Alexander Dugin: An Influential and Enigmatic Russian Political Theorist

Francis Fukayama spoke for many intellectuals in the West during the 1990s when he declared that history was at its end. The reference was a Hegelian one, and the implication was that, at least for the foreseeable future, what we now call neo-liberalism would be the de facto norm in global politics. Gone were its old rivals, Communism and Fascism. Liberal Democracy with an accent on global free trade policies seemed to reign triumphant. Oh, maybe some disenchanted leftists in Seattle and Europe would groan and protest against the WTO and the Washington Consensus generally. Perhaps, also, some "isolationists" (including the Buchanan-esque"Paleoconservatives" that voted Trump recently) might resist economic and military expansion of organizations and blocs like NATO and the EU that were then offering coveted membership status to former Warsaw Pact and even former Soviet states (e.g. Georgia, Ukraine). Likewise, they might resent and vilify trade blocs like NAFTA which were sold on the promise of increased prosperity from Canada to Yucatan. Even esteemed Cold War architect George Kennan was ignored when he warned that the eastward expansion of NATO was a mistake that would backfire, and that speaking of Georgia as part of "Europe" when it is actually much closer to Persia made little sense. But back in the "roaring 90s" there was great confidence among Western elites that free market fundamentalism and liberal democracy were essentially joined at the hip, and were now the best or only viable game in town. It was only natural for the institutions and policies I mention here to take their course, or so went the conventional wisdom. A corollary to such views was (and too often still is) that Liberalism and Global Capitalism do not stand in need of a philosophical articulation or defense. The system which is the heir apparent requires no special theory; the age of ideologies had come to a close.

It is well known that Fukayama has long since retracted these ideas. Almost 30 years later, history looks quite different. We now see it through the toxic haze of the 2008 global financial meltdown, the increasing awareness of China's rise to prominence (something deemed intolerable by our leaders), the dramatic changes in domestic and international policies within Russia at least since the annexation of the Crimea, and now the rise of right wing ethno-nationalist movements in Europe and the US-- movements that had more than a little to do with the electing of Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK. Elsewhere on this channel, I've discussed the rise of European ethno-nationalist and populist parties fueled by the refugee crisis and flagging economic health of the EU. Here the point is that philosophy is returning to the world stage as a means of articulating, unifying, and legitimizing movements that oppose the status quo ante. A multi-polar world was not part of the plan, and now it appears not only multi-polar, but in some cases hostile to Liberal Democracy and globalization as conceived by Western elites.

In China, over the past 15 years, there has been a growing State interest in revitalizing Confucianism for the needs of a rising 21st century China. This is an interesting development supported vigorously by China's President Xi Jinping. That topic deserves its own post here in the future. I flag it here to illustrate the point that powerful nation-states that do not entirely buy into the Washington Consensus are currently developing political self-consciousness, which means philosophical underpinnings. Confucianism was part of the glue that held China together politically and ideologically for centuries, and it may be repurposed at the official level in the near future since the nominal status of China as "Communist" is neither accurate nor credible, and lacks motivational sweep for Chinese citizens today. The stale phrase of art , "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" coined by Deng Xiaoping is just as clumsy and misleading. It also sits uneasily with another of his phrases, viz., " To be rich is glorious."

Similarly, Russia after the Cold War has had a difficult time articulating a political theory and ideology appropriate to the goals and policies of its leaders, and the beliefs of its citizens. Indeed there has not been widespread agreement among Russians regarding such goals and ideas until rather recently. But this decade has witnessed a seismic shift in ideological and political consciousness there from a state of internal disagreement and contestation to a widespread coalescing mindset which looks back to the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire (and affiliated institutions including the Orthodox Church) for political and cultural energy going forward, i.e. what is often simply called "Putinism.". Even Stalin has been rehabilitated to some extent, and Putin and the media never miss an opportunity to take a swipe at the "perversions" of Western Liberalism both culturally and politically. Often these "perversions" are homosexuality, transgender and LGBT movements which are not tolerated in Russia.

If one were to search for a philosophy that articulates and legitimates those trends in Russia (and ethno-nationalist movements in Europe which are often fond of Putin's Russia) they would find one Alexander Dugin, the philosopher somewhat comically called "Putin's Brain" and "Putin's Rasputin" by Western Policy analysts https://www.foreignaffairs.... and https://www.centerforsecuri... . If you follow BigThink you may know his name as that of "the most dangerous philosopher in the world" http://bigthink.com/paul-ra... . Philosophy and psychology correspondent, Olivia Goldhill writes of Dugin that "with his pointed beard and imperialist philosophy, [he] would likely be
dismissed as too over-the-top to play a convincing Bond villain." While such language is, I think, hyperbolic, and I don't think we have an evil genius on the loose here, Dugin certainly is influential and well connected to various politicians, allegedly Putin's "favorite philosopher," and is one of the only intellectuals I know of who is under US and Canadian economic sanctions as an individual as well as leader of the group Eurasian Youth Union. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... He played a visible role during the annexation of Crimea which marked a turning point in Russian nationalism and Putinism, both of which are linked in the official propaganda of Russia. Many of Putin's speeches about traditional values, the perversity of Western Liberalism (often exemplified by rants against homosexuality and the transgender movement) and barely concealed statements of Russian expansionist ambitions-- i.e. incorporating all the former Soviet States as a regional bloc to start, and perhaps later part of a greater Russia. Like Putin, Dugin was all in for Trump and was given prime time media slots to sing the praises of Trump as "an ordinary American who represents the real America." The real America, for Dugin, is something out of a John Ford Western in which we meet "self-reliant" individuals who neither want nor need the overweening state and its programs. These Americans are good and simple, if "without any special talents." You can get a sense of this by watching this RU clip, "In Trump We Trust" from the 2016 electoral season directly below this post.

If he is speaking to the masses colloquially in this clip , don't be deceived into thinking Dugin a plain-spoken man. He peddles quasi-occultist, metaphysical philosophy fused with an anti-modern, Luddite, pro -"Russian Fascist," global politics that envisions Russia as a Eurasian Empire whose ethos is that of what he calls the "New Middle Ages." Perhaps his most important book is called The Fourth Political Theory (fourth after the allegedly failed 3 theories of Liberal Democracy, Communism and European Fascism of the 20th century). Dugin maintains a website devoted to the exposition and development of this emergent ideology, http://www.4pt.su/en , and there is a reasonably informed discussion about that ideology by foreign affairs journalist Doug Sanders here: https://www.theglobeandmail... Saunders wonders whether Putin really believes much of Dugin's discourse or rather appropriates it as propaganda. https://www.theglobeandmail... I suspect the answer lies in the middle somewhere, and that Putin has found in Dugin someone whose views overlap with some of his own. I do not know how sincere Putin's embrace of religion is, and I doubt he knows much about (or cares much) about Dugin's main influences, viz. Heidegger, Rene Guenon's mystical "traditionalism," Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, Old Believer Russian Orthodoxy (prior to changes in creed made in the 17th century) and "real socialism" in which all individuals are as cells in the body politic, and not "autonomous" as the Liberalism he so loathes. The individual is likened to a body part ("arms and legs") which are needed for the health and function of the body but not to be confused with it. In philosophy this is called the "organismic analogy" and is found often in Statist ideologies.The body is the "people" whose manifestation is geo-political-- and in the case of Dugin's Russia it will take the form of an anti-modern, Eurasian superpower which is an effective counterweight to "Atlanticism" (West Europe, US and Canada) After all, the Atlantic Powers are all products of a "perverse" civilization, what with secularism, alleged nihilism, homosexuality and excessive individualism afoot. Apparently some right wing neo-fascists such as Golden Dawn have also found inspiration in Dugin's book, The Fourth Political Theory http://www.grreporter.info/... Much of European "Third Position" neo-fascist thought has indeed been influenced in part by Dugin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

I hasten to add, as someone who spent too many years working on Heidegger's philosophy in grad school, that Dugin's version of Heideggerian ontology-- which he credits as his primary influence-- is completely distorted. Heidegger had no patience for the occult, railed against all post-Platonic metaphysics and theology ("ontotheology), and his warnings about technology were not nearly as phobic as Dugin's. Indeed, one of Dugin's lectures has the title, "Why God Hates The Internet" betraying his very non-Heidegarrian blend of theology, politics and fierce anti-technological fervor (he endorses a total ban on the internet). Not only is technology evil, but those who don't support Putin in Russia are, he says, "mentally ill." I'm sure these maligned Russians will have even less hope if the internet ever is really banned there!

