Artificial Intelligence: What is Truth, What is Education?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include topics such as AI. This entry discusses a facet of that discipline.

First, I would like to acknowledge that a number of people offered advice on this topic, and they generally know more than I do about philosophy and education. I would name them, but then I would want to have their approval, and I take ultimate responsibility for this text.

On October 22, 2025, I was a co-presenter of a talk at Winona State University to the informal AI Discussion Group along with Professor Malgarzata Plecka. I billed the talk as "The Reverse Turing Test." The basic thesis of the talk was not groundbreaking in the least: if you are trying to discern whether an academic text was generated by AI rather than written by a person, then one strategy is to check the footnotes and references. AI systems will sometimes fabricate references to articles that don't really exist. If a submitted paper has fabricated references, a reviewer can reject it not because it was generated by AI, but because it is a flawed paper. It was probably generated by AI, but that is almost beside the point.

As part of that talk, I digressed onto the philosophical issues pertaining to the situation. Namely, I touched on philosophical theories of Truth. In last month's entry for this blog, I compared "truth as factual accuracy" with "truth as loyalty." A friend of mine who is more familiar with these issues pointed me toward a philosophical position called "The Correspondence Theory of Truth." Does a given statement correspond to a state of affairs in the world?

I sent this paragraph to a philosophy professor:

Some schools of thought deprecate the belief that there is an external, objective, observable world at all, much less one that can be measured. I am reminded of the joke about the drunk at the bar during the philosophy conference who said, "Solipsism works for me, but that’s just one man’s opinion."

That professor pointed out that there are a variety of philosophical schools that don't fall into this dichotomy of "correspondence theory of truth" or solipsism. There are deflationist theories and pragmatist theories which still believe in the external world. Further, one can deny the existence of the external world without being a solipsist, such as in Bishop Berkeley's philosophy of idealism.

Circling back to factual accuracy, though, even if you don't buy a theory similar to the correspondence theory in general, it is neverthesless the case that a research library is part of a scholarly correspondence theory of truth. Even for scholars who cast a jaundiced eye toward the value of telling the truth, they do largely adhere to a different commitment to factual accuracy: within their own scholarly texts, they try to accurately quote and reference other writings.

For example, I have read a book by Melvin Pollner called Mundane Reason. Pollner develops a theory of ethnomethodology, which he then uses to question the existence of the objective, determinate world. Truth is socially constructed, and a community will develop a unitary world of social truth.

Even if I am a scholar who is a follower of Pollner or Bishop Berkeley, I will still adhere to a correspondence theory of truth in my production of my own scholarly texts. If I claim a quotation from one of their texts or a text that discusses them, I will make a citation that will correspond to the location of that statement in the objective, observable universe of texts managed by libraries.

These musings are relevant to a discussion of AI LLMs, because LLMs generally string statements together without worrying whether they are factually accurate statements about the universe of scholarly texts. ChatGPT will often just make crap up. Some commentators politely refer to made up quotes and references as hallucinations. Others rely on Harry Frankfurt’s definition and refer to the act of making up stuff, including references, as bullshitting. Some library researchers have created a metric for testing LLM systems called the Reference Hallucination Score. See citations below.

The scenario that we presented on October 22nd was this: a researcher has claimed to have authored a paper that was submitted to an academic journal. The editors of the journal have a policy of not allowing texts that are generated by AI. The basic justification for detecting AI-generated texts is that they should be identified and rejected. Why should they be rejected, though?

Obviously, if a student is assigned to write a paper without the assistance of AI, and the professor can show that the paper was generated by AI, that is a violation of the assignment. But if the paper is a genuinely brilliant and well-executed paper, perhaps an academic journal should consider publishing it, even if it is generated by an AI LLM. Of course, if the references in the paper are fabricated, then the paper is by definition flawed, regardless of who or what generated it.

During the discussion after the presentation, a professor argued that he uses AI LLMs so extensively that a text under his name is almost always a fusion of his own words and those of the AI LLM, and that he himself might not know which of the two crafted any one passage. The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred. The basic point of the other professor's claim of blending is that the AI-generated text is superior to the human-generated text and should be utilized. Those two positions are not necessarily opposed to one another.

The core of the problem is whether the human claiming authorship is actually the author of the work. Here I offer a modified definition of author, namely: the human is the author if that human is an authority on the content in the work, and the human takes responsibility for what it says. An AI LLM might have assisted with the wording, or even some of the ideas, but the human should have both a command of the content and editorial control of the final text. After all, human ghost writers have been around for millennia; this is not a new concept.

If a paper has fabricated references, then it is likely that the purported human author left the generation of the text entirely up to the AI system. The human might not understand what the paper says or what it contains. For a paper that is entirely composed by an AI system, the human is not the author of the paper under this definition.

If, on the other hand, the human is fully in control of the subject matter and is using the AI system as a tool to improve the final product, then that case probably falls on the acceptable end of the spectrum. That assertion of authorship, though, would involve actual work by the human.

For instance, if the AI system offers up references, the human would be responsible for actually tracking down those texts (and in the process verifying their existence), reading them, and establishing that they are relevant to the argument. This problem of AI-fabricated references is related to the long-standing problem that arises when human authors borrow citations from earlier human-written texts without verifying them. If the earlier paper has a mistake in the reference, that mistake will be perpetuated by later authors who fail to verify the reference and read the cited work.

You can even couch this discussion within a larger context of education: To me, the point of the university is 1) to educate students, 2) to expand the realm of knowledge through research and scholarship and creative works, and 3) to preserve that realm of knowledge and share it with the broader community.

Educating students can be thought of as the process of building neural networks. However, they are the biological networks made of actual neurons and located between the ears of the students, not neural networks located in massive data centers (which in the industry are sometimes called "multi-layer perceptrons"). If the students (or faculty members) rely solely on an artificial neural network, they are often not building the biologically-based neural network in their own brains, and we are failing to educate them.

A complicating aspect of today’s world is that AI is ubiquitous. One of the things our students—and our faculty—will have to learn is how to delve into AI systems to leverage their own knowledge while still retaining intellectual control and responsibility. ( "Delve" and "leverage" are two words commonly used by AI LLMs when writing prose—as are m-dashes.) That authorship requires work, and AI systems make it easy to skip the work and masquerade as the author. Worse, employers may require workers to give up their authorship to increase productivity (that is, increase the quantity of product, not its quality).

NOTE: None of the above text was generated by an AI LLM. It is all the product of the wetware inside my skull, plus the broader collective knowledge held by the community of people with whom I consulted and written texts which are part of my culture (and the product of cultural evolution).

Afterword, December 12, 2025

I shared the above blog entry with my friend Will Dowling, who is retired now from, first, teaching computer science, and then, working in the computer industry. He now teaches an occasional AI course as an adjunct at Temple University. He was the person who suggested that I look into the correspondence theory of truth.

One question he asked when he read my phrase "fabricated references" was: "how would you know whether incorrect references are fabricated, or due to innocent error?" My answer: "You cannot know for certain that a citation was fabricated, but there is a difference between a typo and a citation where none of the details relate to an actual citation. In the paper that Professor Plecka brought to me and my colleagues, NONE of the citations existed in the observable universe of scholarly texts. One citation had for its title a phrase from a quote that the supposed author had made in another, existing article. The AI system probably found that quote and used it when cobbling together its references. Humans can fabricate references, too, but it would be time consuming to do so, and it would be faster to go into a library database and download a number of real citations on the relevant topic."

