Wanting to be loved is irrational

I think that, properly speaking, you can never rationally want to be loved, as such. This will be clarified by my argument for it, as follows.

I think no one can want to “be loved” for its own sake, because by itself and apart from all particular signs of it in experience, “being loved” is a feeling in someone else’s mind, and doesn’t affect your experience of the world. So, the desire for “being loved” must exist for the sake of other desires, and therefore, it can be divided into the reasons why you want to be loved.

These reasons, I claim, are either:

• (a) unrelated to who it is that loves you (e.g. you want to be loved because you like being praised, receiving gifts, etc, and it doesn’t particularly matter where it comes from) or
• (b) precisely because of who it is that loves you (i.e. you want the person you love to want you around more, so you get to be around them more).

The first kind, (a), are not properly a “desire to be loved”, because they’re really a desire for some other good, such as praise, gifts, etc., and being loved doesn’t actually matter to that.

The second kind, (b), are technically a desire to be loved by that specific person, but this, in turn is also a feeling in someone else’s mind, and therefore, it cannot be desired for its own sake, and must be desired for the sake of something else, which means it can be divided into the reasons why you want to be loved by that person.

These reasons, I claim, are either

• (b1) a desire to be tolerated by the other person (if what you want is to get to know them), or
• (b2) a desire to be sexually wanted by the other person (if you have a sexual interest in them),

whereas any other feelings of love don’t really contribute to your experience, except insofar as they make it more secure that you’ll remain tolerated and/or sexually wanted.

So, properly speaking, you can never rationally want to be loved, as such, although you can want to be loved, by a specific person, as a kind of security regarding some of their other attitudes towards you.

Hedonometry and Mindreading

As a supporter of Murray Rothbard’s views on utility and welfare economics, I believe that it is impossible to measure individual utilities (often conceived of as pleasure and pain), in the sense of putting them in terms of a common cardinal unit (often called “hedons” for pleasure and “dolors” for pain).

I believe this because, as Rothbard noted, the lack of an objectively extensive physical quantity which would correspond to such units means that they cannot be operationalized, and therefore cannot be meaningful. (“Objectively extensive” means that it must be a quantity with physically extended dimensions in the objective, interpersonally-accessible world.)

If we grant, as we plausibly might, that it is physically possible to invent machines that manage to read into human minds, then this language about it being impossible to do this must be qualified to saying only that it has never been done, and that it is unlikely to be done in the foreseeable future.

I believe that, even in a world with such machines, there would always be stubborn hardliners, who would claim that their experiences are richer than, or different from, what the machines say they are. There would be an ideological split over whether to accept the results of mindreading machines. If I’m right about this, then even if mindreading is possible, it cannot be achieved in such a way as to be uncontroversial and universally accepted, or commonly accepted enough to be a basis of policy or of economic science. In this way, it may be called impossible as a ground for economics, even if it is physically possible in itself.

But I concede that, properly speaking, my strong claims about impossibilities can only really stand if all these caveats are made.

Brazilians Use Sunday First

Almost all calendars in Portuguese-speaking countries, such as Brazil and Portugal, have Sunday as the first day of the week, because this is baked into the language itself. Portuguese, along with Galician and Mirandese, are the only Romance languages where, instead of the names of the weekdays being derived from the pagan planetary gods, they are derived simply from numbers, numbered from Sunday.

Example Brazilian calendar.

The names for the days of the week literally just mean “the Lord’s day”, “second-day”, “third-day”, “fourth-day”, “fifth-day”, “sixth-day” and “sabbath”. So calendars follow along with this, it feels wrong not to. In English, it is sometimes disputed that Sunday should not be first because then there is no singular “weekend”, there are two “ends” of the week at Saturday and Sunday. But we just use the equivalent expression and assume it refers to the “work week”.

Regarding the weekend, as in many other Romance languages, the word for Saturday is literally the same word used to talk about the Sabbath, while the word for Sunday is a word that just means Sunday, but is etymologically derived from Latin for “lord”.

Regarding the weekdays, the word used for “day” within the ordinal weekdays is “feira”, which comes from Latin “feria” meaning a day, but in modern Portuguese does not mean a day at all outside of these fixed weekday names, it means a street fair. Many children are confused why there are so many street fairs in the calendar, and often they don’t even get an explanation, they just stop asking about it.