Dugin's philosophy is wildly syncretic, combining elements of things one would not usually associate (e.g. Stalinism and the Pagan Occultism of Hermes Trismegistus). But fascist ideologies often have such arcane undercurrents, and seldom do the masses tune into all the esoterica, focusing instead on the political and nationalistic parts without the metaphysics. For example, one aspect of German Fascism Dugin admires is Himmler's mystical/occult project, Ahnerbe, which fused the search for the origins of the "Aryan Race" with all sorts of occultism and pseudo-science. The Germans even funded an expedition to Tibet, and claimed that the historical Buddha might have been an "Aryan offshoot of the Nordic Race" as discussed in Christopher Hale's book Himmler's Crusade. Cranial measurements of Tibetans were done, Mandalas and Buddhist scriptures brought back to Germany and housed in the Anherbe Library. Mystification and authoritarian doctrines are often wedded, since more rational grounds for demanding total surrender of individuality to the corporate body politic in the modern west are in short supply. And so it is with Dugin's labyrinthine trail of books, lectures and interviews. To illustrate, here is a typical quotation of Dugin discussing Heidegger in connection with-- of all things-- Eurasianism from an interview. He is trying here to "clarify" one of the central themes in one of his books on Heidegger called The Philosophy of Another Beginning (Heidegger often spoke of a "second beginning in philosophy"-- the first one having occurred before Plato in Ancient Greece). Here Dugin is answering an interviewer regarding Eurasia as a 'philosophical' concept:

" Eurasia is a philosophical topos... It is first of all a Seynsgeschichtliche reality and only then a geopolitical, political or  economical one. So it is for me the land of New Beginning, nowhere land, the na-koja-abad of Persian thinker Suhrawardi. It is the territory for awakening an Ereignis [i.e.an "event" that suddenly comes into view or discernment in late Heidegger works-ed.]. That is the core of my own Seynsgeschichtliche [or] vision of the historic moment. The rebirth of Eurasia is an eschatological and spiritual event. Today, Eurasian people are in a profound existential sleep. But the logic of history put them in front of the dilemma either to awaken or die. That doesn’t depend on will: the will is orientated toward self-destruction. But the turn (Kehre) is always possible. Where there is risk there is salvation as well, as Hölderlin used to say. So I defend the choice of salvation. It is my choice and I hope Russia’s choice. We see signs of possible awakening in Russia through intermediary forms, such as the rejection of liberalism and American hegemony, and the search for identity. The same is true on a lesser scale for other Eurasian peoples. But I am sure the awakening
will come all of a sudden. Being prepared by all human history, it will arrive quite unexpectedly. Such is Ereignis. It can last. It is the rift in the texture of the sleep-time of inauthentic existence." (Source: http://www.4pt.su/en/conten...

All of this might be brushed aside as bad, even humorously bad philosophy if Dugin were not a politically influential thinker who has advised members of the Duma. One wonders if the sudden "event" Dugin would like to see in Eurasia is not only philosophical but military in nature. Let's remember that it was a military event in the Dombass region of Ukraine that sent Putin's ratings through the roof a few years back. Indeed, Dugin was involved directly. He has been praised by Putin; looms large in Russian media; is under US and Canadian sanctions for his role in the invasion of Crimea; and he has a large group of dedicated believers getting their talking points from him. So it may not be all that funny in the end, but I think there is a lesson in all of this.

As I began by saying, philosophy has until recently provided roadmaps for our understanding of politics, ethics, culture and to some extent the nature of knowledge itself. Many westerners have come to believe that their everyday beliefs, values and the political and economic structures within which they operate are simply the status quo, not the complex and often problematic products of long debates and discourses in philosophy, political economy, ethics and public life. This was not the case during the Cold War, of course, when Liberalism needed its apologists no less than did Bolshevism. There was even a time when reform-minded philosophers were household names (e.g. John Dewey, whose picture graced a US Stamp during his own lifetime). The idea that "it's the economy stupid," (as Bill Clinton put it in the 90s) that deregulated markets and a weakening representative form of government can take care of themselves without deliberate analysis and theory-- this idea has left something of a conceptual and moral vacuum at the center of contemporary politics. Elsewhere I have discussed the trend away from democracy supported by some empirical research in that area: https://disqus.com/home/dis... But here I emphasize that not only must we not take our system of government, policies, goals and values for granted (which leaves them in the hands of detached elites); but we must unlearn the myth that Secular Liberal Democracy *is* the global future, and realize that geopolitically and ideologically speaking, the grass is growing beneath our feet. That is, new philosophical and ideological constellations are coming into being, whether they be Modern Chinese Confucianism, Right Wing Ethno-Nationalism at home and in Europe or the new, anti-modern, anti-liberal, occult-lathed Russian/Eurasian fascism of Alexander Dugin. Meanwhile, the US population is understandably unsure of just where the country and government are going in the age of Trump. While Americans are soul-searching and questioning their future at home and as a global power, other great powers like Russia and China are beginning to articulate new political visions in their own post-Communist phases. - (Original Post from 2017)

Question: Do you think political philosophy is important in the present and future? Can it be "replaced" by other fields such as economics and the sciences?

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Pt. II)

(This post will make more sense to those who have read Part I, but can be read independently. It is an overview of W's examination of what happens when we try to discuss "mental" phenomena like sensations, desires, feelings and so on. We tend to treat them like private objects locked away in the "box of consciousness." But whatever the virtues of such an understanding may be, they do not, for W, shed light on the way we actually talk about these allegedly "private" phenomena. What follows is introductory and hopefully accessible. There is also supplementary video which may help.)

In part one we saw that W thinks that we only acquire meanings of words and sentences in social contexts by learning how and when to use them within language games. But the emphasis of part I was on words and sentences thought to represent or refer to “the external world”—objects and processes “outside” of my subjective mental world. The examples that came up included cards, balls, and ethical words applied to observable behavior (the good, etc.). How does Wittgenstein deal with words that are supposed to refer to inner experience or qualia? Since Augustine, but more especially since Descartes and Locke, the mental or subjective realm has been imagined as an interior locus of private experiences which only each one of us in solitude can undergo, while none of us has knowledge of the contents of other people’s inner life. This gives rise to such questions as “How do I know any one else really has any mental experiences?” and even “How do I know I’m not deceived by my own experience?” It also leads to a rigid mind-body dualism according to which personal or "inner" experience is immaterial while non-conscious entities(including , on this view,our own bodies) are thought to be mechanical, quantifiable and physical. The subject, the "owner" of mental experience, is viewed as being stuck in a private room that has no windows(Locke’s image from Essays on Human Understanding) a kind of theater of passing images and thoughts (Hume’s image). Either image makes it clear that each mind alone has privileged access to its contents (e.g. joys, sorrows, pains, plesures, color perceptions etc.). Since each of us is confined to a private realm, we can at best infer that others even have minds, much less what the contents of those minds are. Mental experience is, thus, terminally private for most modern philosophers between the 16th and 20th centuries, from Descartes and Locke to Wittgenstein's early mentor, Bertrand Russell and beyond.

Wittgenstein follows this path of thinking where it leads logically—to the idea that to express the actual experiences of inner life (sensations, emotions, memories, desires and beliefs) we would have to each come up with a “private language” where each word would correspond to some private experience unique to “me.” Each of us would have to name these experiences and keep track of the names so they could be used consistently and correctly. So when a certain sensation occurs I might mark down or say the letter “S” or “S1” and another sensation might be called “S2”and so on. The list of sensations, beliefs, desires etc. would soon get very long. How would any one person be sure they were using S1 for the same sensation today that they used it for yesterday? This problem is known as “memory skepticism.” If our sensations are private, then nobody could ever correct us if we were to confuse the private experience S1 names and the private experience S2 names. Maybe S1 in my private language originally meant something like “ throbbing toothache” but I mis-remember this and start to use it for other mental events like “tingling feeling on the gums” How would I know if I’m using the words consistently? To use a symbol consistently is to observe a rule such as "when I feel that particular sensation involved in today's toothache I will write the letter S in my diary." Perhaps a week later I have a sensation of some sort and I use the same symbol S. How do I know I'm following the rule that S should only be used for the sort of toothache I had last week? Wittgenstein makes an argument against the whole idea of such a private language by answering that question in the following way: We wouldn’t know. Using words correctly is a function of language games where others can play the game, correcting us if we break a rule we’re supposed to follow (such as the rule “use S1 for throbbing toothaches and only for throbbing toothaches that you experience.”) In PI (202) W says astutely, “obeying a rule is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule privately: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying a rule.” (PI: 202) This may be the closes W comes to making a formal argument in PI. Just because I think I'm following a rule that I invented, and about which nobody else knows, does not mean that I really am obeying that rule. Between the problem of unreliable memories, and the inability to know if I am following the rules of my own invented language, W has a strong case against the possibility of a private language. The famous sections that follow are collectively called the PLA or “Private Language Argument,” but the main argument is what I just quoted, and most of the numbered sections thereafter employ analogies, assorted examples,thought experiments and imagined dialogues to guide the reader toward an awareness of the confused thinking that leads us to talk about the "mind" and its "inner contents" as we do.