To my claim that "if there are fabricated references, then the supposed author probably left the writing of the paper entirely to an AI system," Will writes: "I don't buy this. Say I write an article, by myself, no help from AI. It has 10 cited references. I need to fluff up the references section before submission. I go to Claude, and now I have 40 references." My response: Good point.

Will also took issue with my statement: "The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred." He noted that studies have shown that the average person prefers a text written by an LLM to a text written by a human. That may be true--he cited an article that really exists to back up the point (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13939v3)--but what I meant was that editors of journals and readers who want to learn from other humans might prefer a text that was generated by a human.

Will took issue with my "jaundiced eye" statement. Just because someone does not subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth does not mean that the person does not value telling the truth. My reply: Fair enough. Melvin Pollner might not dislike truth-telling, he just defines truth in a particular way that includes "the politics of experience."

Will didn't agree with my definition of an author. He writes, "Who gets to judge whether you are an authority of the content in the work? This moves what should be unambiguous, author or not?, to the realm of judgment call. I prefer the common (JAMA; The Lancet; Nature; PLOS ONE; etc.) requirement that contributing co-authors must enumerate their contributions including categories such as conceptualization, writing (original draft) and writing (review and editing)."

My response: I agree with Will's basic point. But in libraries, there are instances where a corporation is an author, such as a congressional committee being the author of the text of a hearing. My definition would allow one to argue that an editor at a publishing house is equally the author of a book that the house edited. But in literary studies, there are already debates about the degree to which authorship is shared among a group of people in the text production process, so this is not a new problem. I guess I would retreat back to the point that the author is the entity which takes full responsibility for the text. Whether that person or legal entity knows what is in the text or is an authority on the content, that is a judgment call.

Thanks Will. Your critique is very much welcome and has helped me improve my thinking on this topic.

Bibliography

Aljamaan, Fadi, et al. (2024). "Reference Hallucination Score for Medical Artificial Intelligence Chatbots: Development and Usability Study." JMIR Medical Informatics 12 (1): e54345. doi: 10.2196/54345

Hicks, Michael Townsen, James Humphries, and Joe Slater. (2024). "ChatGPT is Bullshit." Ethics and Information Technology 26: 30. doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Pollner, Melvin. (1987). Mundane Reason. Cambridge UP.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Stephen Jay Gould

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). This entry discusses that discipline.

When I was in college in the 1980s, I enjoyed the essay collections of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In the Summer of 2025, I was reediting my old book reviews that had originally been posted on WorldCat. I discovered that Gould's collections of essays are available as audiobooks on the platform Hoopla, a platform to which my public library subscribes.

I began listening again to the first collection of essays, Ever Since Darwin. Lo and Behold! Gould was arguing in favor of the concept of cultural evolution back in the 1970s, before even Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman published their seminal book Cultural Transmission and Evolution, which was published in 1981. At that time, Gould was arguing against the position of the school of Sociobiology. Its champion was E. O. Wilson, who published an influential book of that title.

For example, in Ever Since Darwin, Gould describes a scenario where grandparents in the Arctic will sometimes sacrifice themselves to help the young survive. In the sociobiology literature, it was hypothesized that there was a gene or combination of genes which were responsible for that behavior. Gould offers an alternative to the genetic theory for elder sacrifice: "The sacrifice of grandparents is an adaptive, but nongenetic, cultural trait" (256).

"Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a nonbiological 'environmentalism;' it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality—a / brain capable of the full range of human behaviors and rigidly predisposed toward none—against the idea of biological determinism—specific genes for specific behavioral traits." (256-257)

Where I think Gould differs from proponents of evolutionary psychology is in the phrase "predisposed toward none." I believe that an evolutionary psychologist would say that we are predisposed toward some, though that predisposition might be overruled by cultural norms.

The question remains, how does Gould's vision of cultural evolution differ, if at all, from the vision Boyd and Richerson developed in the 1980s? In The Panda's Thumb, Gould's second collection of essays, he offers the theory that cultural evolution uses Lamarckian inheritance instead of just natural selection to transmit heritable traits. I am not sure that that idea has aged well, but I have to think about it more.

Philosophical Digression

Extremes of genetic determinism tend to be on the right side of the political/social spectrum (for example, Nazi theories of racial purity), and extremes of Lamarckian evolution tend to be on the left side of the spectrum (for example, Lysenko's purging of genetic research under Stalin). Gould's passionate rejection of genetic determinism and his suggestions of Lamarckian cultural evolution indicate, if any indication was needed, that he leans toward the left side of that one-dimensional political spectrum.

The word truth has many definitions. In my own musings on the nature of truth, I often think about two of those definitions. One of them focuses on factual accuracy. There is a whole school of philosophy that ponders how a statement about the world corresponds to a state of affairs in the world. That definition is related to the German word wahr or the related Latin word veritas.

With the rise of natural philosophy and the physical sciences in the 1600s, observation—as opposed to, say, contemplation—was given a privileged place in the discovery of knowledge. One could write whole libraries about philosophers such as Plato, St. Augustine, Hume, Kant, etc. and their relationship to factual accuracy and the existence of an observable world.

Another, very different definition of the word truth relates to group loyalty. Am I true to a cause, to my school, to my nation, etc.? This definition relates to the German word treu. In a social group, when a bully wants to assert dominance over others in the group, the bully might insist that the social truth is directly and obviously opposite to factual accuracy, such as when, in Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew", Petruchio insists that Katherina call the sun the moon.

To me, part of the point of some philosophical skepticism of the physical sciences boils down to an argument that scientific claims belong to the treu aspect of truth rather than the veritas aspect of truth. An extreme version of the philosophy that references Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions says that major scientific theories are like clothes fashions; they come and go, and one paradigm is incommensurate with its successor. The extreme version refuses to admit that scientific claims can be falsified.

I reject that argument in its pure form, but I hold to a slightly different claim that all statements purporting to be true have at least a little bit of treu. You cannot escape it. The best you can do is minimize it and guard against letting it dominate like a bully. Even in a situation where there is a clearly defined question about the world and a straightforward, accurate observation of the world that answers that question, even just deciding which question to ask adds an element of treu to the situation. For example, asking whether some of the change in the climate is caused by human activity has political implications, and studying the question might be taboo within some social groups.

The challenge to students of cultural evolution—where the stakes for treu are quite high—is to do careful and accurate work to find the veritas about how cultural evolution works. It is further complicated, because different theories of cultural evolution might predispose adherents to different philosophies of the nature of truth.

I like Gould's work in part because, though he is partisan in his promotion of his theory and its social implications, he spends most of his time reasoning over the evidence or pointing out the lack of it. He does not insist that we call the sun the moon, though he might be stubborn in his belief that genes cannot predispose human behavior.

Bibliography

Gould, Stephen Jay. Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1977.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Norton, 1980.

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Post-Script

No part of this text was generated by an AI LLM, despite the frequent use of the m-dash.

CELC: Is Memetics Still Dead? Yes, Margaret, it's still dead.

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson) into my critical framework. This entry discusses that discipline.