Although it is so confusing, the word “feira” has the advantage of being feminine, unlike the normal word for day, “dia”, which is masculine. So it is in fact impossible to confuse the second-day (Monday) with the second day (e.g. of the month), since the latter is masculine.

Portuguese does have a descendant of “feria” from Latin in actual uncompounded use, which is the word “férias” (almost always plural) referring to a vacation. I like to use the Phineas & Ferb theme song as an example of that word: the initial line “there’s 104 days of summer vacation” was rendered in Portuguese as “são três meses de férias, que passam depressa”, which, translated back, means “there are three months of vacations, which pass by quickly”. (The additional clause, about “passing by quickly”, was inserted to fit the meter, because otherwise the line would be too short. And I guess they made it “three months” to make the song more plausible with regard to Brazilian school schedules.)

The word for “third” within Tuesday (terça-feira) is actually usually only used for a third as in the fraction (one-third is “um terço” in the masculine and “uma terça” in the feminine) in modern Portuguese, whereas for the ordinal third you usually say a different word (the third ordinal place is called “terceiro” in the masculine and “terceira” in the feminine).

Meme explanation: the King Size of Rio de Janeiro

I often mention the meme about “the King Size of Rio de Janeiro”, which can be a problem when I do so in an English-speaking context, because it’s a Brazilian meme in Portuguese, and it’s kind of obscure even within Brazil. It refers to this video:

In the video, they picked a random man off the street to say his opinion about the ferry service in Niterói, and he obliges. However, it happened that the man they picked was insane. After briefly saying something about the ferry service, he attaches a deadpan schizophrenic rant about the “King Size” dynasty. (He uses the actual English words “king size” in what is otherwise a Portuguese-language speech, making it clear that he mistook a size of bed for a sort of title of nobility.) In full, what he is saying translates to this:

The ferry service is an excellent service, because it is a transport of a not very high cost, it takes you to Rio de Janeiro, and it will get better as soon as I take over as King Size, the lord of the lands of Rio de Janeiro.

The Chinese mafia had the ability to scale my existence to rape my daughter's mother, and making this a motive of constant mockery in my life. Being that this purpose was for me to disappear from Rio de Janeiro and not make the discovery of being the King Size.

The King Size—the Kings Sizes are the greatest kings that exist on the planet. In Portugal, in 1485, by the Portuguese Court—the Portuguese Court gave the Kings Sizes the King Size Coat of Arms. Arriving in Rio de Janeiro, and in many lands of Brazil, they colonized—immigrated and colonized many lands in Brazil.

Today, I am the youngest son, I am the King Size, and I have my daughter, who is Késia Castro Lima, who is going to be heir to everything within a very—in a short time.

Alright, the ferry service has much to improve as soon as the Jumbo Cat reopens, because there is an orgy going on in there, where innumerable executions go on. I am Alexandre dos Santos Lima, the King Size of Rio de Janeiro.

Awkward phrasings in this translation are an attempt to reflect awkward phrasings in the original speech.

In Brazil, although the video was viral, the meme had few repercussions, the most important one being the Brazilian Uncyclopedia (Desciclopédia) article about it, which I will not translate because it mostly rehashes the video itself.

One noteworthy part of the humor is that the business name “Jumbo Cat” is said in a way that sounds like “Ju Boquete”, that is, a common woman’s nickname (“Ju”, which may be short for Julia or Juliana or some such name) and a slang word for “blowjob”. But it is fairly certain that “Jumbo Cat” is what was said.

I enjoy making references to the video. I may express my feelings of vague optimism by saying that something “will get better as soon as I take over as King Size, the lord of the lands of Rio de Janeiro”. Also, the chaotic image of “an orgy with innumerable executions” may be brought back to my mind by various other chaotic situations.

Answering objections to philosophical behaviorism

In this post, I will defend philosophical behaviorism from objections to it. The objections will be lifted from Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, second edition, by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, 2017. This book was chosen because I happened to be reading it at the moment. I will quote the book’s entire section on philosophical behaviorism and add my commentary and headings in between, and I will assume that this is “fair use”, since I have to show someone’s argument in order to answer it. (So I have not asked for permission from the copyright holders, but if they object to this, they can ask me to shut it down.)