Perhaps the most famous passage in the book occurs when W asks us to imagine a room of people in which each person holds an opaque box. Nobody can see the content of anybody else’s box (a fine metaphor for subjective consciousness and private experiences). When asked what is inside the box, everybody checks their box and says “beetle.” But without the ability of any one person to see anyone else’s box, we have no way of knowing that what they mean by “beetle” is the same as what I mean when I say “beetle.” For all we know, all boxes could be empty, or some empty and others filled with various different entities or events. Or maybe what is “contained” in the box is in a state of flux, and is not a fixed referent at all. All or none of these are possibilities in such a situation. Let the word "beetle" mean toothache, and Wittgenstein will say that beetle/toothache does not refer to the private experience of the sufferer but his/her "pain behavior". John or Jill will, perhaps, put their hand on their cheek, squint, and say "Ouch! That root canal was just dreadful. It really hurts." A nearby friend will probably respond by saying something like "Sorry to hear it. Did you take something for that?" This is the pain language game. I don't try to imagine exactly what you feel, but I do understand the expressive behavior. I will usually have no reason to doubt you (unless I'm a doctor who knows you like pain killers, or something like that). We're not able to get at the "beetle" or the concrete experience of the sufferer. But I don't need to in order to understand that this person is in pain. The pain is not attributed to the mind or the body but the person. Nobody says, "I'm sorry your mind is in pain?" in a case like this. Rather we are dealing with persons not metaphysical substances, so we say "I'm sorry *you* are in pain."

But how do we learn to understand each other in this way? If we are not matching private phenomena to symbols, how does the ability to communicate effectively about sensations, emotions and the rest arise? Wittgenstein's account involves interpersonal relations, as for example between parents and children. Suppose little Johnny falls down and gets a nasty cut on his arm. He begins to writhe on the pavement, scream, and cry out “Ow,ohh No! Ouch!” while grimacing and maybe choking up and crying. (Sorry about all the painful examples, but W used them quite a lot to illustrate his points.) Along comes his father, say, and he disinfects the cut, soothes the boy and says something like the following: “It’s okay, Johnny, when I was young and I got cuts I acted just like you. But you’re going to be just fine, and before you know it there won’t be any pain. As you grow up, you won’t get so upset or cry over a cut. You’ll merely say “Oops, this cut hurts, I better bandage it up. But you'll know that big boys don't cry.”

Is this defining pain by pointing to it, the way we saw in part one with objects like balls? No. Johnny is being shown new—entirely different—ways of behaving when he gets cut. He is learning to *substitute* pain words ("throbbing," "dull," "sharp" pains etc.) for screams and groans. He is replacing one way of expressing pain with another. But, asks W, isn’t this leaving the internal experience out? Aware that some would object that W is only concerned with behavior (what people say and do) but not subjective experience (what people feel and experience), Wittgenstein preemptively attempts to correct that misreading (unfortunatelysome authors continue to see him as a behaviorist who believes the inner world is a Skinnerian black box which nobody can see or understand due to thought experiments like the "beetle in the box" and others) Wittgenstein makes it clear that he does not have any commitment to behaviorism.

From sections 307-323 Wittgenstein answers the question he poses in section 307: “Are you not really a behaviorist in disguise?” (an imaginary interlocutor is asking this of W) (PI: 307). Wittgenstein makes it plain that he is not. Asked if he believes everything but behavior is a fiction (i.e. the inner life would then be fictional) he demurs saying: “If I speak of a fiction at all it is a grammatical [i.e. linguistic] fiction.” (PI: 307). That is, the fiction is to pretend our non-linguistic experience can be converted into a public language game. It is not fictional to say there really are non-linguistic experiences occurring all the time. To make the point even clearer, he says, “I tell someone I’m in pain….Let us assume he says “It’s not so bad.” Doesn’t that prove he believes in something behind the outward expression of pain? (PI: 310). Just as with my example of Johnny and his father, the interaction doesn’t make sense without the belief in what we metaphorically call "inner" experience, or better, personal experience. He is not a behaviorist, but rather someone who sees language as possible only at a public level, and all we have in public settings are the expressions of inner processes as mediated by language games. We can't "get at" the non-linguistic experience with words.

Now, back to Johnny and his father discussing his painful cut. By the time Johnny grows up he has learned a language game of sensations, emotions and other such phenomena. His own interpretations of sensations, feelings, etc, will have change due to the socialization into public forms of life (culture). The idea that “it isn’t so bad” or “you’re getting to old to cry about cuts” will have been internalized and will play a role in shaping both the experiences and their expressions. In
a private non-socialized realm there is no language game for pain that is established for mutual understandings. But when you go to a pain clinic and are asked to rate pain on a 1-10 scale, or describe it as stabbing or throbbing, mild or severe—you have learned to interpret whatever private processes occur in some way that enables these public words to have meaning.

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Below is a "Crash Course" video which is mostly devoted to summarizing the sections of PI that I have discussed in this post (language games, the beetle in the box, private language etc.) The presentation of W's ideas begins at the 3 minute mark and continues almost up to the end. It may help to clarify W's ideas in all of 7 minutes.

Recommended Reading:
P.M.S. Hacker: Wittgenstein On Human Nature; (Routledge, NY: 1999) is a 60 page monograph on Wittgenstein's later work (mainly the PI) that covers the Private Language Argument quite nicely. Hacker is a peerless W scholar who has co-translated Philosophical Investigations, and written a 4 volume commentary on it.

There is also an excellent overview of the PI in the John Searle video in the comments section below for those with the interest and/or time (it's about 40 minutes).

Questions: 

Do you think W neglects the realm of personal meanings?

How convincing do you find W's view of language?

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Pt. I)

In 1953 Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was published posthumously. Few books in the 20th century had the revolutionary impact of this one. Though philosophers still debate the finer points of the book, it is clear that Wittgenstein had come to see philosophical problems, and many problems that arise in everyday life, as "symptoms" of a confused "picture of the essence of language."(Wittgenstein, PI: 1 ) It is important to stress that Wittgenstein is not simply targeting philosophy or philosophers here. The understanding or picture of language that Wittgenstein wants to displace is not to be thought of primarily as a "theory" (whether Platonic or Cartesian, etc.) but as a pre-philosophical conception which is deeply entrenched in the way most people (or at least Westerners) think whether or not they study philosophy. Philosophers have only complicated things by establishing theories of meaning and mind that are based on these preconceptions. Wittgenstein's goal in Philosophical Investigations (hereafter PI) is to lay bare the nature of the confusions he diagnoses, and then to enact what he calls "philosophical therapy" to help the befuddled reader to find her way out of the trap, much as one might "show the fly out of the fly-bottle," in W's famous phrase. So the last thing he wants is yet another theory of language. Rather, he compares himself to Freud in the sense that his aim is to liberate perplexed sufferers from a kind of conceptual illness, not to impose new doctrines on anybody (Monk: Penguin;1990). So, like Nietzsche and Heidegger before him, Wittgenstein prophesies the end of philosophy as we know it, and a new beginning. Unlike them, though, the new beginning for Wittgenstein leaves absolutely no role for future philosophers of any kind. The last job philosophy will ever have is to talk itself out of business!

What is this misleading picture of language that W thinks most of have internalized? He finds it operative in Augustine's recollection of learning how to speak in his Confessions, and calls it the "Augustinian" view of language-- but it could just as well be called Cartesian or Russellian-- or for that matter the received view of language generally. Firstly, there is the assumption that language is uniform, that all words and sentences have meaning in the same way. If we ask, "How do words come to have the meanings they do?" most people will think this is a reasonable question that a philosopher or linguist might try to answer. The typical answer to such a question is that words have meanings by virtue of standing for objects. So if I say, "There is a tree" then I a) have a picture or representation of a tree "in my mind" which b) refers to any number of actual trees in the external world. The essential feature of meaning, then, is that of names that correspond to things, or words that correspond to objects. Wittgenstein sums this view up thus,"In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands." (Wittgenstein PI: 1) So the meaning of the word, "book" is simply any thing that is a book. The meaning of a ball is simply any member of the total set of balls that exist.

