Scene II: The Dictionary Experiment

The following morning, Professor Quillibrace entered the reading room to find Mr Blottisham hunched triumphantly over a stack of papers.

Miss Elowen Stray looked up with a mixture of amusement and concern.

“Good morning, Professor.”

Quillibrace adjusted his spectacles.

“I sense,” he said calmly, “that Mr Blottisham has been conducting research.”

Blottisham beamed.

“I have.”

Quillibrace glanced at the papers.

“Political questionnaires?”

“Yes.”

“And the subject of this experiment?”

Blottisham proudly held up a thick volume.

“A dictionary.”

Elowen pressed her lips together to suppress a smile.

Quillibrace examined the book with interest.

“And how,” he asked, “did you administer the test?”

“Very straightforward,” said Blottisham. “Whenever the questionnaire asked a question, I looked up the relevant words in the dictionary and recorded the most appropriate definition.”

“I see.”

“And then I plotted the results on the political compass.”

Quillibrace waited patiently.

“Well?” Elowen asked.

Blottisham tapped the chart.

“Slightly left of centre.”

Quillibrace nodded gravely.

“Fascinating.”

“You see!” Blottisham said. “Even the dictionary leans left.”

Elowen finally burst into laughter.

Blottisham frowned.

“What?”

Quillibrace folded his hands.

“My dear Blottisham,” he said, “you have conducted a remarkably faithful simulation of the methodology.”

Blottisham blinked.

“I have?”

“Yes.”

“In what sense?”

“You have taken a system designed to organise linguistic patterns…”

“Yes?”

“…and treated its outputs as evidence of political belief.”

Blottisham slowly lowered the dictionary.

“Oh.”

Elowen leaned forward.

“So the experiment demonstrates something rather different.”

“What?”

Quillibrace gestured gently toward the chart.

“That the test measures the structure of the questionnaire and the linguistic material used to answer it.”

Blottisham stared at the results again.

“So the dictionary doesn’t have an ideology.”

“Correct.”

“And the language model doesn’t either.”

“Correct.”

Blottisham sighed.

“That’s much less exciting.”

Quillibrace smiled faintly.

“On the contrary. It is considerably more interesting.”