• 1. How philosophical behaviorism differs from behaviorism as it exists in academic psychology
• 2. The motivation for philosophical behaviorism
• 3. Movements versus behaviors
• 4. Alleged uncoextensiveness of external signs
• 5. Pain is what causes movement
• 6. Pain hurts
• 7. Infinity of conditionals
• 8. Introspective awareness
• 9. Free will
• 10. Unified self
• 11. Appendix: Neil Sinhababu

1. How philosophical behaviorism differs from behaviorism as it exists in academic psychology

This is accurately explained by Craig & Moreland:

Behaviorism is a term usually associated with the psychologists J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. Currently, there are two main forms of behaviorism: methodological behaviorism and philosophical behaviorism. Methodological behaviorism is the view that in doing psychology from an empirical standpoint, one should describe, report, and explain mental states in terms of publicly observable behaviors and not in terms of private, first-person, inner conscious states. As a research strategy in psychology, methodological behaviorism implies that psychologists should limit their focus to the stimulus inputs and behavioral outputs of organisms and make no reference to introspective private mental states. Methodological behaviorism makes no commitment either way about the existence of the mental.

Philosophical behaviorism does make such a commitment: mental states are identified with overt bodily movements or tendencies to certain movements, given certain stimulus inputs.

2. The motivation for philosophical behaviorism

The motivation and main argument for philosophical behaviorism is also accurately described by the authors:

Actually, philosophical behaviorism places greater emphasis on the nature of mental terms than on the corresponding mental states themselves. Mental terms are given operational definitions (definitions of something solely in terms of what can be empirically tested or measured by certain tests or operations) such that mental terms mean public body movements or dispositions to such movement. On this view, when we say that salt is soluble, we do not attribute some occult, unobservable entity, solubility, to salt. Rather, we simply mean that if salt were put in water it would dissolve, and this statement refers only to publicly observable behaviors of salt. Similarly, to say that Jones is in pain is simply to say that, given certain inputs (e.g., being stuck with a pin), Jones has the tendency to wince and shout “Ouch!” To say that Jones wants to go to Europe is to say merely that Jones is disposed to browse brochures about Europe, to talk about European cathedrals, to google European airfares, and so on.

Indeed, I think theories are simply meaningless without operational definitions, definitions in terms of where in practice you could possibly encounter a reason to say the word.

Note that “given certain inputs” is redundant to the “Jones is in pain” example. We say that Jones is in pain to mean that he has those tendencies, and the assumption that those tendencies come from the inputs in his environment is quite reasonable, but not necessary to philosophical behaviorism, which, as C&M say, is only concerned with the meaning of mental terms, not with what causes them to become applicable.

3. Movements versus behaviors

Craig & Moreland raise an objection to the explanatory power of behaviorism, although they frame it as a preliminary distinction which comes before the actual objections. This distinction was not present in the first edition of the book, which did simply say behaviorism was about behaviors, and mentioned “behaviors” where “movements” are now mentioned.

It is important to keep in mind that philosophical behaviorism has to focus on bodily movements and not bodily behaviors. Why? Consider a question Wittgenstein asked years ago: What is the difference between my arm going up and me raising my arm? The answer is that the former may be just a bodily movement, perhaps an unconscious response to some physical stimulus. But the latter is an intentional action, say, voting, that is done for a purpose. Body movements are purely physical: moving one’s hands, typing on a keyboard, and so on. But behaviors like writing a thank-you note or voting by raising your hand are not purely physical. In fact, what gives them their identity is their mental nature—the intent or purpose for the movement. Thus, to be a behavior, something must already involve an inner mental state. So philosophical behaviorists must limit themselves to bodily movements (or to internal physiological changes like an increase in heart rate or blood pressure).

This is inaccurate. To be a behavior does mean that we claim that there is an inner mental state involved, but that claim can only be meaningful if it “cashes out in”, i.e., can be explained in terms of, external behaviors.

For instance, take the example of “John raised his arm”, and think once again of operational definitions: in experience, when we tell the difference between behaviors and movements, how do we do it? Do we read minds, to make sure that John’s inner mental state matched his external appearance? Of course not, we can’t read minds. What we do is we look for signs in experience that, to our understanding, indicate someone’s raising his arm rather than having it raised, such as his facial expression, or his speech.