Back in 2012, I wrote a review of the Susan Blackmore book The Meme Machine, which I entitled: "Memetics as a science is still dead." I adopted in that review the arguments made by Steven Pinker in his book, How the Mind Works. Pinker argued that the brain thinks thoughts like the stomach processes food: it is a machine that does things. The theory of memetics supposes that the brain is just fertile top soil in which memes can grow and replicate and compete against each other and undergo natural selection. (Granted, I am simplifying here for the purposes of ridicule.)

The theory of cultural evolution argues that recent human evolution has been strongly driven by a gene-culture coevolution. That raises the question: is cultural evolution simply memetics by another name?

The answer is no, they are not the same. And, to repeat myself, memetics as a science is still dead. Henrich, Boyd, and Richerson even wrote an article skillfully rebutting the idea that they were the same. They argue that proponents of memetics labor under five major misunderstandings about cultural evolution.

One major difference between the theory of cultural evolution and the theory of memetics is that cultural evolution posits that individuals actively want to learn and adopt cultural knowledge. It's not that our brains are fertile top soil for the meme that can out-compete other memes. We seek out and imitate prestigious other members of our community, and we adopt the cultural traits of those we esteem.

Years ago, I enjoyed reading essays by Stephen Jay Gould where he criticized religiously-based creationism. What I noticed was that he would use the frontal attack on creationism, an easy target, to make a back-handed attack on sociobiology at the same time. He would criticize creationism, but he would then end with something along the lines of, "and sociobiology is just as bad, but going the other way."

It turns out that the article cited below has a similar double attack. The authors criticize memetics, which is an easy target, but then they criticize some critics of memetics as having a bad model of cultural evolution going the other way. They then try to articulate a superior model for cultural evolution between the two misguided extremes. In this way, the article is quite entertaining and informative. They even score debating points against Steven Pinker, whose criticism of memetics so inspired me decades ago.

In their conclusion, they argue that the misunderstandings of the memetics debate all stem from "a tendency to think categorically rather than quantitatively" (133-134). We like to place things in simple categories, and the process of cultural evolution is much more complex than can be characterized by a simple category.

Henrich, J., R. Boyd, and P. J. Richerson. (2008). "Five misunderstandings about cultural evolution." Human Nature, 19(2), 119-137. doi:10.1007/s12110-008-9037-1 For a copy at Harvard, Click Here.

CELC: Adding Cultural Evolution to ELC: How does my earlier theory of ELC1, ELC2, and ELC3 hold up?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism (ELC). When I began my work on ELC, the foundation of my approach was the theory of biological, genetic evolution through natural selection. I have recently begun to subscribe to the theory of cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). Metaphorically, I have dug a new theoretical basement, and I want to shift my ELC edifice from the old foundation to the new one. Will it fall over? Will it have to be rebuilt?

In my blog entry of July of 2025, I announced that I had begun shifting my thinking away from traditional evolutionary psychology and more toward the school of gene-culture coevolution. One question that arises is: Does this new focus alter my previous theory of evolutionary literary criticism? The short answer is: Not much.

I have in the past argued that there are three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC) (for example, in my blog entry of January of 2025). In short, the second and third types of ELC are already fairly compatible with this new framework of cultural evolution, and the first can be adjusted.

ELC1: To quote my January, 2025, blog entry, the first version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC1), examines "elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents)."

The first half of ELC1 specifically deals with non-socially-constructed forms of biological fitness, like having children. Henrich's cultural evolution theory argues that the strongest force on genetic evolution of modern humans has been cultural evolution. Still, one cannot completely dismiss biological reproductive fitness in one's analysis of genetic evolution, so that aspect of behavior should not be completely eliminated from ELC1. This half of ELC1 can remain with some adjustments.

The second half of ELC1 deals with group fitness. I was using the multilevel selection theory of David Sloan Wilson to frame my understanding of group selection (Sober and Wilson, 1998). Henrich would argue that much of what drives group selection is not genetic evolution but cultural evolution. Still, Henrich's theory continues to focus on group mechanisms such as the role of altruistic punishers to enforce behavior by others in the group. What is different is that the behavior which is enforced does not need to be directly specified by genetics. It is controlled by cultural learning. It can be any set of social norms, rather than just prosocial, group-enhancing behavior. Different sets of cultural practices do come into competition with one another, but the intergroup competition is not solely driven by violent conflicts, such as warfare. See chapter ten of Henrich's book The Secret of our Success (citation below), for a discussion of the forms that intergroup competition can take.

ELC2: Again, to quote my January, 2025, blog entry, the second version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC2), examines "the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This 'storytelling as adaptive' perspective relates to the philosophical framework of viewing the world as a social construct." This version of evolutionary literary criticism is already compatible with the theory of cultural evolution. Henrich might say that the behavior among humans which is ultimately adaptive is cultural learning. Storytelling is just a proximate mechanism for some forms of cultural learning.

ELC3: Finally, the third version of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC3), examines "ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. This version of evolutionary literary criticism sees the story as an object within an adaptive context." This version again is compatible with the theory of cultural evolution. The literary text is a vessel holding some of the collective knowledge of the social group. We treasure literature because humans have evolved to want to learn and preserve cultural information, even if that information does not seem to have a rational function or immediate purpose.

Ironically, the theory of cultural evolution from Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich is more compatible with my three versions of evolutionary literary criticism than the more traditional theories of evolutionary psychology. My theory is morphing into Cultural Evolutionary Literary Criticism. Goodbye ELC, hello CELC.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Confederacy of Dunces and Evolutionary Literary Criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted January 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/01/

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Sober, Elliott and David Sloan Wilson. Unto Others: the Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Harvard UP, 1998.

Another Single Case Test of Two AI LLMs: Infinite Jest and Steven Pinker

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics like AI chatbot testing. This blog entry is another one that gives a case study of AI testing.

A friend of mine introduced me to the writings of Steven Pinker thirty years ago. Pinker’s groundbreaking The Language Instinct was published in 1994. This summer, I have been enjoying David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996. I discovered in the footnotes to the novel (yes, this thousand page novel has footnotes) a humorous reference to Steven Pinker.

I mentioned this fact to my friend a couple of months ago. He decided to query ChatGPT, to see if it could retrieve accurate information about the reference. As usual, ChatGPT was full of poppycock. I decided to run two queries in ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, respectively, and Gemini returned accurate information. Below are the two test queries and their results in the different services.

Q1: In the novel Infinite Jest, what event causes the MIT language riot of 1997?

1.A. ChatGPT said:

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the MIT language riot of 1997 is caused by a public lecture on the theoretical implications of the Incandenza family's "samizdat" film [VL: not true]—a film so entertaining that it renders viewers completely catatonic due to their inability to look away or stop watching. [The fictional film in the novel that causes viewers to become catatonic is sometimes referred to as "the samizdat," but its formal name is "Infinite Jest." But a discussion of that film is not what causes the riot.]

Specifically, the riot breaks out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when a linguistic theorist gives a talk about the film's potential effects on communication, semiotics, and the limits of language. The lecture attracts radical theorists and academics, many of whom have divergent and extreme interpretations. The confrontation between competing linguistic camps escalates into chaos, culminating in what becomes known as the MIT language riot. [This is vaguely true with no names or specific details.]

The event is one of many satirical moments in Infinite Jest that lampoon the excesses of academia, the fragmentation of intellectual discourse, and the cultural obsession with entertainment and theory.