How do we learn these meanings according to the traditional view? Through ostensive reference i.e. the act of somebody pointing to objects (like books and balls) while uttering the word for that object (e.g. "book, book" or "ball, ball") This is what Augustine remembers his elders doing until he too knew the names of the objects. The adult points and gestures until the child comes to associate the words "books and balls" with their referents, which are the books and balls around the house etc. In this way the child gradually masters language and becomes a competent language user. This is still, more or less, the way many philosophers and linguists treat language. We learn how to master word-object relations largely through ostensive reference. But W's response is that pointing to and naming objects isn't how children learn to use words at all. Of course it is part of the process. Adults do point over and over to objects, but what linguists and philosophers tend to overlook is that when they point they are also engaging in activities which demonstrate how the objects can be used in various ways.. If all the adult (A) does is to point to a static ball on the floor and intones the syllable "ball" while the child (C) looks on passively then C will not learn how to use the word "ball" meaningfully. For all C knows the reference is not to the ball itself but to the color of the ball. If it's a tennis ball he may start using the word ball when he sees anything that is yellow. But if A starts to play a little game with C, perhaps rolling the ball to C and coaxing him to roll it back until there's a pattern back and forth, and if he says "ball" while rolling it, then C will eventually get the hang of it and say "ball" as he rolls it over to A. This kind of primitive activity in which words are first learned is called a"Language Game" (LG) by Wittgenstein (Witt. PI: 7)

Language Gamess are devices used by Wittgenstein to emphasize that we learn by doing things according to certain social conventions. Balls are for rolling, bouncing, catching, throwing, kicking, etc. Each of these might be part of a different language game. Over time, C will come to apply the word ball in all such instances provided he/she learns how to play such games as "kick the ball," "catch" and so on. A simple one to one correspondence between the general term ball and some object which is static could never reveal the meanings of all these diverse activities and types of balls. According to Wittgenstein's "theory of meaning as use" we learn language meanings by learning the various ways in which words can be used in social settings where others also use the words. Meanings are socially established, perpetuated and altered in practices (like the athletics examples) which arise in different cultures (or "forms of life" in W's idiom).

Words and sentences, then, do much more than describe the world by referring to objects. Some of the language games Wittgenstein lists include giving and obeying orders, speculating about events, making up stories, play-acting, singing, guessing at riddles, asking, thanking, cursing etc.(Witt. PI: 7) We invent games as well, or take existing ones and alter the rules.(PI: 83) There is inventiveness and flexibility involved in the negotiation of meanings in everyday life. It should be clear that you can't understand the language games listed above in terms of symbols that correspond to objects. But now Wittgenstein will widen his attack on conventional understandings by saying that we can't even define the words in a universal and general way. He claims that all, or most, meanings are fuzzy or vague as they must be if they are to be used in such a variety of social contexts (e.g. the symbol ball stands for tennis balls, golf balls and footballs, and there is no precise and fixed definition for all balls taken as a set; a new type of ball may be invented tomorrow morning). W demonstrates the point by attempting to define the word "game" which he is already using in more than one way. According to the received view of language, it should be possible to provide an"Essential Definition" of an abstract noun like "game." We would then be able to describe the "essence" or unifying core of all games by listing the necessary and sufficient conditions for using the word. How might that look?

What, asks W, are some properties shared by any and all games we might think of? Winning and losing? No. Playing catch or bouncing a ball against a wall doesn't include victory or defeat, but they are games. Teams? No, that leaves out solitaire and solo video games. Perhaps games can be defined essentially as activities that are governed by rules. Perhaps rules are a universal feature of games. This has been suggested, but Wittgenstein thinks not. He writes:

    "We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start  various  existing games, but playing many without  finishing    them    and    in  between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air chasing each other with the ball, and bombarding one another for a joke, and so on...And is there not also the case where we play and make up the rules as we go along? We can also alter the rules as we play." (Witt. PI: 83)

The upshot is that there is no essence, no underlying unity to the word/concept "game" just as there is no essence in common to all language. Some games are governed by rules, others not. Some word use is rule-governed; some not. If I ask for a list of rules governing all instances of the word "chair," it will probably not include the rule "you may use the word chair to refer to an object you stand on while grabbing a book from a high shelf" nor will it include "a chair is an object used for breaking windows." But I would not be misusing the word if I said to a friend in my house, "I need to use that chair to grab the book up there" or if I mentioned having used a chair to break a window during a fire to get out of a burning house. The point is that there is no exhaustive and universal list of rules that get at the essence of objects, activities, or words. In German the word game also means play (spiel), and W is emphasizing the playful nature of concepts and words which often do not have fixed boundaries articulated as a set of rules, although some (e.g. chess) do have such finite rules. Games do not have essences but "criss-crossing similarities and differences" or "family resemblances." Some games resemble others because they involve cards, or balls, or they involve winning and losing, or they are played standing, sitting or running, etc. The "bewitchment of language" leads us to believe that the abstract noun "game" actually stands for some unitary phenomenon or concept. Instead its meaning is both vague (ranging from contact sports like football to solitaire with all kinds of gradations in the middle) and indeterminate (we can invent new games and they will be recognized by others as games because they resemble already existing games). Thus meanings are based not on unchanging concepts and/or rules, but ongoing practical social activity. Because of the examples of words we have followed Wittgenstein in using, it may seem that the implications of all this cannot be terribly important. To show why this has importance, lets examine a key philosophical category,"Good" and see how W's analysis might undermine much philosophy that has been done in Ethics.( We could do much the same with other intellectual terms used in philosophy and other disciplines, but for now one will do.)

What does it mean to label something as "good?" (We could also ask this about beauty, truth and other basic philosophical terms). It is usually assumed that there is some unitary essence, a general definition of the meaning of goodness that guides the use of the term in everyday life and in ethics. But what does a "good" cup of coffee have to do with a "good lover?" Or a "good" argument with a "good person?" A "good game of golf" seems to be, at best, only faintly related to a "perfectly good chair" which, in turn, has little in common with a "good choice" when ordering at the restaurant. What is the common meaning shared in the locutions, "so-and-so has good eyesight" and "so-and-so has a good soul?" None of these have identical meanings, none follow exact rules, but all are likely to reveal some similarities and differences (W's "family resemblance" view of meaning).

Plato assumed that "The Good" was a unitary essence, a universal "idea." Thus Socrates famously used a "craft-analogy" when discussing "The Good" quite frequently. He would say, "a good carpenter knows his craft and thus makes excellent tables and chairs; a good statesman must know his craft and know how to govern with excellence" as if there were a common essence of the good that makes carpentry and governing city-states importantly similar. This, says Wittgenstein, is the "bewitchment of language" -- the spell of words on the mind when we don't attend to their multiple meanings, uses, contexts and the associated activities which at best resemble one another to some degree and in some way. In this case , if W is right, the very idea of "Goodness" or "the Good" is displaced, leaving behind a world of multiple meanings in flux. (Some have compared this outcome with Derrida's deconstructionism, though I would be cautious about such a claim.) We will explore PI in further detail and discuss its legacy in philosophy in part 2.

References:

-The Duty of Genius; Ray Monk(Penguin 1990) --excellent biography of W

- Philosophical Investigations ; Ludwig Wittgenstein (Oxford; Blackwell 1953)
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-Do you find Wittgenstein's view of language to be convincing? Why? Why not?

-If Wittgenstein's analysis of language is correct what implications does it have for fields that depend on universal definitions (e.g. sciences and much of philosophy)?

-It is W's contention that philosophers have caused far more trouble and confusion than they have alleviated. What do you think?

Wittgenstein discusses his reasons for rejecting philosophy in his later career. He also provides a concise overview of some aspects of PI. Taken from Derek Jarman's film, "Wittgenstein" (worth seeing for those with an interest in W!) The questioner in this scene is supposed to be John Meynard Keynes.

Reappraising Humanism in the 21st Century

Humanism since the Enlightenment has emphasized several interrelated ideas which form its core. For purposes of this post I break these ideas down into 2 philosophical principles and 3 social and political guidelines for action. The 2 underlying principles of post-Enlightenment humanism are:

1) All human beings have intrinsic moral worth or dignity. (Historically speaking this can be seen as a secular codification--by Kant and others-- of the idea that all human beings have a "divine spark" or a soul which gives them inherent value).