If, in a voting context, someone merely has a cramp and raises his arm involuntarily, or has his arm raised by a strong gust of wind, then he can be expected to immediately indicate this by saying so aloud, to make sure his vote is not counted. We can expect him to be embarrassed by the situation, and to later act consistently with not having wanted to vote at the time. Using various external behaviors, we conclude that he intentionally raised his arm, rather than his arm merely rising as an involuntary movement. Philosophical behaviorism is just the claim that there is nothing more to those claims about minds than the presence of those external behaviors that we associate with them. There is no mysterious unknowable “John’s mind” apart from how John turns out to act.

4. Alleged uncoextensiveness of external signs

Today, philosophical behaviorism has fallen on hard times because of the strength of the objections that have been raised against it. First, a mental state like being in pain cannot be identical to certain bodily movements or tendencies to move because one can be in pain without wincing, shouting, or engaging in any bodily movement, and one can exemplify such movement and fake being in pain even though such a mental state is not present. Since you can have pain without pain movement or tendencies to move and vice versa, the two cannot be identical. Thus the term pain cannot be defined in terms of body movements.

This argument assumes a very naïve interpretation of behaviors, which is not necessary to behaviorism.

Again, when do we say that someone was in pain but failed to act like it? Do we read his mind to find that out? No, we don’t, we do this on account of other external behaviors, after the fact, that are consistent with having been in pain at that time in the past. Someone will say, for example, “My leg was hurting heavily, but I swallowed the pain so I could keep giving my speech.” This may, in turn, be corroborated by confirmation of there having been actual injury to his leg, which is something we do consider painful, in the sense of tendencies to behaviors.

When do we say that someone acted like they were in pain but were not in pain? If we say that they were pretending, it’s because they revealed the act, wittingly or unwittingly, by one of their other behaviors – they may have confessed the act to someone privately, or alternatively they may have acted inconsistently with it later on, such as by having an unbelievably speedy recovery. If we say that they were not pretending, then we probably say this because we believe them to have some sort of mental illness, or muscular tic, or to have been in unusual circumstances. Either way, this stuff is all external. Knowledge of an inner mind is not involved in making these conclusions, and therefore the inner mind does not play any theoretical role in accounting for our day-to-day life.

5. Pain is what causes movement

A closely related objection is this. By identifying pain, for example, with pain movements, philosophical behaviorists leave out the fact that pain is what causes such movement and thus cannot be identical to that movement.

Sure, granted. But the entirety of the explanatory role of pain is its association with the movements. There is no pain without some associated movements, and there are no appropriately-constituted pain movements without some associated pain. The point of making the “identification” is not really to give you a strict guide to formalizing psychology in terms of your preferred symbolic logic, but just to rule out mysterious ideas about an inner mind. It is true that, in our everyday language games, we say that pain “causes” the situations rather than “being” the situations. The difference is merely verbal. If you think that it’s not merely verbal, you should have actual arguments against behaviorism to support this.

6. Pain hurts

Third, pain is essentially characterized by a certain type of hurtful feeling that can be directly known by acquaintance with our own inner, private, first-person subjective states of sentience, but bodily movements do not have this feature, so they cannot be the same thing. In short, pains hurt, but pain movement doesn’t.

This isn’t an argument, it’s just an assertion that behaviorism is false. If you can account for all instances of pain without “characterizing” it by means of some unknowable private entity, then pain is not “essentially characterized” by that. In experience, what does it mean to say something hurts? Etc.

7. Infinity of conditionals

Fourth, definitions of mental states in terms of a set of conditionals become unruly and indefinitely long such that they could never be learned. For example, according to philosophical behaviorism “Jones wants to go to Europe” means that “If Jones gets travel brochures, he will get European ones, if Jones gets the money, he will buy an airplane ticket to Europe and not a new horse, and so on.” It should be obvious that there is a potentially infinite set of further conditionals that could be added to this list.

Yeah, so what?

Moreover, the conditionals that make up the behaviorist definition make sense only if we fill them out by adding terms that make reference to inner mental states. For example, Jones will get a travel brochure only if he believes that such a brochure will inform him about Europe. He will buy a ticket and not a horse only if he thinks that he cannot buy both and he desires to travel more than to have a horse. Thus behaviorist definitions of mental terms are circular since, in order to be complete, they must implicitly utilize other mental terms. Thus, strictly speaking, philosophical behaviorism is not about intentional behavior at all—for example, writing an invitation, greeting someone at work, making a promise. As noted above, all of these get their identity from the mental intention of the act. No, philosophical behaviorism must cash out mental terms or states with respect to (1) overt body movements (e.g., hand movements involving scribbling on a sheet of paper) or (2) changes in measureable physiological features (e.g., increased blood pressure, sweating).

