How to undermine scientific authority

Benjamin Wiker is a conservative with many very particular gripes about how the Enlightenment ruined everything for civilization; in his book on the Reformation, he tells this story of how Benedict Spinoza, the famous rationalist philosopher who was also one of the pioneers of biblical philology, wanted to undermine religion:

To make sure that Scripture cannot be revived and used with the irrational, impassioned Christian multitude, Catholic or Protestant, Spinoza set forth as one of the additional tasks of the new scientific exegete, the maximizing of confusion about the real meaning of the text, by ferreting out all the possible ambiguities inherent in the original languages, and by displaying prominently all the variations that occur in the multiple manuscripts discovered since the Renaissance—and, of course, publishing the results. It’s hard for the Bible to have authority if we can’t figure out what it actually said originally. Better just to mind your own business, and embrace tolerance.

The very scholarly apparatus that both Catholics and Protestants believed would take them closer to the revealed truth, and bring about ever more accurate translations of God’s Holy Word, thereby became the vehicle Spinoza and his followers used to sow confusion and doubt, leading to the secularization of the West.

Wiker doesn’t give references to support the idea that Spinoza had this goal, but it’s an interesting thought that I have remembered even though I basically forgot the rest of the book. Undermining biblical authority by the proliferation of textual variants is something that doesn’t do any harm to the Catholic Church, which has the Pope who can simply decide for everyone else what “the Bible says” on an issue, but it does do damage to Protestantism, which has always relied on (the ridiculous idea of) there being some objective science that can determine “what the Bible says” in such a way that experts can reach consensus.

It also does work against anything else that is taken as authoritative, and for which there is no Pope. If you don’t want natural science, say, to be an authority in society, you don’t have to directly make people lose respect for its process, you just have to multiply and amplify the minority viewpoints within it, especially the ones that have gotten a foothold in academia already. The frequency of agreement between experts is a major reason why people want to trust science, but it is a contingent feature of it, and efforts to undermine it can be successful.

If you hate a certain discipline, study more variants of it than its practitioners do.

Qualification as Proportionality

There are different views on how to formalize qualifications, which can be made as, “A is B qua C”, but are also commonly made with English glosses like “A is B insofar as A is C”, or “A is B, when A is considered in its respect of being C”. They are reviewed in Hennig (2024). The following are some examples of qualification adapted from the paper:

• Descartes claims that, insofar as he is a thinking being, he is not made of matter.
• Kant claims that we can know things as appearances, but not as they are in themselves.
• Aristotle claims that an isosceles triangle has internal angles that add up to two right angles, but it has this property qua triangle, not qua isosceles.
• Suppose “Jane is a corrupt judge, but an honest merchant”, which is to say, “Jane is corrupt qua judge, but honest qua merchant”.

The paper reviews many proposals for translating such qualifications into formal languages. It does not review the one I propose here, because it wasn’t in the literature. My proposal relies on “degree-theoretic semantics”, which is the theory that sentences have “degrees of truth” instead of just being either true or false. This semantics arises in the philosophical theory of vagueness, which is concerned largely with solving the well-known sorites paradox:

• how many grains of sand does it take for you to have a heap of sand?
• at what precise instant does a child become an adult?
• how many hairs on his head does it take for a man to no longer be bald?

Degree-theoretic semantics approaches this problem by saying that there is no such number, but rather that the truth-value of, “x is a heap of sand”, “x is not bald”, or “x is an adult”, moves continuously from “less true” to “more true” as more grains of sand, hairs on the head, or years of age are added to x. Its oldest version seems to come from this 1976 paper by Kenton F. Machina, but probably its most famous version came from Dorothy Edgington in 1996.

My proposal, then, is to translate “A is B qua C” into “the degree of truth of ‘A is B’ is proportional to the degree of truth of ‘A is C’”. If we take the properties B and C as predicates \( B \) and \( C \), the object A as a constant \( a \), and \( \mathcal{I} \) as the interpretation function that assigns degrees of truth to statements, then formally, \( \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Ba \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Ca \urcorner) \).