2) Intellectual, moral and epistemological frameworks can only be judged and compared in terms of human perspectives. There is no God's eye view of the world which can be legitimately claimed in the public sphere. ( Edit: In Kantian terms, we do not have experiential access to the noumenal but only the phenomenal world-- although this will lead to some tension when Kant and others attempt to establish Universal Ethics.)

The 3 related guidelines for action in Humanism are:

a) Human beings alone are responsible for moral reasoning and the legislative policies that derive from such reasoning.

b) Religion/s (which had caused much war in early modern Europe) should, ideally, be tolerated but not viewed as a basis for the legitimacy of norms, values, political systems or laws. Politics and the public sphere are to be secular (i.e. Religion cannot be a coercive force in politics and law).

c) Faith should be placed in the (theoretically) unique rational capacity of human agents to continually learn from experience, thus improving both scientific and ethical knowledge. Such ethically informed Rationalism should result in progress. Though there may be temporary set-backs and lapses into "backward" or "barbaric" behavior (such as excessive nationalism, chauvinism, war, and oppression) the overall trend moves in one direction towards the moral improvement of humanity, as envisioned by the philosophes of the Enlightenment, and upheld in some form by most humanists to date.

This ideal picture, or Ideal Type of post-Enlightenment humanism is roughly equivalent to what one of its most subtle critics, Charles Taylor, in The Secular Age, calls "Exclusive Humanism." It is the moral underpinning of Modern Western Liberal Democracies and the International Human Rights Movement. Writing in the 21st century, Taylor is sympathetic to much of the above. He certainly would like to see liberal democracy (or Social Democracy), social justice and toleration of diverse cultures and lifeways flourish as with the humanist ethos. However, he holds that by making the human being the ONLY possible source of morality humanism runs the risk of lapsing into arbitrariness, lacking universal, or at least transcultural foundations while continuing to use the language of "Universal Rights and Obligations." Along with Vaclav Havel and others, Taylor notes that the substantive ethics which Humanism prizes derive originally from religious sources. An obvious, and oft-discussed example is the concept of "Natural Rights." These are the basis for what has become the secular and international concept of Universal Human Rights, as encoded in the UN Charter of these Rights. Taylor and others note that many foreign countries have resisted compliance to these rights because they attempt to regulate and prescribe some of the deepest moral issues from an Enlightenment perspective without respect for alternative traditions-- often religiously informed ones. He is equally concerned about Western intellectuals who either a) reject humanism (e.g. postmodernists) or b) give lip-service to humanism without believing it has any underlying moral foundations, but is just a preference or matter of their own self-interest in remaining part of the modern West. He believes that Humanism cannot sustain its own values without acknowledging a "Transcendent" source or object of reverence and value. However, this inspirational transcendent element, he warns, must not "ossify into metaphysical or religious dogma" since dogmatic religion and metaphysics are polar opposites of the humanistic ethos.

His concerns are not entirely unwarranted. In academia, Humanism is often mocked by professors trading in Critical Theory, Post-Colonial Studies, Gender Studies and a whole swathe of fields influenced by the anti-humanism of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and others across the humanities departments in North America and Europe. As much as I respect Foucault and the others, I have always thought their dismissal of a coherent notion of individual and social agency has only had the (unintended) effect of making humanities less relevant to social and political action in the actual (as opposed to theorized) world. Postmodernist and similar approaches are, at bottom, antihumanist . Still, it is hard to imagine what kind of "transcendent" value, free of dogma and doctrine, Taylor has in mind. He stipulates that it could not be a religion and does little to characterize it with specificity. It's hard to see something so ill-defined as this convincing skeptical members of our own and other cultures that humanist ethics really are universal after all! Perhaps it would be better to say that secular ethics can include traditionally religious attributes such as reverence and faith. But the
reverence can be for nature and future generations, for example, rather than a deity. Faith can be placed in our creative and intelligent capacities and potentials, however often they go unfulfilled. It is by focusing on and having faith in such capacities that we are more likely to realize them in multiple ways ranging from the creation of art and music to the intelligent and fair-minded social reforms and
policies that have improved life for many (though not enough) human beings (egs. abolitionism, women's rights and suffrage, civil rights, welfare entitlements for the poor, LGBTQ rights, international human rights and justice, et al.)

Putting Taylor's concerns aside, in the 21st century, there are even greater pressures on humanism coming not from anti-humanism in philosophy, but Posthumanism and Transhumanism which are immanent technological and ideological forces ensconced in various institutions including biotechnology, the strong AI community, R&D in the military, genetically modified children (designer babies) now sanctioned by gov't in "limited cases" when feasible in the future to cure disease and some of the more (for now) fringe groups like "HumanityPlus"advocating for human hybridization, chimeras, cloning, cyborg citizens and ultimately the "Singularity" or advent of Superintelligence that will subsume and eventually replace homo sapiens as the pinnacle of intelligent life on Earth.

Humanists have not done much to prepare for or respond to such trends. There are some "digital humanists" like Jared Lanier ( see You Are Not A Gadget) who are concerned with the direction of technologies they helped to create. But the posthuman and weakly transhuman revolution is here. Human enhancements are now widely touted as goods, even when their value is not curative but transformative of what is traditionally considered "innate" to the human condition (e.g. powers of memory, concentration, strength, cosmetic issues of "beauty," sexual drive, hormone levels, genitalia, ability to favorably influence future children via the editing of genes, etc.) If Humanism's first two principles (above) state that we are limited to the "human perspective" morally and epistemically, we might do well to ask just what the boundaries of the "human perspective" are in the coming age of human enhancements and augmentations.

Finally, there is the critique from so-called Biocentrists, who claim that the 2nd principle of humanism (we can only evaluate moral claims from a human perspective) is flawed. Human empathy with other members of the biosphere, they say, is thus thwarted leading to the exploitation and abuse of other species, and ecological systems characteristic of the first 2 waves of the Industrial Revolution. Climate Change can't be addressed, they claim, until we "dethrone" human beings from their privileged status of being most valued. Some speak of the intrinsic rights of animals, trees and perhaps the planet itself conceived as the biosphere. Humanism makes us too self-important to notice we are but fragile transients who depend much more on the ecosphere than it does on us. We can't "save the planet" because the planet will be fine with or without us just as it was fine before we existed. Slogans like "save the planet" really just express our desire to save or retain certain optimal conditions for human life. That's fine, but we state it as though we're actually in charge of the planet-- a case of terminal hubris for those who emphasize the biosphere as the ultimate transcendent object of reverence. The non-anthropocentric environmentalists argue that since we're part of the biosphere and, along with untold species, depend on it it for our very survival, it has as greater value than the human race which ought to revere it and value it as intrinsically i.e. as a good-in-itself. It is the hubris of placing ourselves above nature that continues to result in the undermining of our own civilization by emitting greenhouse gasses and depleting finite resources as though with impunity. In a state of blindness we imagine we run the show on this planet, and the earth itself is a possession or set of resources to be used to gratify our wants. Even when the science is in, we stumble on polluting and damaging the world with only a faint understanding of the consequences. We are drunk with conceit.

Contemporary Humanists can retort that, for all the truth in that, in the end it is human action or inaction that will determine our fate. We may be prone to hubris, and that's not good. We may fail this ultimate test of morality and pay the ultimate price of Anthropogenic Global Warming run amok. But whatever happens does not depend on the value we place on the planet for its own sake (since the planet will be fine come what may, just as it was 'fine' before humans existed). In any case, the planet or biosphere does not and cannot set policies or make moral judgments, while we do and must. In this sense, at least, the moral burden falls flatly on humanity, willy nilly-- and what we do or fail to do reflects what we value. In this sense, at least, the humanistic insistence that we alone are responsible for our own conduct and fate seems to fit the situation we face. Yet there is something about the critique both from Taylor and the post-humanist environmentalists that strikes a chord. We may be the responsible agents in terms of Global Warming, but that does not mean that a proper appreciation of our fragility and dependence on nature would not contribute greater depth and understanding to humanism itself.