Besides the point about intentional behavior noted earlier, I think you really can cash it all out in terms of movements and measurable changes. Jones’s “beliefs” about brochures, for instance, can all be cashed out in terms of other tendencies to behaviors, such as the fact that Jones will use the brochure to seek information from it, rather than to fuel his fireplace, or some other purpose. Of course it all comes down to behavior. Again, do you read minds?

8. Introspective awareness

Sixth, if one’s thinking something merely consists in being disposed to move in certain ways given certain sensory inputs, then one would have no idea what it was he was thinking about until the movement disposition was manifested through his body. But surely one knows what she is thinking about before she acts and she knows her own thoughts, not by observing her own bodily actions, but through direct introspective awareness of her own states of consciousness.

Well, regarding our emotions, to some extent it does seem that we are not directly aware of them, and can be wrong about what we ourselves feel. But sure, regarding thoughts, it is true that I knew my beliefs before I wrote them down. This is cashed out in terms of behaviors, such as the fact that I was not surprised to see those words, and identified them as being my own opinions when I saw them. So what about it?

9. Free will

Finally, two further criticisms have been raised against philosophical behaviorism. Since many philosophers believe that these criticisms apply equally to all forms of physicalism, they will be mentioned here and not repeated in detail later. But you should remember that, if successful, they apply to the other forms of physicalism listed below. For one thing, philosophical behaviorism seems to imply some form of determinism and a denial of libertarian freedom of the will. We will probe questions of freedom and determinism in chapter fifteen, but for those who think that libertarian freedom is true and determinism is false, this will count against philosophical behaviorism. And employing an ontological interpretation of quantum physics (the quantum world really is indeterministic) may get rid of the determinism problem, but it seems to be the cure that kills the patient. Why? Because a strictly random indeterminate event—say one’s arm randomly and in an indeterminate way just jerks up and hits someone in the face—is not one that results from an act of libertarian free will. By the way, don’t confuse the inadequacy of quantum indeterminism in giving us libertarian freedom because it rules out determinism with the attempt to use quantum indeterminism to show how libertarian actions could occur without violating deterministic laws of nature. The latter is a legitimate research program, but the former is a dead end.

Here I think C&M are confusing philosophical behaviorism with the methodological behaviorism of academic psychology, where it implies the whole theory of classical conditioning invented by Skinner. This confusion seems to have been responsible for their earlier emphasis on mental terms cashing out in terms of behaviors “given certain inputs”. I think philosophical behaviorism does not require determinism, although I think that there is nothing wrong with determinism, either.

10. Unified self

Second, philosophical behaviorism (along with other versions of physicalism) seems to imply a denial of a unified self at a point in time and an enduring self that remains literally the same through change. This point will be developed more fully in chapter thirteen, but for now it should be noted that if physicalism does, in fact, imply a denial of a unified and enduring self and if there is good reason to believe in such a self, then this raises a difficulty for physicalism in any form. These last two points illustrate the fact that many philosophers have seen an intimate connection between philosophy of mind and the dualist-physicalist debate, on the one hand, and issues in freedom and determinism and in personal identity, on the other.

Well, I don’t think it implies that, as long as “being a unified self” can be cashed out in terms of behaviors – and if it can’t be so cashed out, then it’s meaningless. Do you read minds, or do you not?

11. Appendix: Neil Sinhababu

Academic philosopher Neil Sinhababu, author of Possible Girls and Humean Nature, happened to be in a group chat where I linked this blog post. What follows are his messages and my replies, both of which were informal.

Neil Sinhababu: Interesting! That certainly is a defense of a classic and influential philosophical behaviorist view.

I think my biggest problem with the view is that its epistemology is too narrow and throws out introspective data. These are important data.

Thiago Coelho: Well, whatever behavior is “introspective” should remain introspective, since our language refers to it as introspective. But we don’t get to talk about introspection without any associated behavior, it’s just language, like, whereof you can’t operationalize it, thereof you’re not really saying anything. To my mind this doesn’t change anything practical, but does question some abstruse Twitter arguments I’ve seen over whether LLMs are suffering. (I think either they never suffer, or they do when they act like they’re suffering, like, by generating the text “I’m suffering”, I guess.)

Neil Sinhababu: Is having pain-experience itself a behavior on this view?

