Moving Beyond the Boundaries of a Literal Meaning

It's the literal truth, we say, as if that "literal" conveyed an extra measure of authority.

Actually, literal meanings are frequently wrong, and often confusing.

A recent example is the "naked wife" virus that spread rapidly through cyberspace a few months ago. The Department of Energy found it couldn't send out a warning about the virus because its prudish computer software interpreted "naked wife" literally--and censored the warning.

Literal means using a word in its exact sense, but is that how words are meant to be interpreted? As a kid, I used to fear that my mother would literally push me out of the car when she said she'd "drop me off" at a friend's house.

Anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano concludes in his book, "Serving the Word: Literalism in America From the Pulpit to the Bench," that literalism is "a widespread characteristic of American thought," and a dangerous one at that. Literal thinking often leads to intolerance because it insists that that only one meaning can be right--leaving no room for interpretation, ambivalence or ambiguity.

Perhaps surprisingly, literal thinking has caused almost as many problems in science as it has in other realms of life. Consider, for example, the trouble physicists had trying to determine the nature of light when they were stuck with literal interpretations of the terms "wave" and "particle." Light has obvious wave-like properties, and also obvious particle-like properties; but it is clearly literally neither.

In the end, physicists simply had to face the fact that light--like so many other physical phenomena--could not be strictly interpreted as either wave or particle. It required several interpretations, each dependent on context.

In fact, it's striking how often physicists got stuck in ruts because of literal thinking. They spent centuries trying to determine the exact physical properties of the so-called luminiferous ether--an all but undetectable substance that was thought to pervade all space. Taking the ether literally required believing that a substance could be at the same time as elastic as steel and as transparent as air.

In the end, physicists came to the conclusion that the ether didn't exist. But another very similar substance, known as the vacuum, is alive and well and at the center of physics.

Why does the vacuum persist while the ether was banished?