Boris Johnson launched some words out into the world the other week. The bulk of them we can ignore, but there was one line that got widespread attention. “If [the Chequers proposal for a Brexit deal] were adopted,” he grumbled, “it would mean that for the first time, since 1066, our leaders were deliberately acquiescing in foreign rule.”
Some people took issue with this, including Anoosh Chakelian in the New Statesman, who said that Johnson “appears to have forgotten the Glorious Revolution, when the Dutch king William of Orange was invited by English nobles in 1688 to invade and overthrow James II”.
A large online debate then broke out, in which historians suggested that the Glorious Revolution didn’t count as “foreign rule” because William “slotted in to the existing English constitutional settlement” and “ruled as an English king, not as a Dutch overlord”.
This all sounds like a serious argument, doesn’t it? But there’s something worth noting. No one actually disagrees about anything. Everyone agrees that William was asked to invade by English nobles; that he arrived with an army; that he overthrew James II; and that he became King William III of England and King William II of Scotland, ruling from London, rather than remaining a Dutch king and ruling by proxy through a viceroy.
The entire argument is over whether that set of facts should be included in the definition of the term “foreign rule” or not. If I define it to mean “rule by a foreign person”, it probably does; if I define it to mean “rule by a foreign country”, it probably doesn’t.
The AI theorist and prolific blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky made this point a decade or so ago. If two people are arguing over whether a tree falling in the forest makes as sound if no one hears it, what are they actually arguing about? One is saying: “Every time I’ve listened to a tree fall, it makes a sound. It still makes pressure waves in the air, that’s sound.” The other says: “But no one hears it. No one experiences the sensation of hearing something. That’s what sound is, so there’s no sound.”
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