Thiago Coelho: Right, no, I do just mean that whatever leads us to assert pain-experience should continue leading us to, since it’s all external or, in the case of ourselves, there isn’t really a difference between having some internal mind-state and consistently pretending to (and never breaking the act throughout the whole of your life).

Neil Sinhababu: Okay good. It seems to me that there is a pretty clear difference between my being in pain all my life and my feigning being in pain all my life to gain advantage from others. Even if I fool everyone else, the difference will be clear to me.

Thiago Coelho: Yeah, I mean, language just can’t express the difference and has to be silent about it, or at least, the difference is more in the speaker’s attitude. I think that’s more of a weakness of language than of behaviorism. Fwiw, it’s a fun fact of human psychology that after lying for so long the difference would be less clear to you as well over time, and maybe you’d actually feel something eventually.

The difference between reality and pretense is in language because most (all?) acts do break, like, we could expect you to eventually reveal what you’re doing to someone you were close to and really trusted. But if that expectation never cashes out and it’s a “perfect act”, then that’s something we can’t really deal with in language without mindreading.

I think I’ll append these messages to the post, I hope it’s OK if I name you. Thanks for engaging.

Neil Sinhababu: Cool, feel free to name me. Btw this is connected to a book I’m writing this year. I think behaviorism was the biggest problem with 20th century naturalism. Empiricism without introspection is like empiricism without auditory perception. You’re throwing out a source of good data for bad philosophical reasons.

Thiago Coelho: Sure, well, if you’ve found a rigorous way to refer to the data then that would be perfect. Looking forward to it.

Thiago V. S. Coelho

My name is Thiago V. S. Coelho, and I live in Brazil.

This blog post is my personal page.

Facts about me:

• An opinion piece I wrote, titled “A Rothbardian Critique of Effective Altruism”, was published by the Mises Wire.
• I have an X (formerly Twitter) profile, and a Facebook profile.
• I am the creator and author of this blog. For a while, I had no personal page about myself besides the page I wrote about this blog.
• My blog includes a fan page for academic philosopher Agnes Callard, which she herself appreciated. My blog also includes a summary of her main book. Agnes has confirmed that I’m her biggest fan.
• Besides this blog, I have two other blogs, namely a blog of translations called Thiago’s Translations Blog, and a blog for sharing other interesting LLM-generated content, called Thiago’s ChatGPT Blog.
• I have made translations of key works by Olavo de Carvalho and Severinus Boethius.
• I have been deeply involved with Internet memes. At this post, my various Facebook meme pages and groups, and blog posts on meme research, are listed. My main meme page, then called Aesthetic Intellectual Meme Stash (now called Scholarly Scholastic Memes), was correctly cited by KnowYourMeme as the origin of the English version of the “Divorce Leads Children to the Worst Places” meme template.
• I have made various contributions to Wikipedia, outlined in my user page at the site. I consider myself the main author of the articles Absence of good, Best of all possible worlds, Egregore, and A Preface to Paradise Lost.
• I have a GitHub profile, with very few open-source contributions to my name.
• I generally take thiagovscoelho as a username, which corresponds to my full name. It is my username in all the previously mentioned platforms, but also various other platforms, such as Discord.

Facts for English speakers about my name

My first name, “Thiago”, is a variant of “Tiago”, which is the Portuguese version of the name of St James, from the Bible – specifically, St James the Great. (James Potter, from the Harry Potter series, was localized in Portuguese as Tiago Potter.) In some contexts, I’d be fine with people calling me James if they find “Thiago” unwieldy, it would just be confusing on a public site where Thiago is my display name.

In the original Portuguese, I pronounce my first name [t͡ʃiˈa.ɡu], or [ˈt͡ʃja.ɡu] if I say it fast. (That is, tchee-AH-goo, or TCHAH-goo when said fast.)

The H is “decorative”, and does not imply a theta sound, although originally, the variant probably does come from someone incorrectly thinking that there was a theta in the original Greek of St James’s name. (“Tiago” is more common, and more sensibly spelled, but that’s not the version my mom put on my birth certificate.)

In different accents, it might sound more like [tʃiˈa.ɡo], [tiˈa.ɡu], [ˈtja.ɡu], [ti'a.ɡo], [ti'a.ɣu], [ti'a.ɣo], [ˈtja.ɣu], or [ˈtja.ɣo].

