Political epistemics
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Several people have asked me about how the various U.S. presidential candidates use various indicators of epistemic status. It's easy to calculate word frequencies as a proxy, so here are some numbers from this season's debates. I've tallied feel words (feel, feels, felt, feeling, feelings), think words (think, thinks, thought, thoughts, thinking), and believe words (believe, believes, believed, belief, beliefs). And I've included Ted Cruz and John Kasich, although they're no longer viable candidates:
It seems that everyone does more thinking than feeling or believing; and overall, the Democratic candidates are doing (or at least talking about) more thinking than the Republicans are. Here are the numbers — as usual, the first of each pair of numbers is the count, and the second one (in parentheses) is the frequency per million words:
| feel(s)+felt+feeling(s) | think(s)+thought(s)+thinking | believe(s)+believed+belief(s) | |
| CLINTON | 17 (298) | 359 (6299) | 83 (1456) |
| CRUZ | 3 (92) | 59 (1807) | 33 (1011) |
| KASICH | 4 (139) | 102 (3546) | 51 (1773) |
| SANDERS | 7 (138) | 278 (7463) | 11 (217) |
| TRUMP | 17 (414) | 181 (4410) | 52 (1267) |
Although I've included all the various wordforms in each word family, this is mostly about the bare verbs:
| Sanders | Clinton | Trump | Cruz | Kasich | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| think | 260 | 347 | 162 | 51 | 96 |
| thinks | 5 | 0 | 2 | 5 | 0 |
| thought | 10 | 7 | 8 | 3 | 5 |
| thoughts | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| thinking | 3 | 5 | 9 | 0 | 1 |
And not all of the word instances are used to express the epistemic status of a proposition, but most of them are. Thus of Bernie Sanders' 260 instances of think, 205 come from "I think", and 25 more come from things like "I don't think", "I certainly think", etc. And for Ted Cruz, 45 of his 51 instances of think are from similar contexts.
It seems plausible that Ted Cruz's overall low rate of think-word usage reflects training as a debater or as a lawyer to make statements without epistemic qualification. This may work with judges and juries, but apparently it's not as effective with voters.
Ran Ari-Gur said,
May 6, 2016 @ 9:08 pm
OT: Seeing the title "Political epistemics", I half-expected something about epistemic uses of political words like vote or veto. (Which may sound unlikely, but Google finds e.g. "I vote that this was a mass delusion and never actually occurred" [link].)