Bit of a Stretch

Regular readers -- both of you -- will know that I often enjoy seeing scientific underpinnings for many artistic works. Learning the mathematical relationships of musical notes, seeing how color changes or symmetry or other factors influence what we appreciate in art, and so on are subjects that continue to fascinate me, often well beyond my ability to easily grasp the science involved. Fortunately, there's Tylenol.

But these ideas can be carried too far. Way too far, as The New Republic's William Deresiewicz points out in his review of a book by Michael Suk-Young Chwe that suggests Jane Austen was a modern-day game theorist. "Game Theory" is the name given to a study of strategic decision-making. It models these decisions, usually made by a group of people rather than just one or two, in mathematical terms.

Now, sometimes wildly improbable claims can be backed up by research or at least by coherent logic. Given a set of assumptions that are at least as likely to be true as to be untrue, then this or that judgment or conclusion may be reached and considered plausible. Chwe, however, does nothing of the kind if Deresiewicz is at all accurate in his reading.

Without reading Chwe's book, of course, there's no way to be definitive about his work's quality or lack thereof. But the idea that a woman writing as the 18th century turned into the 19th would be expressing thoughts in a field of study not well-developed until the middle of the 20th century doesn't pass the smell test. The thought that she was a game theorist unawares also has some significant holes -- you don't stumble onto the kind of developed math involved in these theories like you might stumble onto the Pythagorean Theorem.

Another logician, William of Ockham, is associated with what's called the "principle of parsimony," meaning that simpler explanations are more likely to be true than more complex ones, and it's on the proponent of the more complex answer to prove why he or she is right. Applying the principle of parsimony to the question, "Why did Jane Austen write novels?" we find ourselves rejecting the possible answer, "In order to explain a theory that would not be invented for more than 100 years" in favor of the answer, "She liked telling stories and she got paid when she did."

Game, set and match.