Emotions are not beliefs

Emotions can happen at the same time as beliefs, and can cause them as well as be caused by them. That said, everyone knows that emotions are not beliefs. This fact has some consequences which I have found useful to list and explain in detail.

• They are physiological, not rational
• They cannot be justified, only expected
• They cannot be true, only proper
• They have causes, not reasons

They are physiological, not rational

The main difference between emotions and beliefs is that emotions are never caused by your reasoning processes, but by your animal instincts. Accordingly, it is possible for things such as hunger, tiredness, hormones and medications to affect your emotions. This is useful to keep in mind.

They cannot be justified, only expected

It is a common teaching that a belief, if properly caused, can be called knowledge; this is called the justification of the belief. But since emotions are not beliefs, they cannot be justified in that sense. Your emotions can never be called knowledge, although you can know that you felt them. Since they are not even caused by your rational processes, they are certainly not derived as conclusions from your surroundings; they can only be caused by your body’s instincts in an expected or an unexpected way.

They cannot be true, only proper

Beliefs can be true or false, but emotions cannot. We believe, of course, that some emotions are appropriate in some circumstances, such as grief when someone dies. This is a combination of the emotions being expected in the former sense – due to human instinct – and “cultural expectations”, i.e., social norms that require some emotions at some times. Still, properly speaking, the emotions are not true or false; unlike beliefs, they do not represent anything to you, so they cannot be accurate or inaccurate.

They have causes, not reasons

Philosophers usually distinguish between reasons, which only beliefs can have, and causes, which emotions (and other events) can also have. Laypeople tend to ignore this distinction, but it is useful, especially when you are feeling strong emotions. Your beliefs about the past have reasons, which are your memories of the past. They should, accordingly, continue to be believed as long as the reason remains, i.e., as long as the memory remains. Your emotions, by contrast, were caused by events in the past, but the events are not still reasons for them. It is perfectly right, and probably advisable, to stop feeling them as soon as possible.

Impartial journalism

I have thought for some years about whether the idea of journalistic impartiality even makes sense. Recently, a friend helped me see it in a new way.

0. Contents

• 1. The abstract problem
• 1.1. Item presentation
• 1.2. Item selection
• 2. The concrete problem
• 2.1. Cable news
• 2.2. Cable news watchers
• 3. Solutions

1. The abstract problem

In the consideration of a subject which may be examined with impartiality, but cannot be viewed with indifference…

— Gibbon, Decline and Fall, §20

I had usually thought about journalistic impartiality as an abstract problem. It is difficult enough to define what it would even mean for a newspaper to be presented “objectively” or “impartially”, especially if this is meant to be attainable. Usually, no one cares enough to be rigorous, and people will simply state, without argument, that journalism either can or can’t be impartial, and that it either should or shouldn’t try to do so. I thought for a while that I had a pretty fair case for the conclusion that it is impossible, and this is what I will present next.

1.1. Item presentation

Though I could not always present it so concisely, I believe my argument went something like this:

1. “Impartiality” should be defined as neutrality with respect to different possible worldviews.
2. Every decision about how to write something is a human decision, and must have a reason, whether conscious or not.
3. It is impossible for this reason to be perfectly neutral with respect to all worldviews.
4. So, it is impossible for any decision about how to write something to be neutral and impartial.

I thought this argument was pretty good, but it nevertheless does inevitably seem that a lot of things are written without any partiality. Maybe the “trade jargon” of journalism prevents partiality somehow. Which is why the following was also important to me.

1.2. Item selection

Even if a news item can possibly be presented impartially, it is clear that a parallel argument can be made about how to select which news items to report, and what kind of emphasis to give them – as in deciding, for instance, whether an item is front page material or not. Given different newspapers with different items and emphases, someone would be hard pressed to claim that any one selection and ordering of items is “the objectively most important news to the public”. Clearly, then, the selection and ordering of items must reflect some point of view, even if the language inside reports somehow does not.

2. The concrete problem

Inner psychological states are never accessible to the historian.

— Bart Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery, §3

It turns out that the problem of journalistic partiality has quite a different nature when addressed concretely. My best friend, who does not usually look at cable news, ended up having to watch some recently, and she told me the problems she saw with it, which I thought was insightful.

2.1. Cable news

The problem is that networks such as Fox News habitually do the following:

1. Impute motives to people that they have not actually stated (e.g., “X politician is trying to do XYZ”)
2. Report events in a way that is obviously interpretive, regarding moral or aesthetic value (and often inflammatory, e.g. “X politician is using Y group as pawns”)

This is the typical way that they talk about anything, as opposed to there being a separation between “news”, where this is not done, and “commentary”, where this is done; even the running on-screen headlines will have statements of this sort.