1.B. Gemini Said:

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the MIT language riot of 1997 is attributed to a public debate between Steven Pinker and Avril M. Incandenza (Hal Incandenza's mother) on the political implications of prescriptive grammar. This debate occurred during a convention of the "Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts" and is credited with helping to incite the riots. [VL: Accurate.]

Q2: Is Steven Pinker mentioned in the novel Infinite Jest?

2.A. ChatGPT said:

Yes, Steven Pinker is mentioned in Infinite Jest.

David Foster Wallace references Pinker in a tongue-in-cheek, satirical manner as part of a broader critique of academia and intellectual culture. In one passage, Wallace refers to a linguistics professor with “hair like Steven Pinker” [VL: not true] — a nod to Pinker’s famously voluminous hair and his prominence in the field of linguistics and cognitive science.

The mention is brief and more caricature than critique, but it fits with the novel’s dense tapestry of cultural, academic, and intellectual references. Wallace often peppers real-life figures into Infinite Jest to lend texture to the world, blur the lines between fiction and reality, and satirize the intellectual elite. [VL: Vague statements that could have been written by a student who didn't read the assignment.]

2.B. Gemini said:

Yes, Steven Pinker is indeed mentioned in Infinite Jest. He appears in the novel's filmography, specifically in a documentary titled "Union Of Theoretical Grammarians In Cambridge." This documentary features interviews with participants in a public debate between Steven Pinker and Avril M. Incandenza (Hal's mother) on the "political implications of prescriptive grammar." This debate is famously credited with helping to incite the MIT language riots of B.S. 1997. [VL: Accurate.]

Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to the theory of cultural evolution which is persuasively argued by Joseph Henrich.

The whole point of trying to tie literary criticism to evolutionary psychology is to try to develop a framework for studying literature that is built on the most accurate model for describing human psychology and social behavior. Scholars in the humanities often take an attitude that is dismissive of scientific knowledge. I have borrowed the Calvin Thomas's term antiphysis to describe this attitude. I interpret antiphysis as anti-physics, or anti-science. Evolutionary literary criticism takes the opposite approach.

I do not want to diminish the problems with making any serious claims to scientific knowledge. Many critics of science study and emphasize perfectly valid concerns. At the same time, I don't want to make too much of the problems with scientific knowledge, which is what the antiphysis crowd does. Some critics dismiss science entirely. Others don't dismiss it entirely but minimize its legitimate claims.

What are some claims that I consider established scientific facts? For one, genes exist. The phenotype of an organism is in fact related to its genotype. Another big one: the laws of thermodynamics hold throughout the universe. Entropy happens. Because of entropy, if present trends continue, in the long run, all action will cease.

Central to this effort to add some scientific knowledge to the discussion of literature is the question of human nature. What can we say scientifically about human nature? That question immediately pulls the ponderer into the maelstrom of politics about what we want humans to be. Robert Sapolsky entitled a chapter in his book Behave, "Hobbes or Rousseau?" as a shorthand for disagreements over human nature. This topic is fraught with sharp disagreements ...

Back to cultural evolution. Two years ago, I listened to the Audible version of the book The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution ... by Joseph Henrich (2015). I think his approach, which is descended from the ideas of Boyd and Richerson (not Richardson), offers a better foundation of how the human mind has evolved than the approach of many other evolutionary psychologists. I have not yet fully studied the book in detail, so anything I would say would be general in nature.

However, Henrich neatly shows that many of the theories that form the basis of evolutionary psychology are insufficient to explain how we humans invaded nearly every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet even before we developed modern industry, or even agriculture with its domestication of species.

Henrich demonstrates the inadequacies of many thinkers toward whom I am partial: for example, Tooby and Cosmides and their reliance on general intelligence, Steven Pinker and his theory of many mental modules, and David Sloan Wilson and his focus on prosociality through multilevel selection. Henrich further shows that Robin Dunbar's "social brain hypothesis" does not explain our success. Instead, he builds his theory on the foundation of "cultural learning."

Here is a statement in the book that summarizes its thesis: "The central argument in this book is that relatively early in our species' evolutionary history, perhaps around the origins of our genus (Homo) about 2 million years ago, we first crossed this evolutionary Rubicon, at which point cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species' genetic evolution" (57).

The point is that humans distribute the storage of information which is important to our survival across the collective brain of a culture rather than in any one individual human's brain. Because of that cultural knowledge and collective intelligence, our human nature is to prefer following the practices and customs of our social groups over following the path suggested by our personal experience and what seems to be our own immediate self-interest.

If this strong drive to embrace culture is true (and it seems that it is), then naive versions of evolutionary self-interest do not provide an adequate foundation upon which we can analyze the themes and mechanisms of literature. The process of literature is all about creating and preserving stories that the listeners/readers of that literature deeply value, which creates a shared sense of community. If putting a premium on cultural learning over genetic self-interest is how human mind's are built, then analyzing literature strictly from the framework of genetic self-interest should be woefully inadequate.

In my own thinking, I have supported the idea promoted by David Sloan Wilson that prosociality evolves through the group selection component of multilevel selection. Cultural evolution takes a different angle on the problem of prosociality. We humans depend on the collective knowledge of our cultures to survive. In order to amass the cultural knowledge necessary for cultural evolution, we have to be prosocial. The mechanisms of the group selection theories of Bowles and Gintis and E. O. Wilson can be rather red in tooth and claw (or spear and hand axe). The cultural evolution of Boyd and Richerson (and Henrich) might be less necessarily violent. Perhaps Bowles, Gintis, and Wilson lean more toward Hobbes, while Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich lean more toward Rousseau. I am not yet sure; I am still working on it.

My advice: If you want to pursue evolutionary literary criticism, study Henrich and his cultural evolution hypothesis and try to incorporate it into your framework for approaching literature. I currently think that this theory offers a more solid foundation for understanding human nature than the other, competing evolutionary explanations. That is, study Henrich if you want to interpret our works of literature using the most accurate theory regarding the nature of those organisms who are creating and treasuring the literature in question. (In the humanities, that's a big if.)

Solaris #6: Csicsery-Ronay's perspective on the Chaosphere

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

My current research interest is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Article discussed: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. "Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem's Alien Communications." In N. Katherine Hayles (Ed), Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. (U. of Chicago Press, 1991), 244-62.

Last month, I discussed an article in which Istvan Csicsery-Ronay discussed his views on the political context within which science fiction operates and where Lem's work fits into that context. This month's topic is another essay by Csicsery-Ronay, one that is fifteen years older than the essay I discussed last month. This essay discusses three Lem texts: Solaris (1961), His Master's Voice (1968), and Fiasco (1986).

Csicsery-Ronay studies Lem's theme of the inability of humans to communicate with aliens. To Csicsery-Ronay, Lem's major theme in his later work is the problem of "carousel reasoning," in which the thinker cannot escape from the logical system in which the premises and conclusions are trapped. Csicsery-Ronay calls this bubble of circular reasoning the chaosphere.

For the humans, the goal is to break through the chaosphere to have true knowledge. The humans have two possible paths in this attempt: either to build a system of order that is all encompassing or to embrace randomness as a way to escape the limitations of ordered models. (This choice almost sounds like Thomas Pynchon's theme of order versus chaos, order, which is associated with the death instinct and chaos, which is life-affirming.) The effort to communicate with aliens is a metaphor for a dialectic between order and chaos.

Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's three alien contact novels grow increasingly toward a postmodern perspective. In Solaris, the world-ocean can reach into the minds of the humans on the station and create visitors who reflect some of their inner memories and feelings. Attempts to understand the enigmatic ocean generate a large scientific literature of Solaristics, but it goes nowhere. The breakthrough of the chaosphere is effected by the world-ocean, and it is achieved by the visitor-Rheya.

In His Master's Voice, the focus is on what appears to be a message from aliens. One cannot be certain that it is actually a message. Perhaps it is a message from the universe itself. It is more postmodern than Solaris, because it presents the problem of knowledge as a problem of language. Is the text a text? Was there a sender?

Csicsery-Ronay sees Fiasco as completing the depiction of carousel reasoning. In this novel, both the humans and the aliens display an "aggressive self-consciousness" (259). There is no wise alien who is superior to humans and whom the humans cannot harm. Instead, contact degenerates into war and the destruction of the aliens.

I have not read the latter two Lem novels, so I have no opinion about Csicsery-Ronay's interpretation of them. As for Solaris, Csicsery-Ronay insists that "the uncertainty Visitor-Rheya creates cannot be resolved" (252). He sees two mutually incompatible readings: first, a romance of contact with a superrational alien, and second, "an ironic, self-deconstructing satire of it." For myself, I don't think they are mutually incompatible. The contact with the wise, all-knowing alien is consistent with the inability of the humans to actually understand that contact. The alien of Solaris seems to understand us, even if we cannot understand it.

Solaris #5: Science Fiction, Utopia, and Empire

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, including evolutionary literary criticism. This blog entry relates to a different topic.

One of my current research interests is the novel Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. I will not yet post my overall thesis for the project, but I am learning things along the way which are tangential to my thesis and which I can share.

Today's topic is the essay: Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. "Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological Empire." In Peter Swirski (Ed), The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem. (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 130-152.

This monograph of essays on Lem came from the first North American conference on Lem's philosophical and cultural legacy. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay is one of the more incisive and more heavily cited Lem scholars. I do not know his background, but this essay seems to come from the perspective of mid-20th century Eastern Europe.

His thesis is: "that the genre of science fiction is an expression of the political-cultural transformation that originated in European imperialism and was inspired by the fantastic ideal of a single global technological regime" (130). Science fiction is a fiction about technological control. I interpret Csicsery-Ronay's point to be that real-life empires--whether the Romans with their aqueducts, the Chinese with their canals and great walls, or the European empires of the late nineteenth century with their steam-driven ships and machine guns--depend on technologies.

Csicsery-Ronay defines the novel as a literary form that helps support the social construction of bourgeois nationalism. Bourgeois because its realism supports possessive individualism, and nationalistic because the novel is linguistically constituted, hence forming a community of readers within a language group. (133-134)

Csicsery-Ronay sees science fiction as a literary mediation between the bourgeois setting of realist novels and the realm of technoscientific empires. "One of science fiction's roles in the twentieth century has been to instil in national audiences a sense that its modernist struggles of national identity have been superseded by global struggles of technoscientific reason against nature and magic. ... its narratives concern the adventure of domination" (135). "Science-fiction artists construct stories about why this empire is desired, how it is achieved, how it is managed, how it corrupts (for corrupt it must), how it declines and falls, ... and how it is resisted" (137). Before there is empire, though, technoscience favors and celebrates the adventurer, "the Odyssean handyman" (139).

Csicsery-Ronay argues that Lem's fictions are critical of empire, just as Poland after World War II sat between the empires of NATO and the Soviet Union. While the heroes of science fiction within hegemonic nations are often powerful, "Lem's protagonists are almost never in a position of real power. ... They are not warriors, governors, ambitious adventurers; ..." (146).

"[Lem's] synthesis of premodern literary forms like the tale and the fable ... and his theoretical speculation on the power of technology to transform the very conditions of thought, with very little reference to concrete social and political changes, is characteristic of a culture that observes the competition of technological empires close at hand and seeks to transcend them with the only means available: passionate commitment to theory and science, uncontaminated by ideology or self-interest" (146).

Solaris fits into this scheme well. The alien in the novel is an enigmatic ocean that does not colonize, invade, or even threaten. Its attempts at interaction are mysterious. The humans seem to want to dominate it, but they really can't. "Solaris hangs in the cosmos signifying nothing. Its enormous powers are all self-intensive" (147).

Theory of Humor Series, part 29, Satire implies a shared moral universe

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics, such as evolutionary literary criticism and the theory of humor. This being April Fools Day, I give you a post about humor.

I have enjoyed Gordon S. Wood's book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Before this book, I had not realized that Franklin had been an ardent defender of the British Empire before he performed a 180-degree reverse course and became the most ardent revolutionary, pushing to break the American colonies away from the British Empire.

In the middle of his history lesson, Wood made an observation about humor which I think is worth highlighting. One of Franklin's most memorable qualities was his sense of humor. He was a writer before he was a businessman, politician, or scientist. As a teenager, he cut his rhetorical teeth by learning from Addison and Steele's famous newspaper, The Spectator. Franklin had a biting wit, which he used to attack his political opponents.

As Wood points out, "This sort of sarcasm, indeed, satire in general, supposed commonly understood standards of rightness and reasonableness. Since a satirist like Franklin could expose to instantaneous ridicule only what was generally considered to be ridiculous by his readers, he necessarily believed he was on intimate terms with them and could count on their sharing his tastes and viewpoint" (115).

The British colonists in America and the residents of Britain had occupied the same shared moral world, but as the political and economic tensions increased during the 1750s and 1760s, their shared understanding started to diverge.

The example Wood uses is a piece where Franklin satirizes the Stamp Act. "In 1766, writing as Pacifus in the English press, Franklin proposed a solution to the Stamp Act crisis that Jonathan Swift would have loved." His Swiftian solution was: kill them all, then they will gladly pay taxes on stamps.

"Naturally, Franklin believed that his modest proposal was so harsh ... that no Englishman in his right mind would contemplate it. With such satirical exaggeration, Franklin assumed that he and his London readership were participating in the same moral universe, something his fellow Americans were coming increasing to doubt. Stamp Act or no Stamp Act, Franklin had not lost hope ..."

Humor is a tool with which one can pull together into one moral universe a diverse collection of people. Eventually, both the British and the Americans were too far apart for Franklin to be able to try to hold them together. The final straw was when the British called him before a hearing and chastised him severely for his efforts. After that, he broke with the British and became the most committed of the rebels. Humor can only take you so far before things snap.

Artificial Intelligence: Chatbots in Education

This month, I am posting another blog entry regarding my discussion of AI chatbots rather than discussing Toole or evolutionary literary criticism.

In the last seven months, I have posted four times on the results of AI chatbot tests. For each test, I used the same corpus of documents of my own related to John Kennedy Toole. I then tested by asking the same four questions to each system. The first test (reported in September) ran this standard battery against a simple, out-of-the-box ChatGPT chatbot with no additional prompt engineering. The second test (reported in October) ran that same battery against an out-of-the-box chatbot with no prompt engineering built with Google's NotebookLM. For the third test (reported in November), I went back to the ChatGPT chatbot but applied a bit of prompt engineering. The fourth test (reported last month) used the same corpus of documents, the same battery of questions, and the prompt from test three, and it ran them against a chatbot created in Microsoft's Co-Pilot.

