Idea Management

A perspective on analyzing marketing data

Provability is a weaker notion than truth. - Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

You may be familiar with one or each of these great minds (Gödel, Escher, Bach or Hofstadter). I discovered the book while wandering through the philosophy section at a Border’s Bookstore about 10 years ago. The book does a superb job of explaining the meaning and significance of mathematician Kurt Gödel’s controversial (for it’s time) incompleteness theorem which demonstrated the incompleteness of Principia Mathematica. Hofstadter weaves Gödel’s principals with similar examples in music (Johann Sebastian Back), art (M.C. Escher), language and logic to show we use self-reference to ‘prove’ ideas that can’t be proven. As Wikipedia currently describes the book:

Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of “meaningless” elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of “meaning” itself.

In response to confusion over the book’s theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

The most eye-opening concept I pulled early from the book was that “provability was a weaker notion than truth.” In other words, for every proof that claims to be consistent, there is a self-referential truth that needs to be acknowledged. As Gödel’s theorem postulates:

Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory.

So how does this apply to the world of advertising and marketing? Simply this: there is an element of truth to creativity and innovation that exists beyond the “provability” of statistics and analysis. We often prove the success of our subjective strategies through objective analytic measurements. But as any political campaign can remind us, those numbers can be stretched, manipulated and structured to fit almost any agenda or interpretation.

And while those analytics are important, we have to weigh them against the objectives and presuppositions that we originally started with. We also have to recognize the truths that exist just outside of the numbers.