The more deeply we have reverence for and reflect on humanity, the more likely it is that we will realize that humanity already includes nature, ecosystems and the cosmos. Surely great humanist thinkers like John Dewey and Albert Einstein did not value human beings in a vacuum but rather it is the human world which they cherished. That world is part of nature/ the ecosphere. From cosmos to solar system to biosphere, nature literally constitutes our necessary condition for being-- our source and home. What is humanity without a natural habitat consistent with our own survival and flourishing as well as that of innumerable lifeforms with which we are entwined in complex, dynamic interdependencies we still barely understand? The first environmentalists and conservationists emphasized this (though their scientific understanding of it was less impressive than their practical and poetic understanding). From Emerson, Thoreau and Muir to Dewey's Experience & Nature, to Aldo Leopold and his famous "Land Ethic," something like this has been urged by American environmentalists, originally as an extension of humanism.

But alas such reverence and valuation as this cannot be dialed into the nearest pharmacy. It arises spontaneously as all genuinely reverent states (including religious ones if they are not based on fear or expected rewards) always have. There is no point in Taylor or the Biocentrists arguing for faith and reverence in something greater than human beings when such an appreciation cannot be the result of any ideology or program. It is also hubris to attempt to engineer such rarefied states as reverence, wonderment and appreciation whether for the arts, the natural world, or the cosmos. After all, we're not talking about cold, unemotional beliefs here but about attitudes and sympathies that enliven our relationship to others and the world, but which cannot be feigned.

Related links:

Modern Humanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Antihumanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Posthumanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Transhumanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Biocentrism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

In light of the problems and challenges outlined some questions are left unanswered at this time.
What do you think?

1) Is there still a need and viable basis for articulating Humanism in the 21st century (e.g. to protect the values of liberal democracies and human rights)?

2) Does Humanism need to acknowledge a source of value greater than human beings alone in order to thrive (e.g. The Biosphere, "Gaia,"  or a vague concept of Transcendence ala Charles Taylor above)?

The Return of Rationalism in the Age of Fake News

Setting up the Context: Farewell to Reason?

Social Psychology and Behavioral Economics have been greatly influenced by the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (d.1996) who did pioneering empirical research on rational decision making from the 1970s to the late 1990s. In study after study, they found that the "rational utility maximizer" presupposed by classical economic models has no counterpart in real life. Cognitive biases are embedded in a non-conscious process of making decisions quickly. Slow and deliberate thinking is much less prevalent than most psychologists and economists had previously thought. Much of this is summarized in Kahneman's 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow https://books.google.com/bo... . For now, the main point is that models of rational agency were deeply undercut, even discredited by Kahneman, Tversky and associated figures like Richard Thaler who built on these foundations. By the 90s, several universities using real-time PET Brain Scans and game-playing, reinforced the view that decision-making is predominantly emotional and that people do not know what their best interests are, and so cannot be "utility maximizers," i.e. rational goal-directed agents.(Goldman; 2004) Subsequent brainscan studies support the hypothesis that most decisions are not even made consciously (e.g. https://www.sciencedaily.co... ) All of this has trickled down to mass media reports on bias, motivated reasoning and other concepts marshaled to explain seemingly irrational and counterproductive behaviors. The image of persons as "rational animals" has taken quite a beating .

Still, Kahneman and others have pointed out that it is possible to slow down and think deliberately with practice, even learning to avoid some of the automatic biases he and others have identified as widespread phenomena. The question thus arises: If we were to make decisions (how to vote, what cause to support) and judgments (what to believe and why) consciously and somewhat rationally, would we be able to identify our own interests and detect faulty arguments in politics and mass media, for example? Questions like these have no clear-cut answers, but many moral psychologists and affective scientists have promoted the idea that paradoxically, the more we think about morally and politically loaded issues consciously and deliberately, the stronger our biases and prejudices become. This paradoxical outcome (if it is true) is thought to be the product of "motivated reasoning" whereby we evaluate evidence and facts mainly in terms of arguments that support what we already believe or desire (see, Haidt, Kahan, Sperber et al.). Basically, "reason" is largely superfluous; it functions more or less to rationalize our our beliefs and deeds. Whether hypothesized in terms of evolutionary theory (Dan Sperber https://www.psychologytoday... ), policy studies (Dan Kahan https://papers.ssrn.com/sol... ) or moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt https://www.nytimes.com/201... -- the result it a kind of "farewell to reason" which I have never endorsed.

On this channel and elsewhere, I've argued (against the current grain) that learning and practicing critical thinking skills and learning civics in an emotionally engaging setting would go a long way in building up "rationality-muscles" that have long atrophied in the age of click-of -the-mouse news and communications generally. Elsewhere I have argued that rationality and emotion are most certainly entangled in complex ways, but that emotions can themselves be more or less appropriate to various situations based on rational considerations. We certainly act as if that is true when, for example, telling others that their anger is "irrational" or disproportionate to the perceived offense (as in cases like road rage). We act, that is, as if emotions already include rational considerations, which I think is correct, http://changingminds.org/ex... I will expand on that thouht in a post on philosophy of emotions in the future. For now, the point is that when, for example, Jonathan Haidt, claims that passions rule over reason, there is an assumption that these are competing rather than interconnected aspects of mental life. Can emotions be educated, enriched, or broadened? Can people become less prone to snap judgments (less impatient) and cultivate greater *curiosity*-- that pivotal intellectual emotion that, along with *wonder* is associated with both philosophy and science? Is the life of the mind doomed to the narrow precincts of motivated reasoning and rationalization? I do not think so.
Therefore, I was delighted to come across the following NYT article and the detailed research article from the Journal of Cognition which it summarizes . Taking on the motivated reasoning account, the authors review an impressive body of empirical evidence that supports the view that reasoning skills are positively correlated with the ability to effectively differentiate fake from real news regardless of political ideology or moral background beliefs. Links to the NY Times piece, and the academic research article it summarizes are provided below.
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Why Do People Fall for Fake News?

by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand

What makes people susceptible to fake news and other forms of strategic misinformation? And what, if anything, can be done about it?These questions have become more urgent in recent years, not least because of revelations about the Russian campaign to influence the 2016 United States presidential election by disseminating propaganda through social media platforms. In general, our political culture seems to be increasingly populated by people who espouse outlandish or demonstrably false claims that often align with their political ideology.

The good news is that psychologists and other social scientists are working hard to understand what prevents people from seeing through propaganda.The bad news is that there is not yet a consensus on the answer. Much of the debate among researchers falls into two opposing camps. One group claims that our ability to reason is hijacked by our partisan convictions: that is, we’re prone to rationalization. The other group —to which the two of us belong — claims that the problem is that we often fail to exercise our critical faculties: that is, we’re mentally lazy.

However, recent research suggests a silver lining to the dispute: Both camps appear to be capturing an aspect of the problem. Once we understand how much of the problem is a result of rationalization and how much a result of laziness, and as we learn more about which factor plays a role in what types of situations, we’ll be better able to design policy solutions to help combat the problem.

The rationalization camp, which has gained considerable prominence in recent years, is built around a set of theories contending that when it comes to politically charged issues, people use their intellectual abilities to persuade themselves to believe what they want to be true rather than attempting to actually discover the truth. According to this view, political passions essentially make people unreasonable, even —indeed, especially — if they tend to be good at reasoning in other contexts. (Roughly: The smarter you are, the better you are at rationalizing.)

Some of the most striking evidence used to support this position comes from an influential 2012 study in which the law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues found that the degree of political polarization on the issue of climate change was greater among people who scored higher on measures of science literary and numerical ability than it was among those who scored lower on these tests. Apparently, more “analytical” Democrats were better able to convince themselves that climate change was a problem, while more “analytical” Republicans were better able to convince themselves that climate change was not a problem. Professor Kahan has found similar results in, for example, studies about gun control in which he experimentally manipulated the partisan slant of information that participants were asked to assess.

The implications here are profound: Reasoning can exacerbate the problem, not provide the solution, when it comes to partisan disputes over facts.Further evidence cited in support of this of argument comes from a 2010 study by the political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, who found that appending corrections to misleading claims in news articles can sometimes backfire: Not only did corrections fail to reduce misperceptions, but they also sometimes increased them. It seemed as if people who were ideologically inclined to believe a given falsehood worked so hard to come up with reasons that the correction was wrong that they came to believe the falsehood even more strongly.

But this “rationalization” account, though compelling in some contexts, does not strike us as the most natural or most common explanation of the human weakness for misinformation. We believe that people often just don’t think critically enough about the information they encounter.

A great deal of research in cognitive psychology has shown that a little bit of reasoning goes a long way toward forming accurate beliefs. For example, people who think more analytically (those who are more likely to exercise their analytic skills and not just trust their “gut”response) are less superstitious, less likely to believe in conspiracy theories and less receptive to seemingly profound but actually empty assertions (like “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). This body of evidence suggests that the main factor explaining the acceptance of fake news could be cognitive laziness, especially in the context of social media, where news items are often skimmed or merely glanced at.