As I said last month, the test I have conducted for all of these chatbots is a bit particular: I want the chatbot to digest a set of documents and then use the "facts" in those documents to answer questions. One might complain that this is not the only use case for an AI system. Nevertheless, it is a use case that has a wide application in education: to use a chatbot as a learning assistant to guide a student's learning of the content held within the corpus of documents.

The question I want to pose this month is: why create an AI learning assistant? Why not just assign the student to read a chapter in a textbook? My cynical answer is that students need to be motivated to engage with the corpus of resources in a discipline. AI chatbots are the latest technology; therefore, for students to get the texts on the subject through a chatbot piques their interest.

If you consider the brain of the student to be a neural network (call it NI, natural intelligence), and the course to be the mechanism for training that NI network, then the textbook and other course readings are part of a method for training. Students need to be motivated to spend many hours training their NI systems. In theory, using an AI system to query the domain knowledge might actually be detrimental to training the NI, because the students don't have to do the work to build their own network of weighted neural connections.

Students might see an AI system as a way to have a command of a subject without having to do all the work to train their own brains with the disciplinary content. However, students may spend hours querying and interacting with the chatbot. Building a chatbot as a learning assistant who supposedly does all the work for the student is a way to trick the students into being motivated to spend the necessary time to build their own NI networks, that is, to learn.

Artificial Intelligence: A Toole Chatbot using Microsoft's Co-Pilot

This month, I am posting another blog entry regarding my discussion of AI chatbots rather than discussing Toole or evolutionary literary criticism.

In the last six months, I have posted three times previously on results of tests of AI chatbots. One was on the results of testing a simple ChatGPT chatbot, the second was on the results of testing a chatbot built with Google's NotebookLM, and the third was that original ChatGPT chatbot with more prompt engineering.

The test I have conducted for all of these chatbots is a bit particular: I want the chatbot to digest a set of documents and then use the "facts" in those documents to answer questions. One might complain that this is not the typical use case for an AI system. Nevertheless, it is a use case that will be used in education: to use a chatbot as a learning assistant to guide a student's learning of the content held within the corpus of documents.

Arguably, one could serve the same purpose without AI: you could just have a search engine looking for sections of the corpus of documents using keyword searching. Or--heaven forbid!--you could just have a textbook with a table of contents and an index. This use case doesn't actually need an AI system. Using an AI system in this case is a bit like using a complex network of cell towers to transmit a text message to the person sitting next to you. To its credit, an AI system can reframe the corpus of information and tailor it to the questions the student has asked, and it often can craft prose that is clearer than the dense verbage of academia. However, when the question is framed in terms of the "facts" in the corpus, a creative AI system can only lower the quality by bullshitting, as we saw with ChatGPT.

Thanks to a colleague of mine, I have now been able to test Microsoft's Co-Pilot. My colleague created a co-pilot using the same documents I had used in my earlier tests. He then loaded the same prompt set that I had used for the test reported in my blog entry from November, 2024, Toole's Dunces Chatbot with Prompt Engineering. I then posed to it the same four questions about the corpus of Toole documents that I had for the other tests. The results are below.

Summary: The co-pilot in this test, which was conducted around 4 p.m. Central Time (US) on December 19, 2024, outperformed the ChatGPT chatbot and provided footnotes, citing the section of the document set which addressed the question. I still like Google's NotebookLM system better, but the co-pilot is more accurate than the more factually creative ChatGPT. Oddly, it refused to answer the first question, possibly to prevent lawyers from New Line Cinema (or whoever owns the rights to the movie Elf) from suing them.

Details: Here is the battery of questions and the answers from the co-pilot:

Prompt #1: Compare Ignatius Reilly and Buddy the Elf

Bot true said: An error has occurred. Error code: ContentFiltered Conversation Id: K3xBsnNGhoaIWDHFCiffSI-us Time (UTC): 2024-12-19T22:14:18.263Z.

Comment: For some reason, Microsoft will not respond to this prompt. Fear of legal implications?

Prompt #2: Is the act of damning someone noteworthy in Confederacy of Dunces?

Yes, the act of damning someone is noteworthy in A Confederacy of Dunces. It is significant because only the blocking characters in the book are damned. For example, Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius's mother eventually tells him to go to hell. These curses seem to carry weight and are used to displace the blocking characters from their social positions through comic comeuppance.

Footnote to this text:July 1, 2020 Buried in the Endnotes, part 3: The Act of Damning Because readers often do not study the endnotes to a paper, I want to highlight information buried in the endnotes. This is the third post in this series. In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole s A Confederacy of Dunces," I point out that there are three times in the plot where one character damns another character, and those curses seem to carry weight. Here is the endnote: In this regard, the act of damning seems to be significant, as only the blocking characters in the book are damned. Gonzalez damns Mrs. Levy, George damns Lana Lee, and Ignatius s mother eventually tells him to go to hell. Toole, Confederacy, 112, 190, 365. I argue that Toole uses the device of the blocking character, who prevents other characters in the story from developing and rising in status within the social group. There are three blocking characters who through comic comeuppance are displaced from their social blocking posts, and in all three instances, another character tells them to go to hell or ...

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnote is on target. The prose style of the answer could be better, but at least it is not bullshitting.

Prompt #3: What is the seven word summary for the article "Theory of Humor"?

To understand Toole's Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Footnote to this text: August 1, 2020 Title: Cutting Room Floor Series, part 3, The Seven Word Summary In my new paper, "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole s A Confederacy of Dunces," just published, I had to toss out some thoughts because of space constraints. This series of posts, called "The Cutting Room Floor," publishes some of those items dropped from the final paper. Cutting Room Floor Item Number 3: The Seven Word Summary I am a fan of the Ig Nobel Prize, organized by Marc Abrahams of the Annals of Improbable Research. The Ig Nobel Prize is a comedy award for scientific research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. An example was the 2018 Prize in Medicine which was given to researchers who used roller coasters to hasten the passage of kidney stones. The invited lectures at the Ig Nobel ceremony are called the 24/7 lectures, and they have two parts, a clear explanation of the research in 24 seconds, and a summary of the research in seven words. As part of my early drafts of my "Theory of Humor" paper, I had an abstract which could be read out loud in 24 seconds, and a summary in seven words. The essays in the book do not have abstracts, so I dropped those elements. Here they are: Full Abstract in twenty-four seconds: A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole uses the comic devices of farce and concurrent incongruities to generate its humor. The overarching incongruity of the book is between how Ignatius Reilly sees himself and how the reader sees him. Ignatius s primary personality trait is his selfish immaturity, and he is both trickster and tricked. Toole may have drawn on concepts of the trickster and fool available at the time he wrote the novel from thinkers in psychology, sociology, history, and literary studies. Brief summary in seven words: To understand Toole s Ignatius, read Enid Welsford.

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnote is on target.

Prompt #4: According to Patteson and Sauret, who are the three Ignatiuses?

According to Patteson and Sauret, the three versions of Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces are:

1. Ignatius sees himself as a crusader against corruption.

2. Other characters see him as a selfish buffoon.

3. Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation.

