Crosswords and Philosophy
A last from the past.
I’ve got a lot to do as I write this, so here’s a clip from the end of my book On Crosswords, which I’ve been rereading a bit while writing the “1924 in crosswords” material. That’s all queued up now for Thursday through Sunday. Tomorrow: microstic time!
What do crosswords signify to the world?
The answer depends on how you feel about the world. For Marcel Danesi, crosswords are but a temporary relief from the yawning abyss:
The crossword puzzle mania is, in effect, a product of an instinctual need to search out definite, reassuring, small-scale answers to the many questions that life presents. Filling in the little squares with clear-cut answers seems, in its own minuscule way, to negate the existential emptiness that human beings unconsciously feel.[1]
This is perhaps the least fun description of fun I have ever encountered. “Dance, future corpses, dance!” I have a sudden urge to call my family and tell them that I love them.
Hugh Schofield, a British expat in Paris, has a more uplifting view of his own country’s species of crossword, at least:
Cryptic crosswords are civilisation.
Think about it.
Every morning tens of thousands of people, all in their separate homes around the world and, totally unknown to each other, strain their grey matter in the same completely useless exercise: a cerebral labour which requires three things: knowledge of an unwritten, evolving and highly recondite book of rules, a grounding in the classics of English literature and an abiding love of the language.
Most of Schofield’s praise applies equally well to American puzzles, though he might sniff to think so. However, his claims to “civilisation” would be stronger if he didn’t openly fantasize about humiliating his French crossword-solver companion by showing him how much more confusing—that is to say, better—the British clues are than the French.[2]
Susan Haack, one of the world’s most renowned living philosophers, sees in the crossword not an escape from the world or a blueprint for a better world, but a map of the world as it exists now. She used an elaborate crossword simile to outline her early contributions to epistemology, the science of knowing things.
The best model of those standards is not, as much recent epistemology has assumed, a mathematical proof, but a crossword puzzle. The clues are the analogue of experiential evidence, already-completed entries the analogue of background information. How reasonable an entry in a crossword is depends on how well it is supported by the clue and by any other already-completed intersecting entries; how reasonable, independently of the entry in question, those other entries are; and how much of the crossword has been completed. An empirical proposition is more or less warranted depending on how well it is supported by experiential evidence and background beliefs; how secure the relevant background beliefs are, independently of the proposition in question; and how much of the relevant evidence the evidence includes. [3]
Haack’s “foundherentist” philosophy combines a foundation of concrete knowledge, represented by clues, and coherent consistency between facts represented by the crossings of words in the grid.
Heady stuff. You might find it an extra thrill to think of the humble crossword as a model for knowledge itself. Or you might shrink from such responsibility, and prefer to think of the grid as no more than simple, harmless entertainment. Even if you don’t agree with Danesi that humans feel fundamentally empty, most of us would admit we need our escapes.
Is crosswording just an escape, or is it more?
Should you word nerds—we word nerds—solve the crossword as a short break from the world’s chaos, or should we solve it to bring us closer to the world’s underlying order?
And, damn it, is using Google cheating?
Some questions have no perfect answers. Some squares will always remain unfilled. But when asked the last question, Will Shortz often quotes Will Weng. [4] Even though Weng died before Google was born, his perspective still has relevance to the question. It may have some relevance to the other questions, too:
“It’s your puzzle.
Solve it any way you want!”
[1] Marcel Danesi, The Puzzle Instinct, 2004.
[2] Hugh Schofeld, “Why cryptic crosswords are civilisation,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4172455.stm, January 15, 2005.
[3] Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays, 2000.
[4] Will Shortz, The New York Times Daily Crossword Puzzles, Volume 61, 2002.