That’s the entire proposal, and it seems easy enough to apply to the examples:

• Descartes claims that the degree to which he is a thinking being is proportional to the degree to which he is not made of matter. With \( T \) for being a thinking being, \( d \) for Descartes, and \( M \) for being made of matter, we have \( \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Td \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner \neg Md \urcorner) \).
• Kant claims that the degree to which something is knowable is not proportional to the degree to which it is itself, but it is proportional to the degree to which it is an appearance. With \( I \) for a thing’s being itself, \( K \) for a thing’s being knowable, and \( A \) for a thing’s being an appearance, we have \( \forall t [\mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Kt \urcorner) \not\propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner It \urcorner)] \), and \( \forall t [\mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Kt \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner At \urcorner)] \).
• Aristotle claims that the truth of something’s having angles summing to two right angles is proportional to the truth of its being a triangle, but not proportional to the truth of its being isosceles. With \( A \) for the property of having angles that add up to two right angles, \( I \) for the property of being isosceles, and \( T \) for the property of being a triangle, we have \( \forall t [ \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner At \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Tt \urcorner) ] \), and \( \forall t [ \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner At \urcorner) \not\propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner It \urcorner) ] \).
• The degree to which Jane is honest is proportional to the degree to which she is a merchant, while the degree to which she is corrupt is proportional to the degree to which she is a judge. Let’s use \( H \) for the property of being honest, and let’s assume being corrupt just means not being honest, i.e., \( \neg H \). With \( j \) for Jane, we have \( \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Hj \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Mj \urcorner) \), and \( \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner \neg Hj \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Jj \urcorner) \).

I don’t know any objections to this, as of yet. If I knew of any, I would try to answer them, which would give me enough material to try to publish this as a paper instead of a blog post.

This came up in conversation earlier due to my further view that statements involving higher-order properties should be interpreted as qualified general statements about properties. For instance, “honesty is desirable” should be interpreted as “for any x, x is desirable insofar as x is honest”, which in turn means that “for any x, the degree to which x is desirable is proportional to the degree to which x is honest”, i.e., \( \forall x [ \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Dx \urcorner) \propto \mathcal{I}(\ulcorner Hx \urcorner) ] \). In my view, this makes higher-order properties unnecessary. This is motivated by my view that the reason we can use properties to understand things is because properties are intrinsically understandable in themselves – if this is so, then properties don’t need further ‘metaproperties’ to be understood.

Personality

This post is about what it means to get to know someone. It consists of various previously unconnected points on this subject that I have gathered over the course of some years.

• History
• Conveyance
• Length
• Popularity
• Tolerance

History

Everyone has a story. By this I mean that almost everyone is able and, in some contexts, willing to tell their entire life story from birth to the present. The older they are, the more story there is to tell, but also the more times they have been asked to tell it before, which makes them readier to do it.

I have a story, too. I will not tell it here, but I have it down to a pretty coherent narrative that I tell a little differently each time depending on the audience, but the details of which are pretty fixed. I usually begin my story in 2017 rather than at my birth, considering events before that point uninteresting. Everyone who knows me knows my reasons for beginning at 2017; only a few, besides my family, know about my life before then. (My family, in turn, do not know much about my life since then.)

Not everyone is equally good at telling their story. Some people are particularly interested in some aspects of their life and will omit others. But there are a few major aspects to someone’s life, and you cannot be considered to know someone well if you do not know those, even if they usually pass over them. Roughly, in trying to get to know someone, you’re trying to get them to hit at least these points:

• Who are their current friends, and how did they come to meet them?
• What are their current interests (and/or career), and how did they get into them?
• What religion were they brought up in? How did their own religious views develop over time, if at all?
• How did their political beliefs develop over time, if at all?
• What have their romantic and sexual experiences been?
• What have their experiences with drugs and alcohol been?
• If they do not have children, do they want to? Have their feelings, with regard to wanting to have children, always been the same? Do they have any particular views on childrearing?

