals about eternal matters of fact, but that happens after the presentation sinks in by activating the right sorts of intuitive experience.
      In my vernacular, the experience of activating intuition is in harmony with your description of “an emotionally valenced understanding of what [something] is like”. It is also consistent with your view that the “dichotomy between conveying propositional contents and conveying nothing” is a false one. A person could have secured the right kind of understanding without ever having bothered to articulate it in literal form.
      In the past I have found that I am inclined to arrive at similar conclusions to the one you expressed, and it is a fine thing to hear a professional philosopher of language express these thoughts. Always nice to know that I’m not entirely lost and alone in the space of reasons.

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    15. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Sorry to misinterpret. I most certainly don’t speak for the philosophy of language world. I’m a pretty far outlier in that world, I suppose.

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    16. BLS Nelson Avatar
      BLS Nelson

      No worries. My fault for not signposting, I think.

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    17. Anne Jacobson Avatar
      Anne Jacobson

      My very recent book, Keeping the World in Mind, argues that cognitive neuroscience’s representations are much more like what’s involved in showing, and so like Aristotelian, Thomistic, Humean (and many others’) representations. That is, much more like that than like telling; e.g., having content or intentionality as understood in line with Chisholm’s misreading of Brentano.
      To put it very roughly: a good way to get to learn Tai Chi is to get one’s brain to (partially) copy that of a practitioner by watching them; the practitioner can show you how to do it. A bad way is to read through a set of descriptions of the movement – unless your mind works very differently from mine.
      One gets a more general notion of representations as copies by taking neural activity to copy the electrochemical activity that impinges upon one.

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    18. Mark Lance Avatar
      Mark Lance

      Hey, thanks Anne. I’ll have a look at the book – though realistically not before summer.
      yes, that’s absolutely my experience, and I’ve done a fair bit of both quizzing and watching teachers of many things: music of various sorts, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Cross Country Skiing, Rowing, and of course all sorts of intellectual things. The vast bulk of good teaching of all the former seems clearly to be showing, and it also seems clear that this is more effective. (Glad to know that there is systematic evidence for this.) To me the interesting part was always that the same applies to intellectual stuff as well. Learning to do proofs in recursion theory, or to argue philosphically, is just as much of a skill as playing trumpet. And you don’t learn either by memorizing facts, much less by following a set of rules for the practice.

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