class of objects—ranging from wingback to folding metal to beanbag
chair—possessing some indefinable essence of “chairness.”
The philosophical problem confronted by Derrida, Hofstadter, and
fuzzy logicians becomes clear when we consider what Swift’s Lagadoan
conversationalists would have to pack in order to communicate. What
thing, for instance, could signify a simple noun like tool? A hammer,
screwdriver, ax, crow bar, wrench? For that matter, what should they
carry to signify screwdriver—a philips head, flat head, or motor-driven
electric? What if they wanted to speak of a pet? Should they pack a dog,
a snake, a gold fish, a ferret? Exactly what degree of “petness” does
each possess—and how far can we extend the continuum?
Fuzzy logicians point out that neither words themselves nor the con-
cepts they represent have clearly defined parameters. We use the word
tall, for instance, when describing people, buildings, and mountains.
And yet, tests show that people generally agree on what constitutes a
“fuzzy set,” determining with remarkable statistical consistency, for
example, what degree of “toolness” is possessed by objects ranging
along a continuum from hammerto spoon. It has also been found that
cultures throughout the world categorize the colors of the spectrum in
similar ways, despite different languages.
Lotfi Zadeh, one of the founders of fuzzy logic, has observed how
simply combining adjectives with nouns alters their meaning.
Commenting on his work in Fuzzy Logic, authors Daniel McNeill and
Paul Freiberger note, for instance, “red hairalters the meaning of red.
Ice cube changes cube. We bring knowledge to these terms. In the past,
red hair has always referred to a special kind of red, quite different from
the red of the spectrum. Our experience perfuses language.”
Meanings don’t reside within individual words any more than human
memories reside within individual neurons. This is quite a different
thing from saying, as deconstructive critics do, that there exists an
unbridgeable gap between signifier and signified. Consequently,
Derrida’s “iterable marks” are not entirely graftable, as he asserts, but
change in subtle ways from context to context. In focusing on the print-
able and reproducible elements of linguistic forms, deconstructionists
are committing an error that scientists in the fields of complexity and
artificial intelligence call “level confusion”—an idea with particular rel-
evance to the art of writing.
One of the fundamental insights of complexity science is that by fol-
lowing simple rules, complex dynamic systems self-organize to produce
higher levels of order from lower ones, in a process called “emergence.”
Trying to reduce emergent orders to lower level phenomena results in all
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