I just wrote this list up for the first time, so it’s not something I have been explicitly checking every time I wanted to get to know someone. But mentally, I have probably always gone through something like this, since I wanted to learn almost all of these things about most people I made a deliberate effort to get to know.

Conveyance

A distinction I like to make is between clarity and transparency.

Clarity refers to how clearly you can convey what you think when you speak; its opposite is obscurity. Transparency refers to how much you tend to say what you think; its opposite is opacity.

Someone who is very clear, but very opaque, will not often speak his mind, but will usually be understood when he does so; someone who is very transparent, but very obscure, will speak his mind a lot, but people will usually be confused as to what he means by what he says, and requests for clarification won’t seem to help.

I do not claim that the two tend to either go together or appear separately; the qualities are simply worth distinguishing. Both make someone easier to befriend.

Length

There’s a niche indie film called Classical Period, directed by Ted Fendt, which I know about because I have been internet friends with one of the actors, Calvin Engime. (Due to regional restrictions, I have not actually watched it.) Cal showed me some of the published reviews of the film, which spoke to its relative notability within its niche. One was this one by Jonathan Romney, which includes the line: “These are people who speak in paragraphs. Very long paragraphs. With footnotes.” This line has stuck with me for some years, because it describes me and my closest friends very well.

I have sometimes texted people who don’t read or write a lot. There’s a lot more orality to how they text than to how assiduous readers text, even if they stick to a high register – they’ll send many short messages to say what could have been said in one longer message, because that’s what writing looks like when written by someone who is more used to speaking. This style with a lot of short sentences, juxtaposed rather than connected, is also found in the Old Testament, which was written in a culture where writing was not very common yet.

Popularity

There’s one sense of popularity which is equivalent to notoriety, i.e., how many people know about you or have heard of you. This is the most common way to describe someone as “popular”, and while it can be measured by doing polls on how well people know someone, it is usually measured by checking the number of Google results when looking their name up, or by looking at their number of followers on social media.

There’s another sense of popularity which is something like likability or status, and which is seen in the phenomenon of “popular kids” in school. In school, due to common roll calls and such, almost everyone knows almost everyone else’s name, so everyone is equally notorious. But only a few kids are popular. They’re the kids that everyone likes, or admires, or aspires to be like – the coolest kids. Popularity, in this sense, refers to the extent to which people like you, or have a high opinion of you.

I have never been notorious. I do not do anything important enough, or widely enjoyable enough, to achieve notoriety. But I think I have usually been one of the more popular persons within the groups I’ve gotten into.

At the same time, I am peculiarly unlikable, and I am not allowed into many groups. My account on X (formerly Twitter) is blocked by so many other accounts that it often gets hard to read the site while logged into it, due to the large number of comments that are hidden from me. This had usually left me out of group chats on the site, as well, back when an account could not be in the same group chat with anyone who blocked them. Even after this rule was changed, I was still not added to many group chats.

I don’t like many people myself, either – sometimes I connect this sense of ‘liking and being liked by few people’ with a personality disorder. But this is not the place to go into this.

Tolerance

The novel The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, begins by describing a peculiar quality of its protagonist, Nick Carraway. I will quote the first three paragraphs of the novel in full, since it costs nothing to do so, since the book is in public domain, and space within a webpage is practically unlimited.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret grief’s of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

Carraway goes on to say that he had grown tired of listening to everyone’s personal story, but that he made an exception for Gatsby, the novel’s titular character.

Ever since it was pointed out to me by a close friend that I seemed to also have this quality, I have related strongly to Carraway’s sense of his tolerance, because I have also often had the experience of someone opening up a lot to me very quickly. The occasion in which it was pointed out to me was also significant – I was remarking to my friend that I was, at the same time, close friends with two persons who had also been close friends with each other, but were in the process of bitterly falling out, so that I heard both of them tell me how they felt about their dispute in closer detail than they’d ever tell each other to their face. This experience of being privy to the internals, as it were, of both sides of a conflict, was very interesting. (It did not, for all that, help me prevent their falling out, and they have not spoken in almost three years.)

Although I am not liked by many people, the people who can stand me are unusually comfortable with me. This is also, evidently, a quality that makes it easier to get to know people.

Catholics vs Protestants

Studying the subject lately, I get the sense that Catholicism is bourgeois and Protestantism is aristocratic.

Catholics believe in progress: the Church is infallible, so whenever theologians manage to develop doctrine such that a new dogma is defined, they continuously add to our previous understanding. Protestants believe in an original church that was good and which has horribly decayed, and to which we’re always imperfectly trying to go back. “Semper reformanda”: the church is not infallible, so it may always have to come back to some issue that it decided before.

Catholics believe in human perfection in this life, and deification in the next. We have help from God, through the sacraments issuing from Rome, to do perfect deeds that are pleasing to God, to become saints who totally fulfill the moral law, and then work wonders that no one has seen. New saints are still canonized, and new miracles are still ecclesiastically approved. In the next life, what happens (if we’re good) is we gain all the attributes that the pagan philosophers (not the vulgar pagans) allowed to the gods: invulnerability, bodily immortality, perfect knowledge of nature, a blessedness that cannot be interrupted.

Protestants believe that there is no perfection in this life. No matter how much we try, we still fall short of the ten commandments, and even divine grace does not change the fact that there is some measure of sin in every action we commit. We can go to heaven, not because our corrupt nature is made pleasing to God, but because God, in his mercy, chooses to count Christ’s perfection and merits as our own. We still get to be immortal, so we become what the vulgar pagans attributed to the gods: undying creatures who are still morally imperfect.

Catholics believe that we can understand the moral law philosophically, through our human reason. (This is Thomas Aquinas’s natural law theory.) “I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.” If man can understand the law with his reason, then he can criticize tyrants. The Church was the only institution outside the state with people learned enough to criticize it, and the fact that it existed only in the West was why liberalism arose within it, having had no equivalent in the East.

Protestants, insofar as they embody the Puritan principle, that nothing can be required when it is not clearly in the Bible, believe in divine command theory: something can only be immoral because the Bible says so. In this, they are the equals of Muslims and Jews. The more consistent ones see the Bible as the only source of political as well as of moral law, and hence want to copy what is essentially a bronze-age government. This led to oppressive theocracy in Calvin’s Geneva, and still has its defenders in the so-called theonomist movement – the one comprised of Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Gary North, and others, in which the virtues of stoning are extolled.

Catholics, through their philosophical interpretation of the moral law, found so many ‘just titles’ to interest that the Bible’s restrictions upon usury were reduced to a technicality; Protestants, while they ruled states (before they gave way to sceptical Enlightenment liberals), were much harsher on usury. Catholic Scholastics saw it fitting that we should enjoy our life in this world, and looking for how best we can do this, anticipated much of marginal economic theory; Protestant Calvinists, seeing work as a virtue and a sign of predestination, gave birth to the errors of Adam Smith, his labor theory of value and his idea of ‘unproductive labor’, which sees consumers’ goods as opposed to capital goods. This idea, which took a long time to be purged from economics, is that labor that contributes to consumption in the present does not add to wealth, only labor that increases our consumption deferred indefinitely into the future does. Only in the next life, for the Protestants, should there be enjoyment.

The Catholic Church, finally, is an international institution, indeed the only such institution that existed after the Roman Empire itself fell. It was against this institution that the Protestant revolution was fought. Protestants, early on and to this day, brought all power back to Europe’s petty local potentates, so that humans could be governed according to the accidents of their birth rather than according to their common nature. It is not to be wondered at that racism only reached its greatest horrors in Protestant countries.

Dialogical motivations

It seems useful to distinguish the “psychological motivations” for a belief from the “dialogical motivations” for it.

• Psychological motivations are your best account, given your model of someone’s mind, to explain how they got their belief; given usual “disenchanted” views of psychology, this may involve attributing most beliefs to emotions, or psychoanalytic complexes, etc.

• Dialogical motivations are the motives that a person themself gives for their own belief, when talking to you in dialogue.

(Note that I have to speak of “motives” or “motivations”, not “reasons”, because a person may be willing to admit that their belief is unreasonable, but nevertheless have motivations to give for it.)

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I’m not sure how important the dialogical motivations are.

On the one hand, it seems that psychological motivations may allow us to explain the presence of a belief without any reference to the dialogical motivations. If someone’s psychological situation changes in such a way that the psychological motivations for their belief are no longer in place, then the belief changes. If you ask someone, “What happened to all those motives you told me before? Those didn’t change, so why did you change your mind?”, they might have to shrug it off and say, “I guess I just don’t care about that so much anymore.”

On the other hand, some people may place a high value on not ending up in a dialogue situation exactly like I just described; that is, they may highly value avoiding the appearance of their being fickle, inconstant, irrational. So they may prevent themselves from changing their belief until they can find a good counter to their own previous dialogical motivations.

And it seems, after all, that if someone has weak dialogical motivations, such that they keep getting embarrassed in an argument when they talk about their belief, then this may amount, itself, to a psychological motivation to change it.

And of course, it’s probable that the dialogical and psychological motivations will coincide in some cases, if someone simply reports their motives accurately; this seems most likely for low-stakes intellectual beliefs, where, indeed, the main effect of having them is that you’ll defend them in dialogues.

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Someone said that the talk of “psychological motivations” seems redundant, since all motivations are psychological; he wanted to use different words, so as to focus on a contrast between a belief’s true causes and someone’s attempt to explain, and possibly idealize, what they are.

I said I’d really rather frame this distinction in terms of “you explaining someone” versus “someone explaining themselves”. The former is your attempt to do psychology, while the latter is someone’s attempt to look like they’re doing psychology while also possibly (though not necessarily) trying to, e.g., save face, or look good, or convince you of the belief. So that’s where I’d be coming from, regarding the nomenclature.

It is at least possible that the motivations someone gives in dialogue are always affected by ulterior motives such as “trying to look good”, whereas under a rare condition —let’s say, under hypnosis— they might give a “pure” account that is unaffected by ulterior motives and is, therefore, different; the dialogical motivations are the former. It is also at least possible that all three of, the dialogical account, the hypothetical “pure” self-report, and your psychological assessment of someone, are different from the person’s “true” motivations— which, if we are to operationalize without allowing for mind-reading, I’ll just say are the motivations that an idealized ‘very good psychologist’ would ascribe to the belief.

But really, with this post I’m most interested in the question of, what’s the value of dialogical motivations? If you imagine that it’s 2007 and people are hyped up in New Atheism debates, obviously they’re very interested in the dialogical motivations: they want to know all the possible arguments their opponents might give for their belief, and how to counter-argue each one. Which might be pretty removed from a psychological model, but it would seem that it can’t be totally irrelevant to changing minds either, if they’re caring so much. Even though, all the while, both sides might think that their opponents are childish and their entire belief is just an excuse for being an asshole.

It certainly feels like someone’s model of my motives, in order to be accurate, has to listen to my self-reports and attempt to explain them, even if it explains them away and opts for an account that diverges a lot from them.

Discourse ethics

If philosophy does not consist in a definite subject matter, but consists rather in a style of talking, then it does not provide knowledge, it only influences behavior. It is a rhetorical technique. I believe that this would not be philosophy. As such, I believe that philosophy has a definite subject matter, and provides knowledge about it.

