Misspeaking and Misthinking

The "I misspoke" excuse--currently being deployed by Alberto Fernandez--is common in politics. It's one of those claims that tends to provoke eye-rolling because it so often really translates as "HOLY SH*T did I ever f*ck up--and I got called on the carpet for it, AND HOW."

So it tends to be kind of a joke. Fernandez's case is a great example because it stretches the limits of credulity, and of the "misstatement" defense. There are, after all, limits to how big the gap can be between what you actually said and what you claim you meant to say. I can't, for example, say that you are a flaming fascist and then say that I misspoke, having meant to say that you are a sweetheart.

(My all-time favorite such defense is the "taken-out-of-context" defense. It's astounding how often this simple trick works. People don't seem to be capable of recognizing that some claims are just so patently false or otherwise defective that no fiddling with the context will save them. "Ignorance is strength" can't be salvaged by an appeal to context...unless of course you claim to have said it in the following context: "..... is false.")

In case you care--not that you should--I actually think that there is a phenomoenon related to misspeaking, that it happens all the time, and that we tend to fail to recognize it for what it is and identify it as such. We might call this phenomenon "misthinking."

People often mistakenly think that our ideas are completely worked out before we express them. But they often actually get worked out in the process of being expressed. Sometimes, that is, our thoughts don't come before our words--rather, they come into existence simultaneously. Often this turns out fine. But often such thoughts come out before they're ready. Half-baked. What we need is a convenient and reasonably face-saving way to call an intellectual/verbal do-over. I mean, it's not like this is illegal or anything, it's just that it's way less common than it should be. People should, I'd guess, expect to have to call such do-overs many times per day. We do, in fact, sometimes say that some assertion or other "didn't come out right," but that--to my ear--tends to suggest that the problem is one of tone rather than content.

Perhaps such do-overs aren't institutionalized because such quasi-slips-of-the-tongue are taken to be decent evidence of the speaker's actual thoughts. Dunno. That's just a conjecture.

But if we did allow frequent do-overs of this kind, we'd avoid a certain kind of problem. Currently, people often say things they ought to take back and revise...but once the thought is out there, they feel obligated to defend it--even if it takes them down the road to some conclusion they don't think they ought to defend. Then, as Emerson notes, we end up going on record in a certain way...others chide us if we try to revise our position...and we end up doggedly and reflexively defending something we'd never have chosen to defend under more nearly ideal conditions. And dialog and inquiry get bogged down as a result.

Well, anyway, none of this is going to help out Fernandez. He screwed up big time by speaking the truth that everybody's thinking about. The truth is too obvious and salient, and the administration has spent too long denying it for anyone to grant a do-over in this case. We're all thinking it, even everyone in the administration has to be thinking it by now...Fernandez is just the first one of them to say it. (The first one currently in the administration to say it, that is.) It's as if we were all standing around the crib thinking my god what an ugly baby...and then one of us blurts it out. No way anybody's going to buy the claim that it was a simple misstatement. Nor even that it was a misthinkment. Or whatever.

So there you go. That's all I got.