CALL ME SNAKE

It is a source of endless amusement to me, an aging logician, to hear people glibly say: “What part of 'no' don't you understand?” or the equally absurd rejoinder, “No means no.” The naivete of such remarks is astonishing in this era when one considers that the “problem of no” has confounded philosophers over the ages--invariably leading to bafflement, despair, and worse. Count Hinkel, the renowned 19th-century semiotician, was driven to madness in his obsessive pursuit of “the no,” as he called it. Wolfgang Perlich, his protege, took his own life, but not before claiming (in some margin notes) to have proved that the problem has no unique solution and, in all likelihood, no general solutions either. (The full text of his argument has yet to be found.) Another noted philosopher, Sir Martin Luddington, died of syphilis though the precise link between that affliction and his work (a spectral analysis of the gradations of no) is still shrouded in secrecy. These setbacks have not dissuaded others from trying where the hapless Hinkel, peerless Perlich, and lusty Luddington have failed, yet progress in this century can at best be described as “incremental,” with a steady narrowing of the domain space for no the only tangible result. Concomitant efforts to attack no's parameter space have proved fruitless to date. Perhaps the only definitive statement that can be made is that no resolution to the no problem is in sight. Lest there be any confusion on this point, I'd like to stress that by exposing the fundamental ambiguity of no, I am in no way condoning the exploitation of syllogistic loopholes to justify acts of violence and moral turpitude. Still, we should be aware of the perplexities involved in defining no, not just for heuristic reasons, but to guide our legislators, policy-makers, and schoolyard leaders with the “shining light of metaphysics.” A simple example might be instructive here: If we assume for the sake of discussion that “no means no” and “yes means yes,” then what does “not no” and “not yes” mean? By fundamental principles, not no must include both yes and the netherworld of maybe. Not yes, by similiar reasoning, encompasses the domains of no and maybe. Solving these equations for maybe, we're left with the unsatisfying conclusion that not no minus yes equals not yes minus no. Juggling terms, this translates to: No plus not no equals yes plus not yes--a.k.a. Conrad's Conundrum. The flaw in this proposition is that it assumes both time-invariance for yes and no, as well as absolute values, both of which are insupportable in a quantum mechanics world dominated by probabilism. Complications arise, for instance, from notorious QM “tunneling effects” in which seemingly impossible events happen. Many assume that no is the correct response to the question (familiar to any student of casuistry): Do sheep fly? The right answer, in fact, is “yes, though rarely,” as argued so trenchantly by Deschamps in his rhetorical tour de France. God does indeed “play dice with the universe,” Einstein's qualms notwithstanding. Indeed, if we affix probabilities to the “wave functions” for yes, no, and maybe, we are left with the infamous bell curve--a useful pedagogical tool tarnished by Murray and Herrnstein. Yes, in most graphic renderings, occupies the left-hand portion of the curve, no the right, while maybe occupies the vast bulge in the middle--not unlike that burgeoning from the waistlines of middle-aged men who can't say no at the buffet table. In the special (and some argue “trivial”) case of a flattened bell curve, yes, no, and maybe are all equivalent (and normalized to zero on a Gaussian scale), pointing to the patent absurdity of the standard yes/no dichotomy. Would that it were so simple, then I too might join the great mass of couch tubers splayed out in living rooms across the country. But in this world of Heisenbergian uncertainty, where no routinely spills over onto yes and vice versa, I must continue my quest for the “grail of no”--a quarry that has lured and destroyed some of the greatest thinkers in the lands. It is now a lonely occupation, with few professional journals extant, save for the vestigial “Null” and its online derivative, “Naught.” The times--to echo the words of Zimmerman--are indeed “a-changin'.” Years ago, when I was a philosophy student at correspondence school, we used to knock off several paradoxes before breakfast, taking on Xeno's dilemma, as well as Euclid's vaunted (though misguided) attempts to “square the circle.” Nowadays, so-called philosophers can spend an entire career trying to prove the existence of “Lucy”--a fictional character evidently much beloved to TV viewers in the early days of that medium--without knowing a single word of Heidegger or Husserl. I recently spent time with one of these “scholars,” debating the pervasiveness of palindromes in written discourse late into the night over a cup of latte' (what we once called “Sanka” ). I insisted on picking up the tab, despite my meager philosophy pension, yet try as I might, I could not interest the young sophist in the problem of no and the converse theories of affirmation. Indeed, my classes on these subjects were barely attended up to the time of my forced retirement 20 odd years ago. The only graduate student I managed to attract to the enterprise--an enthusiastic, though not overly bright Canadian--quickly abandoned ship, taking a position in the “laboratory” of my department rival to exact ever greater constraints on the number of angels that could safely flit on the head of a pin, or some such rubbish. His name frequently crops up in the literature, though only on ancillary problems of little import to humanity. I've reached the sad conclusion that until our society is ready to truthfully and diligently confront the no question, we will never be able to fully embrace “yes,” as Molly Bloom did so convincingly at the conclusion of Ulysses. That would be the real tragedy here, making the demise of Hinkel, Perlich, and their luckless successors (a list of names that might someday include my own) seem insignificant by comparison.