2.2. Cable news watchers

In my experience, this actually makes it harder for habitual watchers of such sensationalist content – whether on Fox News or on certain YouTube channels – to see things from any other perspective than their own. Since this is the main way they hear about news, they have a harder time separating the facts from the values that come with them.

Since the content is often meant to arouse anger and other strong emotions, people who watch it often feel such emotions about the content, and have a harder time thinking and talking calmly about contemporary politics. They often fiercely hate their political opponents, and can sometimes find them unbearable.

Also, the habit of ascribing bad motives to political enemies seems to make some people really believe that a large proportion of people with opposing politics really do act with bad intentions a lot of the time. They are led to think that our opponents have no conscience, and are conspiring to destroy the things we hold dear; that they are evil, and are out to get us.

I have seen these effects in some other people, and also in myself. They are defects in thought.

3. Solutions

The solution, then, to the concrete problem, is simply to avoid such value and intention judgments in news reporting, as well as displays of emotion. It is much less difficult than the abstract problem, which is probably unsolvable. News publications can probably easily be impartial in the sense of only reporting observable things, and leave their particular interpretations to a dedicated editorial section.

There is, of course, no incentive for cable news networks or sensationalist YouTube channels to change their ways at all. I believe that the first to do so would simply lose its public to the remaining sensationalists. The public that watches these things is probably simply not interested in impartial reporting; for such people, I suppose the only hope is that some external reason will cause them to grow more mature, so that they will grow tired of such content and abandon it.

European marriage pattern causes preliminary research

Just earlier today, I found out about the so-called “European marriage pattern” (EMP) and “Hajnal line”. The latter seems less supported by data than the former. Please look at the linked Wikipedia articles to find out what they are.

This got me curious about the possible causes of marriage patterns, generally, and the EMP specifically. (Much of the controversy seems to be about its effects, i.e., whether the EMP leads to improved economic growth or not.) While it would be good to properly think this through from principles, I wanted to see what theories have been raised about it. From a cursory search, apparently there have been the following:

• Racial and biological theories.— The “Hajnal line” Wikipedia article makes several mentions of racist theories about the line; they apparently rely on the line itself being factually supported, which is questionable. The idea seems to be that the Slavic peoples, for reasons inherent to their race, favor a reproductive strategy used by species whose offspring are individually expendable, such as certain insects; so-called r/K selection would seem to be related here. (Personally, I find such theories distasteful, but given how cursory my research has been so far, I have no arguments against them.)
• Catholic Christian culture and regulations.— The Catholic Church seems to have had various internal regulations and theological ideas which favor the marriage habits corresponding to the EMP, and nuclear families generally. These explanations are covered at some length in the “Western European marriage pattern” Wikipedia article, and in this Mises Institute article.
• The Black Death.— This other Mises Institute article cites, in passing, a different theory “that the Black Death aided the EMP by trigging a labor market for women.” A 2013 academic article by Tracy Dennison (PDF), focusing mostly on the EMP’s effects, also mentions the idea that “in England after the Black Death, it is claimed, labour scarcity and a shift from arable to pastoral agriculture increased demand for women’s labour outside the household, encouraging a move towards late marriage, high lifetime celibacy, and a calibration of marriage decisions to economic fluctuations.”
• Corporative institutions.— The just-cited Dennison article (PDF) also seems to mention how “strong corporative institutions (communities, guilds, universities, firms) which benefited economic growth by guaranteeing property rights, enforcing contracts, and facilitating exchange” made it easier to have a network of people you trust without a large family. This is mainly claimed to be an effect, but also apparently a cause, of the EMP.

That’s all I have seen for now. These things might all be part of the answer (though I wouldn’t consider the first one). As the following passage from the Dennison article (PDF) highlights, however, the range of currently available theories seems unsatisfying, and more work should probably be done:

No variant of this new literature unambiguously spells out the direction of the causal relationships involved. On the one hand, the EMP is supposed to have created a better position for women. But on the other, greater female autonomy is supposed to have given rise to the EMP. And in some variants, both marriage patterns and women’s position are ascribed to underlying factors such as European or Christian cultural norms, the Black Death, or pastoral agriculture. The evident endogeneity of the different variables limits the scope of these claims to the merely descriptive assertion that the EMP was associated with a higher status for women, which in turn benefited the economy.

But even this claim is at odds with the evidence. As the women’s history literature has shown, women had a good economic position in some societies with the EMP and a bad one in others. [...]