The Mind-Projection Fallacy (or why I’m glad I don’t speak Turkish)
Posted by CM under Ornithology, Writing on Thu 15 Feb 2007
ne of the things I’ve been, well, not really struggling with, but at least wary of, has to do with my hero.
Yes, he’s a beta. And yes, he’s smart, and one of the reasons my heroine eventually falls in love with him is that, having observed one small link in a chain of interactions, he can sight clear to the end, and see what’s really bothering her. In short, when everyone else in the world thinks she’s crazy, he understands her. This means I can’t ever really rely on plot devices like his not understanding her, or willfully misunderstanding things that she says. Other people can do that, but my hero? No; he’s just not that kind of guy. He gets her. Given enough information, and the inclination, he’d get anyone and anything. (As you can imagine, “inclination” is important.)
(There’s a certain idea out there that incredibly smart people–uber-people–cannot be people people. There’s truth to that in some ways, but in other ways, some of the incredibly smart people I have known are often very good at figuring others out. They can’t help it. Other people are a problem, and you put it in front of them, and the mind whirs and it spits out an answer. It doesn’t mean that they’re always right, but they often have great insights.)
But I have to balance this against the fact that he’s also absolutely obsessive about his own interests, and finds society (and the ton) completely baffling. He never gets the rules of etiquette. He finds the rules of precedence mind-boggling. He’s vaguely aware of the dictates of propriety, but assumes that other people will make sure that no lines are crossed, and never bothers to think about it. If he really wanted, he could probably figure all that stuff out, but he can’t be bothered, because it would take valuable brain time and energy from the subjects he’d rather think about. So for the most part, he’s happy not to waste brain cells thinking about people.
And in the blackest of black moments–coming up shortly–he does have to not understand the heroine. And that is what makes it so black for her. Up until now, he’s understood everything without her saying more than a few words. Nobody else sees what she wants, or understands why she’s bothered. But he understands. But at some point, he has to have the inclination to understand, and the information. And he’s got to miss it, completely.
I suspect I am bebothering myself with something that nobody else will care about, given that (as my critique partners can attest) I freak out about truly minor factual inconsistencies that nobody else in their right mind would possibly care about. But it does matter to me that this make sense. In any event, his reaction turns entirely on the mind-projection fallacy—something that he, for all his smarts, is prone to.
The mind-projection fallacy is something all romance writers are familiar with, though probably not by that name. The mind-projection fallacy assumes that your view of the world is factual. That is, you project your mind on to other people. Examples of the mind-projection fallacy are things like, “That book sucks. Why is it a best-seller?” and “She’s so ugly. Why do all the guys like her?” and (less obviously, and more controversially) “We can’t know the position and velocity of a particle exactly; therefore the position and velocity are delocalized.”
I don’t know what romance writers would do without the mind-projection fallacy. But according to a reasonably reliable source, it’s a linguistic artifact. !! Exclamation points!!!111!!!one! I’ve heard it claimed that it happens because in English you can state opinion as if it were fact, and that other languages–the one named was Turkish–make such statements impossible.
Now, I already know that I think differently in different languages (and I only speak two, and the second, I only speak with marginal fluency–and I’m not even sure of that now). But this claim boggles my mind.
How do you write romance novels in Turkish? Must all their misunderstandings be unspoken? I would cry for help, except I don’t speak Turkish, and so it’s no problem.
Does anyone know if this is true or not?
February 15th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I don’t know anything about Turkish. I do know I’m glad I’m not writing a romance novel in Filipino, because pronouns have no gender. He/she and his/hers are the same words. So the sentence that translates “he licked her nipple” could also be translated, “she licked his nipple,” or “she licked her nipple,” or “he licked his nipple.” That would get confusing real fast.
February 15th, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Hmmm, I have more than a passing familiarity with a number of languages, at least in their WRITTEN incarnations (ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as well as French, Spanish, and German) and I’m doubting there’s any language in which you can’t state an opinion as a fact. At least, not if you don’t KNOW what you’re stating is an opinion rather than a fact.
For example, if I say the sky is blue, that is my OPINION of the color I see when I look at a cloudless sky. I ASSUME it to be fact because everyone else who can see it (and isn’t yellow-blue colorblind) seems to agree that it is blue. But IS IT, in fact, a fact?
I don’t think any language can possibly count on the speaker KNOWING what he/she is saying is an opinion rather than a fact, ergo, I can’t imagine a language which wouldn’t PERMIT an opinion to be stated as a fact. All that’s required for that to happen is the speaker to BELIEVE what he’s saying is a fact.
So, while I can say, “George W. Bush is a moron” in English and have everyone understand that’s a statement of my opinion, in another language, I might wind up stating that using a construction that implied the “I think” as long as I KNEW I had no evidence to support the factuality of my claim. But if I had evidence that my statement was factually accurate (e.g., I had the results of his IQ test and they showed it to be below 80–or whatever the cutoff for moronism is; I’ve forgotten), I think I could still state it as a fact in that language, even if it subsequently turned out the test results were forged.
God, linguistics are great.
And Tessa’s comment on Tagalog has me cracking up!
February 15th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Jacqueline, like you, I have no way to conceptualize the Turkish thing. I don’t see how it’s possible. And yet I was told this by someone who (a) was a native speaker of Turkish who (b) produced peer-reviewed articles in the field.
I throw my hands up in confusion.
February 15th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I don’t know anything about Turkish, but I trust Jacqueline more than the expert.
Alice
February 16th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Well, I’d trust someone who was a native speaker of Turkish more than me, Alice (because I don’t speak or read me any Turkish).
It seems to me, however, that it either has to be impossible to state ANYTHING as a fact in Turkish (because when it comes right down to it, whether something is a fact or not is a matter of opinion!) or it has to be impossible to state something you KNOW is an opinion as a fact. If it’s the former, than no one can say anything in Turkish and construct it as something other than an opinion (in which case, all facts are opinions and all misunderstandings, etc. are going to occur as a result of people’s opinions) OR it’s possible to state something as a fact, in which case, you can state an opinion as a fact and later discover you were wrong!
Seems to me those are the only two options, because WHAT we say is so incredibly dependent on what we BELIEVE. And I don’t think it’s linguistically possible to eliminate perception’s effect on reality.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:26 am
Maybe this helps explain it:
http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/inferential.htm
Evidentally there is a special verb tense used when the speaker has no direct evidence or observation of what s/he is describing. Of course, that doesn’t mean one could not state an opinion as fact, in so many words. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say one cannot state inference or conjecture as an observed fact?
February 16th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Interesting. Not quite what I imagined from hearing what I did, but that’s still different enough that it makes my head hurt. How bizarre.
And it would still totally ruin my novel.
February 16th, 2007 at 11:03 am
“Evidentally” - I can’t believe I typed that. Ack.
Evidently I should not make comments before I’ve had my coffee.
February 16th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Turkish, fact, fiction. . . it’s all Greek to me (especially since my first marriage last name was Karavolos!)