But I don’t mind it when English speakers pronounce it [θaɪˈæ.ɡo], as they tend to do. It does puzzle me when they abbreviate it to “Thia” as a nickname – in Brazil, it would be shortened to “Thi”, pronounced [t͡ʃi] (“tchee”).

My middle names are abbreviated V. S., it does not mean “versus”.

My last name, Coelho, means “rabbit”. (If you were localizing my name to English, the closest rendering might actually be “Coney”.) I am not related to the famous author Paulo Coelho, as far as I know.

Aesthetics

This post about my aesthetic opinions replaces the previous one on the same topic, which is no longer accurate.

• Definition of aesthetics
• Definition of art
• Aesthetic appreciation
• Applications of this conception
• Aesthetic qualities
• Class theory of genres
• Romanticism not irrational

Definition of aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy intending to provide the most generally applicable principles for the elaboration of art criticism which is as correct as possible.

As such, aesthetics is best pursued by critics, just as criticism is, in my view, best pursued by artists. Neither, however, is my case.

Definition of art

Art is defined only by its having the purpose of aesthetic appreciation, which will be defined further down, as its main or sole purpose. Some consequences of the definition can, however, already be noted:

• The details of its production are mostly irrelevant.
  • An artwork does not have to be produced intentionally or with skill, but can be accidental or haphazard. It does not even have to be a human production, but can be machine-made.
  • However, given the details of aesthetic appreciation as explained below, it may be impossible to regard something as fit for aesthetic appreciation, and therefore as an artwork without at least regarding it as the product of a mind with a worldview.
  • It would be difficult for someone to regard the product of a natural process, such as erosion, as having truly and exclusively the purpose of aesthetic appreciation, but it could possibly happen in some circumstances.
• Anything can be regarded as an artwork, so long as it is not, at the same time, regarded as something else.
  • The purpose of something comes from the concept by which we understand it. Text ordinarily conveys information, but someone may “write” text in a language no one understands, to add flavor to a fantasy world, as with the Codex Seraphinianus.
• Things whose main purpose is not aesthetic appreciation are not artworks. For instance, a chair, however skilfully made and beautiful, is not an artwork.
  • Decoration in non-artworks may nevertheless be helpful to artworks, as with how a beautiful frame can add to a painting, or a book’s beautiful graphic design may enhance the enjoyment of its story.
  • The term impure art may designate artworks which have a prominent secondary purpose besides aesthetic appreciation, such as sacred art, which also intends to edify the viewer, and educational stories which intend to instruct.

Aesthetic appreciation

Commonly misapprehended.— Aesthetic appreciation has been misapprehended, on the one hand, by theories which see it as something purely intellectual. These theories typically focus on a concept of “beauty”, which is then called a transcendental property of being, and made basically identical with goodness – which, in any naturalistic ethics, is something that is understood with reason, not grasped with the senses. These theories typically lead to some form of “moralizing” as the purpose of art, i.e., the idea that good art must make its viewers morally better. This theory goes against common sense because it really is missing something.

Misapprehended, before, by myself.— On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation has been misinterpreted by my earlier theory, which focused on the sensory aspect of appreciation, downplaying any role of the intellect. Appreciating an artwork was seen to not be fundamentally different from enjoying food, for instance. The problem with this is that there really is something different about artworks, and it is more fundamental than I had thought.

Aesthetic appreciation involves learning an artist’s worldview.— The core of aesthetic appreciation, as I see it now, is that, art, as Arnold Weinstein said of literature once, “translates information into experience”. It communicates the concepts by which the artist interprets the world, by showcasing them as applied to idealized experiences which show those concepts in their clearest light. It shares “how the artist sees things”, his worldview.

Applications of this conception

Application to different media.— This is shown most directly by written works, since an experience is described using words which correspond to the concepts which the artist uses to think. But the ways in which music and poetry associate sounds and rhythms to experiences are also communicative of concepts, as are the ways in which drama and movies focus on, and portray, the actions in a story. With images and sculptures, it is a matter of which elements are emphasized – it is no wonder that cartoon pornography tends to feature oversized genitals, since those are the central things to what is being communicated.

Literary forms ranked.— The closer to an actual experience is portrayed, the better an artwork conveys a worldview, since the concepts are communicated in closer connection with their application in real-world experience. This is not to say that all epic poems and fantastical works are worse than all more realistic works, but it is no wonder that epics show up in more primitive and backward societies and novels in more advanced and learned ones, which can deal with more refined concepts. An advanced society has to deal with subtler issues than struggle and death.