To test this possibility, we recently ran a set of studies in which participants of various political persuasions indicated whether they believed a series of news stories. We showed them real headlines taken from social media, some of which were true and some of which were false. We gauged whether our participants would engage in reasoning or “go with their gut” by having them complete something called the cognitive reflection test, a test widely used in psychology and behavioral economics. It consists of questions with intuitively compelling but incorrect answers, which can be easily shown to be wrong with a modicum of reasoning. (For example: “If you’re running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in?” If you’re not thinking you might say “first place,” when of course the answer is second place.)

We found that people who engaged in more reflective reasoning were better at telling true from false, regardless of whether the headlines aligned with their political views. (We controlled for demographic facts such as level of education as well as political leaning.) In follow-up studies yet to be published, we have shown that this finding was replicated using a pool of participants that was nationally representative with respect to age, gender, ethnicity and region of residence, and that it applies not just to the ability to discern true claims from false ones but also to the ability to identify excessively partisan coverage of true events.

Our results strongly suggest that somehow cultivating or promoting our reasoning abilities should be part of the solution to the kinds of partisan misinformation that circulate on social media. And other new research provides evidence that even in highly political contexts,people are not as irrational as the rationalization camp contends. Recent studies have shown, for instance, that correcting partisan misperceptions does not backfire most of the time — contrary to the results of Professors Nyhan and Reifler described above — but instead leads to more accurate beliefs. We are not arguing that findings such as Professor Kahan’s that support the rationalization theory are unreliable. Our argument is that cases in which our reasoning goes awry —which are surprising and attention-grabbing — seem to be exceptions rather than the rule. Reason is not always, or even typically, held captive by our partisan biases. In many and perhaps most cases, it seems, reason does promote the formation of accurate beliefs.

This is not just an academic debate; it has real implications for public policy. Our research suggests that the solution to politically charged misinformation should involve devoting resources to the spread of accurate information and to training or encouraging people to think more critically. You politicized times. Just remember that this is also true of people you disagree with.
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References/Related Readings

-Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion; Pantheon Books; 2012

- Dan Kahan: Director of Cultural Cognition Project Website at Yale- http://www.culturalcognitio...
-Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow; Farrar, Strauss and Giroux; 2011

-Richard Thaler: Quasi-Rational Economics; Russel Sage Foundation, 1994

-Gordon Pennycock and David G. Rand: Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning; Journal of Cognition; June, 2018
PDF here- https://static1.squarespace...
-Gordon Pennycock and David G. Rand: "Why Do People Fall For Fake News," NY Times , Jan. 19, 2019

Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier: The Enigma of Reason; Harvard U. Press, 2017
Recommended Critical Thinking Series: Detecting fallacies and biases: https://www.khanacademy.org...

The above 7 minute video frames some of the main issues under discussion, and shows current efforts in education to combat the plague of Fake News. It comes from the PBS News Hour:

Questioning the Idea of Meritocracy

-"We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else..."  -Barack Obama, inaugural address, 2013

-"We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers." - Donald Trump, inaugural address, 2017

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life – money, power, jobs, university admission – should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events.

Most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. In the UK, 84 per cent of respondents to the 2009 British Social Attitudes survey stated that hard work is either ‘essential’ or ‘very important’ when it comes to getting ahead, and in 2016 the Brookings Institute found that 69 per cent of Americans believe that people are rewarded for intelligence and skill. Respondents in both countries believe that external factors, such as luck and coming from a wealthy family, are much less important. While these ideas are most pronounced in these two countries, they are popular across the globe.

Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck (2016), the US economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates’s stellar rise as Microsoft’s founder, as well as to Frank’s own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best.

According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

The ‘ultimatum game’ is an experiment, common in psychological labs, in which one player (the proposer) is given a sum of money and told to propose a division between him and another player (the responder), who may accept the offer or reject it. If the responder rejects the offer, neither player gets anything. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times, and usually the proposer offers a relatively even split. If the amount to be shared is $100, most offers fall between $40-$50.

One variation on this game shows that believing one is more skilled leads to more selfish behaviour. In research at Beijing Normal University, participants played a fake game of skill before making offers in the ultimatum game. Players who were (falsely) led to believe they had ‘won’ claimed more for themselves than those who did not play the skill game. Other studies confirm this finding. The economists Aldo Rustichini at the University of Minnesota and Alexander Vostroknutov at Maastricht University in the Netherlands found that subjects who first engaged in a game of skill were much less likely to support the redistribution of prizes than those who engaged in games of chance. Just having the idea of skill in mind makes people more tolerant of unequal outcomes. While this was found to be true of all participants, the effect was much more pronounced among the ‘winners’.

By contrast, research on gratitude indicates that remembering the role of luck increases generosity. Frank cites a study in which simply asking subjects to recall the external factors (luck, help from others) that had contributed to their successes in life made them much more likely to give to charity than those who were asked to remember the internal factors (effort, skill).

Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.

This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The ‘even playing field’ is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race and the like. Yet Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice.

Meritocracy is a false and not very salutary belief. As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

However, in addition to legitimation, meritocracy also offers flattery. Where success is determined by merit, each win can be viewed as a reflection of one’s own virtue and worth. Meritocracy is the most self-congratulatory of distribution principles. Its ideological alchemy transmutes property into praise, material inequality into personal superiority. It licenses the rich and powerful to view themselves as productive geniuses. While this effect is most spectacular among the elite, nearly any accomplishment can be viewed through meritocratic eyes. Graduating from high school, artistic success or simply having money can all be seen as evidence of talent and effort. By the same token, worldly failures becomes signs of personal defects, providing a reason why those at the bottom of the social hierarchy deserve to remain there.

This is why debates over the extent to which particular individuals are ‘self-made’ and over the effects of various forms of ‘privilege’ can get so hot-tempered. These arguments are not just about who gets to have what; it’s about how much ‘credit’ people can take for what they have, about what their successes allow them to believe about their inner qualities. That is why, under the assumption of meritocracy, the very notion that personal success is the result of ‘luck’ can be insulting. To acknowledge the influence of external factors seems to downplay or deny the existence of individual merit.

Despite the moral assurance and personal flattery that meritocracy offers to the successful, it ought to be abandoned both as a belief about how the world works and as a general social ideal. It’s false, and believing in it encourages selfishness, discrimination and indifference to the plight of the unfortunate.

-Clifton Mark

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

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Some Thoughts on Clifton Mark's essay:

This article certainly stirred things at Aeon, as it was the "most read" essay of the week, when it appeared in March, 2019.. One reason, I think, is that the question of belief in meritocracy in one form or another goes right to the core of the human quest for justice and rationality in an unpredictable world. The article makes some interesting points about the ways in which belief in meritocracy may affect such traits as generosity. But the deepest problem is one of conceptualizing “merit” and distinguishing it from “luck” or circumstance in a cogent way. For example, in an exchange in Aeon's comment section, someone states that Bill Gates’ merit/talent was in seeing a future in which everyone had a desktop computer. Philosopher, Nigel Warburton, responds by noting that having such a mind, or having such an insight is itself an instance of luck.

Perhaps so. But such an analysis runs the risk of vicious circularity. If our talent, creativity, temperament, perseverance, et al., are all interpreted as “unearned” traits which have to do with genetics, environmental and cultural (among other) factors, than the very idea of “merit” seems to be squeezed out. I’m actually sympathetic to some such view, but it has radical implications that are not taken up here. If our “merits” are seen not as endogenous but rather contingent traits conditioned by physical and cultural contexts, then taking pride in our accomplishments seems unwarranted. The great composer or painter was born not only with the artistic talent, but the tenacity that was transformed into a “work ethic” by agents of socialization. It’s not just innate (genetic or otherwise) proclivities but social benefits that make us who and what we are. This deeply threatens a psychological (and in the West strong social) need to be distinguished as accomplished individuals. We like to think that our lives are much like works of art in the making, and that we are-- or can be-- the primary authors of our destinies. Like the libertarian variant of free will, without which it is hard to argue that are morally deserving of praise and blame, meritocracy as both a reality and ideal leaves us with few conceptual schemes by which to make sense of individual differences, similarities and highly disparate outcomes in the "social lottery."