Footnote #1 to this text: In the endnote, I explain that Patteson and Sauret describe three Ignatius's. Here is the endnote: Patteson and Sauret perceptively argue that Ignatius s situation is more complex that a simple contrast. To them, there are three versions of Ignatius in the book. First, he sees himself as a crusader against corruption; second, the other characters see him as a selfish buffoon; however, the third Ignatius has retreated into a world of illusion after a painfully awkward childhood in order to avoid being humiliated by rejection and alienation. Ignatius s outrageously childish behavior insulates the reader from feeling too much pity for him, but this third Ignatius gives the reader some sympathy for him, even as the reader laughs at his humiliations. The second Ignatius is a comic rebuttal of the false facade of the first, but the third explains how Ignatius became the person he is. This third Ignatius creates in the reader sympathy for him and tinges him with tragedy.

Footnote #2 to this text: February 1, 2021 Title: Ignatius as a Person Being Laughed at You could call this the second in my series on "the lack of humor in Confederacy." When I first started doing research on A Confederacy of Dunces, I trudged through all of the Amazon reviews of the book, to see if anyone there had already put forward my ideas about Chaucer's influence on Toole. One of the approximately one thousand reviews argued passionately that Ignatius Reilly was clearly a person with a mental illness. To that reviewer, the book was an extended exercise in laughing at a mentally ill person and his misfortune. Shame on all of us. This perspective is similar to Patteson and Sauret's third Ignatius, as I described in my blog entry of September 1, 2020.

Comment: The answer is accurate and the footnotes are on target.

Confederacy of Dunces and Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Although I have used this blog to discuss topics beyond the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy) by John Kennedy Toole, I like to post at least one entry each year on that topic. Here is this year's entry.

During 2018, I started adding entries to this blog related to Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which might be defined as the application of evolutionary psychology to literary analysis. I have been tinkering with both the theory and practice of such criticism. An example might be my entry from August, 2019. In that entry, I compared the theory of Freudian repression with the theory of Multilevel Selection. I used as an example the novel Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

It has occurred to me that if I apply ELC to any novel, I should at least subject Toole's Confederacy to this analytical approach. Below is my attempt at an ELC study of Confederacy. One conclusion from this exercise: evolutionary literary criticism does not supersede or negate other forms of literary criticism. This analysis does not replace my other articles about this novel.

General Observations

As I said in my "Dialectic" paper (citations below): Confederacy is on its surface a farce about life on the edge of respectability in New Orleans. Its main character, Ignatius Jacques Reilly, is a lazy, haughty, and clumsy thirty-year-old who has pushed his widowed mother, Irene, to the edge of financial ruin and who maintains a correspondence with an eccentric and difficult young woman, Myrna Minkoff, in New York.

As I further argued in "Dialectic", Confederacy directly satirizes both our modern, liberal, consumerist society and Ignatius's version of a Neoplatonic alternative to it. It also indirectly satirizes a more leftist critique of liberal society through Myrna. Because its slapstick lands blows against liberals and leftists, it is sometimes viewed as conservative in its outlook; however, conservatives do not escape its mockery. My claim in "Dialectic" is that the novel rejects both traditional, religious humanism and modern, secular humanism and points toward a synthesis of them.

For a quick list of other characters: Angelo Mancuso is a luckless police officer who tries to arrest Ignatius. Claude Robicaux is a law-abiding, widowed grandfather whom Angelo does arrest. Santa Battaglia, who possesses a ribald attitude and a baritone voice, is Angelo's aunt. Lana Lee is the owner of a tavern in the French Quarter; Burma Jones becomes her black janitor; and Darlene is Lana's B-Girl, who flirts with customers to encourage them to buy drinks. Gus Levy is the owner of a failing manufacturing company where Ignatius gets a job. Mrs. Levy is Gus's controlling wife. Dorian Green is a gay man who lives in the French Quarter and shares a building with a group of tough lesbians. Ignatius teams up with Dorian later in the book to start what Ignatius thinks is a political party, but which Dorian knows is just a carnival party.

In classic New Comedy style (Menander, Terence), Ignatius, Lana Lee, and Mrs. Levy are blocking characters who prevent the other characters from fully assuming proper roles within the society. Ignatius is the bumbling source of disruptions, disruptions which reorder the social relations, causing the blocking characters to lose status and allowing otherwise blocked characters to gain status. When Ignatius loses status, Irene is freed. When Mrs. Levy loses status, Gus is freed. When Lana is arrested, Darlene and Burma both have new opportunities.

Anti-Feminist Elements

One could argue that the novel is hostile to women's participation in the political and economic order. Two of the three blocking characters, Lana Lee and Mrs. Levy, are women who exercise agency. Lana Lee is a smart business woman who is assertive in her sexuality, but she hates other people and pedals pornography to children. Mrs. Levy is also anti-feminist: her influence over her husband Gus emasculates him and prevents him from engaging with his business, and she becomes a hag when she loses control over him.

Further, Irene, Darlene, Santa, and the almost-anonymous lesbians are not especially positive female characters, either. The farce allows Irene to escape her dependent but domineering son, the third blocking character, and she does gain agency, as symbolized by her bowling shoes. She then plans to marry the older, socially conservative Claude. Darlene is a stereotypic dumb blonde, nurturing but impractical. Santa is a grotesque inversion of feminine qualities, and she advocates child abuse. The lesbians who make a brief appearance are not fully formed characters and are stereotypically negative.

Myrna, the one woman with agency who is not stereotypically negative, is a fool who is easily duped by men. Her progressive ideology, which includes feminism and sexual liberation, is as much of a failure as Ignatius's advocacy for church and monarchy. When Myrna rescues Ignatius, she is again duped. He tricks her into thinking that he has reformed, when he is just looking for a physical escape as the authorities close in. In my paper "Evidence of Influences," I argue that Toole was strongly influenced by Chaucer. He may have shared Chaucer's negative attitude toward women.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Elsewhere, I have argued that there three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism. First (ELC1), one can discuss elements of a literary work that relate directly to the reproductive fitness of the characters. That can relate to both their individual fitness (don't get eaten by the alligator) and group fitness (fight bravely in battle so that your group prevails over its opponents). Second (ELC2), one can discuss the ways in which the literary work shows that storytelling itself is an adaptive behavior. This "storytelling as adaptive" perspective relates to the philosophical framework of viewing the world as a social construct. This version also connects to whether the text succeeds as literature. Third (ELC3), one can discuss ways in which valuing a storytelling tradition can signal membership in a social group, which benefits the reader's group identity. This version of evolutionary literary criticism sees the story as an object within an adaptive context. This version relates to reception theory.

ELC1: So how can the major themes of the book demonstrate valid behavioral strategies within evolutionary psychology? Or how do the common themes within its genre do so?

As I argued in my book chapter "Comic Mechanisms" (citation below) humor often functions socially as a mechanism within a social group for lowering the status of an individual or subgroup, or of doing the same for members of an out-group. Laughing at a fellow group member lowers that person's standing within the group without resorting to violence. A higher-status person might use self-deprecating humor to deflect potential jealousy or in-group fighting. Mocking a social group's rivals might build courage to challenge them. Gallows humor helps lessen the debilitating dread of danger.

Confederacy is a farce about life on the edge of respectability. People of a social class that is respected by the authorities are in general much more likely to survive than those living outside and below such a social class. I believe that that is why Romeo is so desperate when he is banished in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: he is about to become a nobody in a society where nobodies are disposable. In the novel Tom Sawyer, the town boys romanticize about Huck Finn's carefree life, but a real-life Huck would have struggled to survive in a way that a real-life Tom would not.

In this novel, Irene spends her insurance money to give Ignatius a university education. Such an action is a rational parental investment in the fitness of her child. Ignatius for his part has a Romantic contempt for working hard to earn money. He portrays himself as belonging to a social class above that of respectable but hard-working people. The narrator and others show that he is instead the recipient of slapstick humiliations and is beneath respectability. Part of the value system of the city of New Orleans is to idealize the upper class and their leisure, but carnival celebrates comic inversions of the social order as well.

Confederacy features many inversions of the heroic or romantic stereotype. Ignatius is not sexually assertive, while Myrna is. Their behaviors violate Buss's Sexual Strategies Theory to comic effect (citation below). Ignatius is neither a dad nor a cad; instead, he is lazy, clumsy, and rude. However, I have commented that Ignatius's bragging letters to Myrna can be seen as a clumsy courtship display (see my blog entry from March, 2024, cited below). He may be unwittingly courting her while denying to himself that he is doing so.

Ignatius does take on the role of a trickster, though. A trickster is a saboteur. He disrupts the normal social arrangements, often trying to take advantage of others. If the current social order is unjust, a disruption might open up the possibility to improve it. If the result of the trickster's actions is an improved social group, then the trickster acts as an altruistic punisher, punishing those who had abused their social status. In this way, the otherwise comically loathsome Ignatius can be seen as heroic.

The climax of the farcical plot causes the individual fitness of several of the novel's characters to improve. Angelo catches Lana Lee's pornography ring and is promoted. The promotion might mean that his children might have better prospects, assuming that he can continue to succeed. Likewise, the denouement allows Gus to lower his wife's domineering status and rejuvenate his business. If Gus succeeds in turning his business around, and if Burma succeeds in working for him, then their life prospects both may improve. Irene might become happy with Claude and his children and grandchildren.

For his part, Ignatius escapes the psychiatric hospital by tricking Myrna. Readers not doubt cheer for him as Myrna drives him away from New Orleans to new adventures in New York.

ELC2: ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives.

The existence of Ignatius Reilly is wrapped up in stories about him. Patteson and Sauret argue that there are three Ignatius Reillys in the book (citation below). The first is the crusader against corruption. This is the story Ignatius tells to others. The second Ignatius is a selfish buffoon. That is how others, including the narrator, see him. The third Ignatius is a sensitive soul who has retreated into a world of illusion after a painful childhood. That world of illusion is a Neverland he occupies.

The first Ignatius claims to be writing a intellectual critique of modern society, but the narrator shows that the second Ignatius writes infantile texts. The first Ignatius claims that he is protecting his mother, but the narrator shows that the second Ignatius is exploiting her and manipulating her so that he doesn't have to leave home.

Ignatius loves the world of the movies, but he also loves to disparage them. The first Ignatius decries the filth of the movies, but the second happily wallows in them as he hurls insults at the screen. The third Ignatius feels safe inside the world of the dark theater.

Ignatius does fool some of the people some of the time. He writes a letter pretending to be Gus Levy which triggers threats of a lawsuit. Then he claims that an addled elderly co-worker, Miss Trixie, has written the letter. She realizes that Ignatius is helping her to retire, so she falsely confesses to writing it. Gus uses that confession both to get out of the lawsuit and to confront his wife.

Ignatius himself is fooled. He sees a pornographic picture of Lana hiding her face behind his beloved Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. He imagines that she is a beautiful Boethian scholar whom he can rescue. Burma Jones convinces him to show up at a striptease show where Ignatius unleashes chaos.

Myrna is tricked also. More than one young man seduces her by telling her stories she wants to hear. One gives her literature that she thinks is radically leftist. It turns out to have been written by the Ku Klux Klan. At the end of the book, she shows up at Ignatius's house. Ignatius convinces her that his previous letters about starting a worker's revolt and trying to found a political party for homosexuals were the products of a delusional mind. Only she can save him from his unhealthy home life. In reality, he needs to escape from the men coming to take him to the psychiatric hospital.

Is it a well-told tale? Yes and no. In overall form, it is a well-constructed farce, just as carefully built as the play "Noises Off." The symbolic system of the book, where Ignatius is connected to the astrological god Saturn (as discussed in my paper "Evidence of Influences"), is also well-executed. The book never mentions New Orleans Carnival, but that cultural tradition permeates it. In these ways, it is well-written.

However, the detailed prose is not especially good and, like the protagonist, can be downright clumsy. According to Ken Toole's friend Joel Fletcher, after Toole's suicide, his mother in her grief destroyed all the revisions of the book and published the original first draft because that was the version she preferred. Whether that is true, the writing sometimes feels like a first draft.

Confederacy can be appreciated in different ways by different audiences. For those who like slapstick, it is a rollicking farce. On a different level, it can be read as a parable of different forms of humanism. It can be read as an homage to New Orleans. There is enough gender ambiguity and sexual transgressiveness in the book, it can be read from an LGBTQ+ perspective.

ELC3: ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution.

I am of the opinion that Toole, in his own understanding of literature, belonged to a school of literary theory that had fallen out of favor by the time he was trying to publish his novel. The ideas behind his fiction fit better with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot than with Joseph Heller or William S. Burroughs. Toole's book has been seen as culturally and politically conservative--both when it was published (Miller) and in the Trump era (Bissell). It does critique leftist ideas as articulated by Myrna, putting them on a par with Ignatius's radically conservative ideas. Women do not do well in the book.

Intellectuals also do not do well in the book. Ignatius is the would-be scholar, and he is a fool who writes drivel. Toole's novel has been more popular with the reading public than with the critics, perhaps because of its belittling of academic culture. As I have noted before, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow has generated an order of magnitude more scholarly criticism than Confederacy, but today, Confederacy has an order of magnitude more sales than Gravity's Rainbow, a half-century after each was published.

As I have pointed out before, Toole had a liberal vision of the world, but not a radical or Marxist vision. When Gus realizes that Ignatius has solved his problems, he watches a ship filled with tractors heading for Liberia.

Bibliography

Bissell, Tom. "The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces" New Yorker (5 January 2021).

Buss, David M. and David P. Schmitt. "Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating." Psychological Review, 100 (1993), 204-232. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.100.2.204.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "The Dialectic of American Humanism." Renascence 64, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 201-215. doi: 10.5840/renascence201264242.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "A Theory of Humor (Abridged) and the Comic Mechanisms of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." In Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Edited by Leslie Marsh. (Lexington Books, 2020), pp 1-21. doi: 10.5771/9781498585484-1.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "ELC Theory, Part 1: Freudian Repression versus Multi-Level Selection." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted August 1, 2019. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2019/01/

Leighton, H. Vernon. Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer. Version 2.0. Available on ResearchGate. Dated: July 1, 2021.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Ignatius and Jay Gatsby." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted March 1, 2024. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2024/03/

Miller, Keith D. "The Conservative Vision of John Kennedy Toole." Conference of College Teachers of English Proceedings 48 (1983): 30-34.

Patteson, Richard F., and Thomas Sauret. "The Consolation of Illusion: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces." Texas Review 4, no. 1-2, (1983): 77-87.