Meaning, Understanding, and Quantification in the History of Ideas

Jeff Jacobs

University of Chicago, April 28, 2023

Section 1: Background

  • From word counts to contextual embeddings: the importance of this development for contextual history

Word Counts: Good Enough?

  • 4 keywords per section:
Section Keywords
U.S. state, court, federal, republican
World government, country, officials, minister
Arts music, show, art, dance
Sports game, league, team, coach
Real Estate home, bedrooms, bathrooms, building
  • For each article, vote for section with highest keyword count:
Arts Real Estate Sports U.S. News World News Total
Correct 3020 690 4860 1330 1730 11630
Incorrect 750 60 370 1100 590 2870
Accuracy 0.801 0.920 0.929 0.547 0.746 0.802

What’s Missing? (Context!)

You shall know a word by the company it keeps.

(Firth 1957)

Article A:

President Bush said he was trying to convince President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that cooperation was “in Russia’s security interests,” even though Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates did not win Mr. Putin’s support during a trip to Moscow last week.

“Bush Steps Up Effort to Persuade Putin on Missile Defense Plan”, NYTimes, 1 May 2007.

Article B:

President Bush began his day yesterday at dawn on the golf course. He began Saturday on the golf course, too. A weekend earlier, the president played two rounds of 18 holes on the course at Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington.

“White House Letter; Bush Makes Quick Work of Relaxing”, NYTimes, 5 August 2002.

The Cambridge School and Contextual History

  • What are political actors doing with words?
    • “telling someone? […] reminding them, or warning them, or reassuring them? […] explaining something, apologising, or criticising […] lamenting […] Perhaps he meant nothing at all.”

(Image source)

(Image source)

Illocutions and Perlocutions

The Importance of Context

E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

“the convention of signing-off novels in this way was sometimes used to draw attention to the romantically nomadic life of the author.” (Skinner 2012, 123)

James Joyce, Ulysses

Weybridge, Surrey, UK: “The classic instance of a prosaic English suburb” (Skinner 2012, 124)

Section 2: Models of Meaning and Context

  • How can we adapt tools from computer science to allow social scientists and humanists to make meaningful (context-sensitve!) inferences?

Computer Science Algorithms as Social Science Tools

blind importing of the default methods and practices used to select, evaluate, and validate models from the computer science literature can lead to unintended consequences.

(Grimmer, Roberts, and Stewart 2022)

Engineering vs. Social Science

  • What I learned in engineering school:
    • Step 1: Make a table of \(F\)-scores, where your algorithm is highest
    • Step 2: Profit ($$$)
  • Showing up in social science program:
    • Where are your standard errors?
    • Have you controlled for confounders?
    • Alternative specification? Robustness?

Natural Language Processing

  • The goal for most algorithms: predict the next word in this sentence
  • “Porting” to social science requires modification + validation
  • What exactly do you mean when you say “context”?
  • Wikipedia corpus, most similar to “Turing”:
Dependency Tree 5-Word Window
Co-Hyponyms \(\rightarrow\) Pauling nondeterministic \(\leftarrow\) Topically Related
(Paradigmatic)1 Hotelling computability (Syntagmatic)2
Lessing deterministic
Hamming finite-state

Raw Word Embeddings

  • What do they “mean”?

Manually-Projected Word Embeddings

  • Researcher imposes meaning

Clustered Word Embeddings

  • Continuous Spectra \(\rightarrow\) Discrete Clusters

The Geometry of Political Thought

Hobbes’s analysis of liberty in Leviathan represents not a revision but a repudiation of what he had earlier argued, […] a substantial change in the character of his moral thought.

(Skinner 2008, xvi)

The 1844 Marx was still operating within the ideological field of Young Hegelianism.

(Löwy 1973, 104)

[Khomeini] now used [mostazafin] to mean the angry ‘oppressed masses’, a meaning it had acquired in the early 1960s when [Ali] Shariati and his disciples translated Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as Mostazafin-e Zamin.