I also believe that humans only have their reason and their senses, and are not provided with any additional faculties for obtaining knowledge. As such, all disagreement about a matter of knowledge can be settled with reason and the senses. If two persons disagree, then they must either have witnessed very different sensations in their experience, or at least one of them is being irrational to at least some extent. There is no third possibility, and usually the first one is excluded very quickly, which leaves the second. This is how disagreements happen in the most respected sciences.

So, philosophical ethics, if there is such a thing, must be what provides knowledge about the nature of good behavior. As with other matters of knowledge, any disagreement about it must be able to be settled with reason and the senses. Arguments about disagreements must be able to come to the point where at least one person’s belief is clearly shown to come from that person’s being irrational to at least some extent, or, if some matter of fact is relevant to the case, from their lacking some relevant sense experience.

This is the only kind of “winning an argument” that philosophy provides, the kind where your opponent is shown to be irrational. After he is shown to be irrational, your opponent may well decide that he prefers, in any event, to be irrational in this case, and that being rational is overrated anyway, and that, after all, it would be unkind of you to press him to behave rationally by accepting the conclusions that you defend, and so on. Any answer to this can only come from rhetoric; philosophy has done its job.

I believe, additionally, that philosophical argument is the only rational mode of engagement, in the sense that all other means of affecting behaviors and ideas do not work by means of reason, but work only by means of infra-rational elements in humanity, such as our emotions and instincts. I believe, further, that it cannot be rational to attempt to seek a different mode of engagement, if philosophical argument is available. It follows that any behaviors are irrational if they must lead to disengagement from philosophical argument. It is, therefore, irrational to make your good judgment suspect by arguing fallaciously, as well as to make your good faith suspect by deliberately lying within the argument, together with any other behaviors that would disrupt an argument and make it clearly unwise to continue.

From this analysis, a restriction follows about what sorts of behaviors can be defensible under philosophical ethics. However much, from the point of view of some nation’s creed, it may be right to lie, or to argue fallaciously within an argument, such a point of view cannot, nevertheless, be defended in philosophical argument. For to defend, in philosophical argument, that such behavior is right, is to make your good faith and your good judgment suspect, and therefore to endanger your participation in the only rational mode of engagement, and therefore to act irrationally, and therefore to show yourself to be irrational, and therefore to “lose the argument”, by the philosophical criterion. Once you are shown to be irrational, philosophy’s work is done.

I believe, finally, as part of my analysis of the practice of philosophical argument as it actually occurs, that it is right to break off an argument, if you cannot be sure that your opponent is seeking knowledge, such as is provided by a philosophical discipline such as philosophical ethics is supposed here to be, or by any other respected science. If it is shown that your opponent might be seeking something else above knowledge, such as entertainment, or a change in your behavior, or any ulterior motive, then there is also no certainty about his continuing to follow the practices of philosophical argument that secure it as a rational enterprise. He may lie to you, or make deliberate fallacies. He can no longer be thought of as taking part in a rational mode of engagement.

As such, it is part of the minimum doctrines defensible under philosophical ethics that, the only intrinsically valuable thing, which must be sought after above all others in all circumstances, is knowledge, or a kind of knowledge. For if you defend that anything else may always be sought above knowledge, then you put your rational engagement into doubt. And if you defend that it is sometimes, in some circumstances, a good behavior to seek something other than knowledge, then you also put your rational engagement into doubt, for your opponent cannot be sure that you are not about to believe yourself to be in such a circumstance.

Such then, is the minimum nature of philosophical ethics, as I see it. I believe that all other moral rules are deducible from these basic propositions, or that, at any rate, no moral rules are defensible philosophically that disagree with these, and there is no other basis for philosophical ethics under the conception here outlined, so that, it is by these criteria that ethics must stand or fall. All other approaches to ethics, such as intuitionism and so on, must be clearly seen to disagree with the approach to philosophical ethics that I have outlined in my first three paragraphs; if they disagree only with further points, I can only say that they hold beliefs about the general nature of philosophical argument that I think are implausible.

This approach is a kind of discourse ethics.

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.