Further, as a matter of pragmatics, in the end inequities will not be significantly reduced one way or another depending on our “beliefs.” Whether or not the qualities valued by employers are called meritorious or fortuitous does not change their market value. In the end some skills will be selected as desirable not because they reflect hard work or virtue, but simply because they are in demand or deemed desirable. So I’m skeptical about claims regarding ethical implications of changing beliefs from ego-centered meritocracy to a more contingent conception of socially and economically valued traits. The deeper question remains, “what do ‘I’ have to do with the person I have become? What makes me the person that 'I' am?" Philosophers in conference rooms can dispense with concepts like blame, praise, pride and shame with much greater ease than they can in their everyday lives along with the rest of us. If none of us merits anything based on how we work with inherited traits consciously, then we have to contend with a flattened moral landscape in which things simply "happen" and there is no do-er. Mystics decrying the vanity of the sense of egoity have sometimes pointed in that direction, especially in some versions of Buddhism in which Anatman (lit. without a subsistent self). If something like this is the upshot of an attempt to deconstruct the concept of meritocracy then we have to ask whether a society operating in its absence is a) possible b) accurate and c) desirable.

What are your thoughts on those questions (or any other aspects of the essay and my response to it)?

Readings/Resources:

Much of Clifton Mark's essay for Aeon builds on the book Success & Luck: The Myth of Meritocracy by Robert Frank (Princeton U Press; 2017) here: https://press.princeton.edu...

The first chapter frames some of the issues and is available as a free PDF here: http://assets.press.princet...

The Science and Philosophy of Emotions: Lisa Feldman Barrett

Modern psychology and neuroscience have been dominated by a theoretical perspective that characterizes emotions as being more or less fixed, distinct, and universal circuits in the brain. Of course, cultures influence the ways in which people interpret and express emotions, but the "basic emotions" themselves (e.g. happiness, sadness, fear, anger etc.) are each identified with particular brain regions and functions, according to the mainstream view. Further, these basic emotions are expressed in terms of allegedly universal facial expressions first mapped out by Paul Ekman https://people.ece.cornell..... These facial expressions of happiness,fear, anger, disgust and so on can supposedly be understood by anybody in any cultural setting. So "having" an emotion (e.g. fear) means undergoing phyio-chemical processes in the brain and nervous system which are more or less the same across cultures, individuals and other contexts. Further the basic emotions can be "read" reliably by members of any cultural group, since, for example, angry people scowl in the same telling manner everywhere. The basic emotions all have unique profiles and neural "signatures" or markers that do not vary significantly. Different cultures may combine and emphasize these basic emotions in unique ways. But, according to the "classical" theory, at the core of emotional life we find universal and distinct emotions, just as there are many mixed colors, but all derive from the primary ones. All of this is, more or less. the mainstream view in neuroscience today.

Many anthropologists, sociologists and some philosophers have looked at emotions in ways very much at odds with the above account. They have emphasized the relativity and social construction of emotions. On this view the socio-cultural contexts within which each of us is born and raised will greatly influence what each person feels and how such feelings will be expressed and communicated-- including facial gestures. There are words for emotions in some languages that do not have equivalents in others, and allegedly universal expressions like scowling, sticking the tongue out and smiling do not always express the same emotional content cross-culturally. For example, smiling turns out to be a sign of diverse emotional states and not just the expression of happiness and friendliness according to ethnographic and historical studies:

"In America, a smile is usually regarded as a friendly, positive gesture of trust. Historians have suggested that because the USA was initially a frontier society with little official law enforcement, the ability to communicate that “I am a friend” was quite important. In contrast, among some Asian societies people smile when they are embarrassed, angry, sad, confused, apologetic, and sometimes) happy." - see full article:http://scienceblogs.com/ret...

Lisa Feldman Barrett -- one of the foremost researchers and theorists of emotion in psychology and neuroscience-- has been developing a model of emotions that draws on both cultural studies and neuroscience. Her most recent book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life Of The Brain, attempts to lay out her theory in a popular, accessible manner. The following is a short description of her theory, which aims to establish, or at least serve as a possible basis for a new paradigm for affective science (i.e. science of emotions). It is taken from a short summary written by Ivana Galapceva.

"Barrett’s work shows how emotions are not distinguishable at the level of brain activity. Her work describes emotions as widely varied, for example with regard to anger, some individuals may not scowl but be stony faced or even cry when enraged. There are as many types of anger as there are individuals and situations. (emphasis added)The concept and expression of anger is not as ubiquitous as one may initially believe and in neuroscientific terms there is no single discrete circuit for each emotion, processing takes place across the entire brain.

Barrett uses examples of remote Tanzanian tribes who do not equate scowling with anger at all; making a strong case for this being learned and culturally transmitted behavior. She notes how our own language and culture may lead us to consider our concept of emotions as absolute. However she doesn’t deny that at some level biology does play a part. She is quick to point out that there is a strong biological element for affects such as attachment or arousal. However the accompanying emotional phenomena that are experienced by the individual are constructed [in the brain] fleetingly in the moment. This distinction between affect and emotion are key to understanding her new theory.

So the long-held assumption that there are hard-wired universal emotions and accompanying expressions is simply not borne out by the evidence. She points out that this idea was first laid out by Plato. It gained further credence from being published in Darwin’s book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Unfortunately he seemed to have missed many of his insights about variation that had appeared in On the Origin of Species and the idea went largely unchallenged, making its way into popular culture.

Despite this fascinating background, Barrett tells us that How Emotions are Made
is not a history lesson. She drives home the important real world application of her findings, using a wide range of examples from healthcare and education to security. She points to multi-million dollar training of US airport staff, directing them to look for certain expressions to reveal individuals who might pose a threat but in light of her findings this is baseless. It is easy to see the tremendous loss of resources incurred and also an alarming basis on which to detain people. She also notes how mature women face higher risk of death due to misreading of emotions: when presenting with heart problems at emergency rooms they are often deemed to be anxious and sent home."

The full text can be found here:
http://www.ideasfestival.co...

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Comments:

1.) The issue of universals: The above summary of Barrett's position states that "There are as many types of anger as there are individuals and situations." While I realize those are not Barrett's exact words there really is a potential problem regarding her dramatic emphasis on the variability of emotions.

If emotions are so variable that they cannot be identified with a) brain regions that have specific functions b) some facial and gestural expressions that can be recognized cross-culturally and c) bodily responses such as increased/decreased skin resistance, pulse, dilation of eyes etc., then what exactly are the units that are being studied and compared? Put differently, Barrett's long overdue emphasis on emotional differences may not be sufficiently counter-balanced by a discussion of the underlying similarities across cultures. Similarity is not universality, and without some account of similarities how can we even make sense of differences? If a psychologist says, "Group X has an emotion called S" and then defines this emotion, what makes it translatable into terms we can understand? If we can study the wide range of emotional differences, doesn't that imply that they are intelligible to us by virtue of some underlying commonalities? I don't know whether Barrett would agree or disagree with my point here, but perhaps in her zeal to explode the "myth of universal and discrete emotions" she glossed over the similarities any comparative study would seem to presuppose. At some level our emotional endowment is probably generic rather than culture-bound. If not it is hard to imagine how cultural *interpretations of emotions* would arise in the first place.

2)Methodological Concerns:There are also methodological issues and challenges. While Barrett is promoting her theory and book, equally prominent neuroscientists like Antonio Demasio and Joseph LeDoux continue to marshal some of the same evidence (fMRIs for example) in order to draw opposite conclusions. Demasio claims that he has identified invariant "somatic markers" by which identical emotions across cultures can be discerned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... LeDoux's theory of "the emotional brain," which is focused largely on the limbic system, does not show signs of disappearing any time soon http://emotionresearcher.co... .This leads me to think that the conclusions drawn from neuroscience studies are underdetermined to a much greater extent than in other sciences. That is, there are more ways to interpret such evidence as brain scan results than should be the case if these are really reliable sources of evidence. Indeed they may be fairly unreliable, something about which I posted on another channel recently: https://disqus.com/home/dis...

Nevertheless, Barrett makes a valuable contribution to the field by debunking naively universalistic theories of emotion. Her multidisciplinary approach is also, I think, a step in the right direction as she draws on ethnography, history, philosophy and neuroscience to get a well-rounded perspective on the topics she discusses. Her familiarity with the literature (past and present) is encylopedic -- indeed she is one of the editors of the very useful Guilford Handbook Of Emotions:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/...


Here is a 3 min. video in which Lisa Feldman Barrett discusses what she believes to be a likely paradigm shift occurring in the science of emotion: