Meta and Meta*

A fun game to play while reading is verbal tics, in which one attempts to identify and list the idiosyncrasies of the author's style. Is he in love with the first person? Unable to resist the parenthetic remark? Wedded to the footnote? Or obsessed with rhetorical questions?

Sometimes, the task is embarrassingly easy, and one has to wonder whether the repetition is deliberate. A recent example of this is can be found in Rebecca Goldstein's memorable book on Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness. In a scathing review in the LRB, Solomon Feferman points to Goldstein's misuse of "metamathematics" to mean philosophy of mathematics (not the mathematics of formal systems), as part of a more general linguistic quirk. Among the best examples of its expression are these:

metaquestion, metaconviction, metaimplications, metaresult, metalight, metaview,

and, best of all,

metaovertones.

Such extremes of self-parody cannot be accidental. Nor can Goldstein's cute description of the incompleteness theorems as "prolix" – speaking to questions about logic, arithmetic, philosophy, and the mind – and later as "loquacious", "verbose", and even "gabby".

I hesitate to say what is going on in Goldstein's book, but presumably part of it is a relentless informality – which blurs into carelessness, and thus infuriates Feferman – intended to bring out, by contrast, the distinctive reticence of Gödel himself. The over-excited use of "meta" is precisely "gabby", and (perhaps?) deliberately so. None of this would excuse the errors of fact that Feferman describes. But it makes one sympathetic to the otherwise distracting tics of Goldstein's prose.