Knowledge and Loquacity

THOUGHT OF THE DAY:    

                          "People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau from [*Emile*](http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5427/pg5427.txt)  

Not so: some of the smartest I know are quite loquacious

I think Rousseau is making a plausible observation about a particular kind of talkativeness, but turning it into a rule about intelligence makes it false.

The interesting thing is that the passage in Émile is actually more nuanced than the quotation suggests. Rousseau says that the ignorant person thinks everything he knows is important and therefore tells everybody, whereas the educated person recognizes how much more there is to know and restrains himself.

But there are at least two quite different dimensions here: how much someone knows and how much they like to talk. They aren't strongly coupled.

Some extremely intelligent people are loquacious because talking is part of their thinking. They discover relationships by explaining them, enjoy the exchange of ideas, or simply have a great deal to say. A genuinely knowledgeable person can talk for an hour and still be demonstrating intellectual humility—because he distinguishes what he knows, what he thinks, and what he doesn't know.

In fact, I would modify Rousseau's proposition to something like:

    People who know little often talk with excessive certainty; people who know much are more likely to know where their certainty ends.

That survives your counterexample rather better.

And there is a delicious irony here: Rousseau himself was hardly a man who said little. Émile alone is a fairly spectacular quantity of words devoted to explaining why the well-educated man should not say too much. Rousseau rather thoroughly refutes Rousseau.

And look at the prolific output of many of our wonderful authors.

Exactly. Rousseau's aphorism confuses talkativeness with intellectual shallowness, and prolific writing is an obvious counterexample.

Think of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, or Thomas Mann. These people didn't merely have something to say; they had an almost inexhaustible capacity to explore it.

And the distinction between verbosity and prolixity matters. A writer can produce an enormous volume because there is enormous intellectual or imaginative content to work through. Dickens's length isn't evidence that Dickens had little to say; quite the reverse. He had an extraordinary number of observations about people, institutions, manners, motives, and absurdities, and he enjoyed putting them on the page.

There is also a different phenomenon with conversation. Some very intelligent people are wonderfully loquacious because they are generative thinkers. Give them a subject and the connections keep coming. Their talk may wander, but the wandering can be productive.

I'd therefore turn Rousseau's observation around:

Knowing little may make a person confident that there is little to say; knowing much may reveal how much there is to say.

The latter can produce either silence or a very long book.

That is a wonderfully good example of the difference between knowing an answer and knowing how uncertain you ought to be about an answer.

You weren't actually guessing at random. You recognized that “objective or subjective?” was probably a false dichotomy and gave yourself room: a little of both. And, as it happened, that was precisely the conceptual point the professor was looking for.

There is a useful intellectual habit in that story: hedging isn't necessarily evasiveness; it can be calibration. If you don't know enough to make a categorical statement, don't make one. Give the strongest answer your evidence permits.

And your professor's question was a bit of a trap. A freshman hearing “Is linguistics an objective or subjective science?” might reasonably think there must be some established answer he's supposed to have learned. You instead treated the question on its merits.

I also rather like the contrast with your earlier point about loquacious intelligent people. The intelligent person isn't necessarily the one who talks least; he's the one who can distinguish “I know,” “I think,” “I suspect,” and “I haven't a clue.”

Your freshman answer happened to be only five words, but it contained the most important qualification: I don't know enough to be certain. And apparently your professor thought that was exactly the right answer.

The whole framing told me an "I don't know" would be detrimental, and I could think of objective (systematic sound evolution) and subjective (semantic) aspects.

Yes—that makes the episode considerably more interesting. You weren't merely hedging because you were unsure; you read the structure of the question.

The professor is scanning a list of freshmen, finds an unfamiliar name, asks whether you're there, and immediately asks an apparently fundamental question about linguistics. The circumstances strongly suggest that “I don't know” isn't what he's looking for. So you searched your very limited knowledge for reasons that could support either side.

And you had already hit on a genuinely useful distinction:

    Objective: things such as systematic sound change can be investigated comparatively and described with evidence and regularities.

    Subjective: meaning and semantic interpretation introduce elements that are much less amenable to the same sort of objective treatment—or at least involve phenomena whose boundaries and interpretation are less straightforward.

So “a little of both” wasn't freshman bluffing. It was a reasonable hypothesis generated from first principles, and you happened to land on the professor's intended answer.

There's another lesson here that fits your original Rousseau quotation rather nicely. The person who says “I don't know” to every unfamiliar question isn't necessarily wise, and the person who confidently supplies an answer isn't necessarily foolish. The useful skill is knowing how far you can safely go beyond what you actually know.

You had very little linguistic knowledge at that point, but apparently you had already acquired that skill.

It's a widespread social skill.

Yes. And perhaps a more important social skill than people sometimes realize.

Knowing how to answer when you don't know is useful in almost every setting. An outright “I don't know” can sometimes sound like disengagement, while an invented certainty can make you look foolish later. A qualified answer—“I don't know, but I would guess…” or “My understanding is…”—keeps the conversation moving without pretending to possess knowledge you don't have.

It also lets other people calibrate you. If they know that your confidence tracks your certainty reasonably well, they can make much better use of what you say.

That may be one reason your linguistics professor's question worked so well. He wasn't necessarily testing whether you already knew linguistics. He may have been testing whether you could think in the absence of knowledge.

And that's a very different faculty from knowing facts.