What are we to do about this? A friend of mine who tutors high school students recently consulted AI (an acronym we now seem to be accepting as a proper noun) about the correct use of pronouns in a sentence like this: He calls her more often than me. The word than, he was told, can be both a conjunction or a preposition, that in formal writing the nominative case may be used, and that the objective case is usually accepted in informal writing and speech. How immediately practicable that explanation was to my friend’s student I do not know, but it constitutes such a jumble of information (albeit presented in bullet points) that I find it hard to believe any foundation of English grammar was set firm in the student’s mind or memory.
This is a problem for us as AI ascends its throne of learning and scholarship. In the antediluvian world of a few years or decades ago, learning and scholarship were slow preoccupations; it took time and patience and perseverance to find and coordinate facts. And in—or perhaps even because of—that leisurely pace (interestingly enough, the words scholar and school derive from the classical Greek word for leisure), students and thinkers could assimilate themselves to the knowledge they were gathering and weaving piece by piece into a context, a mental fabric which could both absorb and reflect the light of insight. It took time, in other words, to see the big picture, to understand how and to what purpose one fact is connected to another. Seeing the relationship of facts produces in the end a system of organized knowledge, what is otherwise known as a science.
And that is my complaint with the AI explanation above about the use of pronouns. The information is not technically incorrect, but it has not been presented—and we do not feel it as—a meaningful share of a whole, of something comprehended by someone else as part of an entirety and which is now being shared with us as such. It all has the thud of striking a piece of solid wood: there is none of that resonance that we humans find so attractive in the things we encounter because we sense an entire meaning. It is correct that the term than has uses both as a conjunction or a preposition, but it is also correct that the sentence in question is indisputably a comparison and that in comparisons than is a conjunction.
That certainty, along with the observation that what turns formal writing into casual writing or speech is the omission of words which are expected to be supplied by the reader or listener (the rhetorical figure called ellipsis), is not observed by the instantaneous, non-human AI computations at all. This would have precluded the sudden introduction of nominative and objective cases (case is a correlate of prepositions, not conjunctions), and from there a teacher with heart and mind would just need to explain that, because conjunctions introduce clauses and we find no verb after the word me, this pronoun must be working as part of an unseen, that is to say elliptical, clause where that objective case would be needed: He calls her more often than he calls me. To simply conclude the explanation by referring to the difference between how we write and speak formally or informally is not to explain at all why this same example sentence could not mean He calls her more often than I call her.
And it’s right there why facts and their coordination matter. The passion for hard facts can go too far, of course, but when we put our trust in the delivery of facts alone, we can be left with fragments that are important-sounding but misplaced or irrelevant. This was a point the celebrated philosopher and educator Susanne Langer warned about (in her Philosophy in a New Key, 1942), that in the absence of weaving facts into a whole, “that mighty and terrible person, the Modern Man” will uncritically give himself over to “the passion for news—news of any sort, if only it purports to be so; which,” Langer concludes with a presciently too familiar observation, “paradoxically enough, makes us peculiarly easy victims to propaganda.” Facts matter, and ultimately so in their connection and context.
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