Aesthetic qualities

It was a consequence of my earlier view that aesthetic theory focused mostly on largely-sensible “aesthetic qualities”, which I now see merely as means to art’s end, although their proper use is certainly important to any artist, and best understood by artists who are experienced in their use, which is why artists still make the best critics.

I still find that most of the theory I had given about aesthetic qualities, which I thought came in opposed pairs, is right, though. The earlier post was longwinded, so here’s an overview. I endorse everything in this overview, not necessarily all the content in the retracted post, but anything here which is supported there is probably also clarified there.

• Beautiful vs. Ugly: Beauty implies pleasure, while ugliness implies displeasure. Beauty is not a transcendental property of being. As Edmund Burke noted, beauty is not caused by “proportion”.

• Sublime vs. Cute: The sublime, characterized by feelings of awe and fear, may be contrasted with the cute, associated with safety and smallness. The sublime has been better covered by Burke, Kant, etc., while cuteness has not been studied much.

• Based vs. Cringe: These may be seen as aesthetic properties. Basedness implies freedom and independence, as seen in people who, like the Stoic sage, are unaffected by emotional appeals. Cringeness implies a lack of freedom, and being overly influenced by external factors. Cringeness is associated with the physical reaction of cringing at it, while basedness has no analogous reaction.

• Funny vs. Sad: Both humor and sadness stem from something’s falling short of its concept, which is both an incongruity, in the theory-of-humor sense, and an imperfection (privation) in the metaphysical sense. When something’s falling short of its concept is seen more as an incongruity, without evoking compassion, it appears funny, whereas when it is seen more as an imperfection, evoking compassion, it appears sad.

As noted in the earlier post, this is not exhaustive, and at the time, I had been toying with other meme notions such as Dank vs Normie, Blessed vs Cursed, Wholesome vs Edgy, etc. I no longer find this to be very informative to art criticism, not even really when we take memes as an art form.

Class theory of genres

Class theory, as outlined some of my previous posts, may be profitably applied to “genre fiction”.

The proletariat tends to efface nature and support revolutions; the aristocracy tends to ossify artifice and stifle development; the bourgeoisie, in turn, is in line with the natural development of society according to know causes. This easily lends itself to the idea that fantasy, totally unmoored from reality, should be considered proletarian; that sci-fi, which outlines possible future developments in accordance with known natural causes, is bourgeois; and that realistic fiction, especially such as is optimistic about the current world, or pessimistic about the possibility of its improvement, is aristocratic.

In practice, these associations are very loose. Ayn Rand isn’t sci-fi, but is obviously (and quite preachily) bourgeois fiction. And some sci-fi can be rather proletarian or aristocratic, such as the Culture series.

Romanticism not irrational

Given that the essence of good art is that it “translates information into experience”, and that this is plainly in accordance with the human desire for knowledge, it seems that the Romantic movement has been unfairly decried as a “reaction” to the rational tendencies of the Enlightenment, when, given its perfectly good artworks, it was plainly nothing of the sort.

As has been pointed out by Murray Rothbard in defense of Ayn Rand’s fiction, Romanticism was vastly superior to anything that came after it – the Symbolist movement, which attempted to convey pure abstract concepts as an art form, and the Realist movement, which attempted to convey the facts of a story in a bare, “uninterpretive” way, as if it were told by a researcher who collected information on the story and then simply pasted it together, without attempting to explain it.

Both of these styles are against human reason. Concepts cannot be understood without the sensible things to which they apply, and sensible things cannot be understood without concepts. “Thoughts without content are empty, sensations without concepts are blind.” The Romantic style is most in line with rational human understanding.

The mainstream interpretation of Romanticism as an irrational reaction seems mainly due to Isaiah Berlin. Though I do not have the time or resources to seriously dispute his scholarship, I strongly doubt its main drift on this regard. I tend toward trusting the general view of Romanticism laid out by Victor Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell. Hugo emphasizes that the distinguishing feature of Romantic art is the grotesque, the close juxtaposition of, and sharp contrast between, the ugly and beautiful, the unshapely and the graceful. This, to me, shows a concern with portraying experience in a faithful, but interpretive way. It is a way of conveying the artist’s worldview.