(Abrahamian 1993, 47)

Constructing Contextual Fields

  • Word2Vec vs. BERT

Semantic Leadership Networks

\[ \begin{align*} \mathsf{Lead}_{a_1 \rightarrow a_2}(w) = \frac{\mathsf{sim}(\mathbf{pre}_w^{a_1}, \mathbf{post}_w^{a_2})}{\mathsf{sim}(\mathbf{pre}_w^{a_2}, \mathbf{post}_w^{a_2})}. \end{align*} \]

Section 3: Case Studies

  • Bringing empirics into political-theoretic disputes, by way of computational tools
  • textlab.app/hegel

The Empirics of Influence

  • How do ideas “move” from one mind to another?
  • How do they spread through populations?
  • How can we characterize the causal relationship between ideas and actions?
  • Sperber (1996): culture = chains of internal and external representations

First Steps

  • How have political theorists conceptualized “influence” thus far?
  • What counts as acceptable evidence for influence?
  • Which instances of hypothesized influence are widely accepted among political theorists? Which ones are widely rejected? Which ones were obvious, and which ones were only accepted after long debate?

Text-Mining Influence Claims

  • “\(X\) influenced \(Y\)”? Let’s zoom in on mechanisms:
  • Collaboration: “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels carried on one of the great intellectual collaborations in the history of scientific research.” (Gandy 1979, ii)
  • Mentorship: “the grandly-titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was begun in 1915 following Wittgenstein’s tenure at Cambridge under [Bertrand] Russell’s mentorship” (Wright 2006, 72)
  • Reading: “Not only had Marx read Hegel’s Logic in 1858, but we know that he studied it once again in 1860.” (Dussel 2002, 195)
  • Shared Intellectual Community: “Schelling and Hegel first met at the Tübingen Seminary in 1790, and the two young men shared a room there during their student years” (Levine 2006, 124)
  • Shared Geography: “Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years.” (Morton 1990, 290)
  • Rivalry: “the cultural philosophy of the Historical School and, more particularly, of Hegel’s rival at the University of Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher.” (Toews 1985, 7)

The Point is To Change It

  • Theoretical Innovation \(\overset{?}{\longleftrightarrow}\) Political Practice

Modeling Texts and Events

Dyadic Influence: Anonymous Communiqués of the First Intifada

Relative Focus

Adapting Over Time?

\(N\)-Ary Influence and Innovation in Twentieth Century Marxism

Semantic Leadership in Nineteenth Century Socialist Thought

  • ~250 texts, 9K newspaper articles
  • So… what was Marx doing, then? How did he “win” the war of words, strategy-wise?

Marx’s Rhetorical “Playing Field”:

And His Maneuvers Across it, Over Time:

…What About the Twentieth Century?

Two world wars, followed by two waves of global rebellion and revolution, which brought to power a system that claimed to be the historically predestined alternative to bourgeois and capitalist society […] involving one third of the globe’s population. The huge colonial empires, built up before and during the Age of Empire, were shaken and crumbled into dust.

(Hobsbawm 1994, 7)

  • The good news: entire state apparatuses could be put to work mass-producing and promulgating Marx’s writings
  • The bad news: Europe no longer the location of the inevitable worker’s revolution…
  • The dialectical synthesis: late Marx and Lenin wrote voluminously on possibilities for Third World revolution… strategically draw out those writings and export!

Preliminary (But Suggestive!) Results

Thank You!

  • Questions?

References

Abrahamian, Ervand. 1993. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. University of California Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 2002. Towards An Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63. Routledge.
Firth, John Rupert. 1957. Papers in Linguistics, 1934-1951. Oxford University Press.
Gandy, D. Ross. 1979. Marx and History: From Primitive Society to the Communist Future. University of Texas Press.
Grimmer, Justin, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart. 2022. Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences. Princeton University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric J. 1994. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991. Michael Joseph.
Levine, Norman. 2006. Divergent Paths: The Hegelian Foundations of Marx’s Method. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Löwy, Michael. 1973. The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx. London: Brill.
McLellan, David. 2007. Marxism After Marx. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Morton, Frederic. 1990. Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914. Collier Books.
Skinner, Quentin. 2008. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge University Press.
———. 2012. Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Soni, Sandeep, Lauren F. Klein, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2021. “Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers.” Journal of Cultural Analytics 6 (1): 18841. https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.18841.
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Toews, John Edward. 1985. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841. Cambridge University Press.
Wright, James Kenneth. 2006. Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Peter Lang.