So I'm not seeing how honesty is serving the purpose you've assigned it (making communication functional). If I ask you where the train station is, I'm far less interested in your honesty than I am in where the actual train station actually is. I want you to be right, not honest. — Isaac

(Btw, there's a game-theory based argument for truthfulness and trust in David Lewis's Convention, the details of which are not leaping to mind.)

It's an interesting question. Obviously in the short term sense, misinformation and disinformation will have the same effect, and the cause of the inaccuracy is irrelevant, assuming you rely on the 'information' to the same extent.

Over the longer term, you're of course also assessing the quality and reliability of the source. I think we do distinguish between sources that are untrustworthy because they're regularly mistaken and sources that are regularly deceitful. The question would be, how do we that and why is it worth the trouble?

One thing that comes to mind is that you get very different results for predicting the source's behavior: mistaken guy can be expected to act on his mistaken belief, but deceitful guy we would expect to act on his genuine belief. Hence "actions speak louder than words" is the corrective heuristic for "talk is cheap."

Cool.

I'd responded to the "creek" vs "crick" for small stream as a functional difference analogy you made — fdrake

Right, "stream" and "creek" are different words that denote the same things, meaning -- at least in this case, maybe not in all cases -- they also have the same function within people's regional dialects. That function relates regularities in the physical environment to regularities in speech behavior. It's not that functionalism ends up having no role here, because it's functionalism that identifies the equivalence of "stream" and "creek," so functionalism can answer the question "Why do say 'creek'?" but it can't answer the question "Why do you say 'creek' instead of 'stream'?"

Your first point was that gender might not be an observable regularity like a creek, so an object like 'man' might be in part determined by whether people say 'man' of it, and so on, practices, comportment towards, blah blah blah. This would speak to @Isaac's constructivist tendencies, 'man' as off the shelf narrative for making sense of things.

I have deep reservations about that account because there are extremely salient observable differences between people because humans reproduce sexually and always have, just like our ancestors who lacked speech and culture. I think it likely we make almost exactly the same sort of intuitive inferences about the sex of members of our species as other mammals do. The question would be whether those intuitive inferences play a major role in our speech and culture or have they long since been swamped by other factors. Unclear to me, but even infants seem to distinguish male and female early, so I'd count that as evidence the machinery I'd expect to be there is there.

But we're not nearly done with functionalism, because one key question is whether everyone saying "I'm a boy" is even doing the same kind of thing. Such a claim could be overwhelmingly down to the sex-determining mechanism evolution bequeathed you, or it could serve a psychological or a social role. Or all of the above. But even before trying to figure that out -- which looks daunting -- we have to think carefully about where the functional account takes hold and where it doesn't. That is -- and now we're coming back to creeks and streams -- there might be a nice functional account of why you say "I'm a boy" but not of why you say "I'm a boy" instead of "I'm a girl," because that might be just a matter of personal history, like saying "girl" instead of "femme" or "Fraulein", or like saying "creek" instead of "stream".

Sorry that's a lot of words that don't advance any particular claim or the discussion. Just really clarifying for myself as much as anything where I think the discussion stands.

But I do point out that that option that we do have, that you outline, is a moral imperative arising from the social nature of language, that it is shared. — unenlightened

We're on the same page here. Humans have always lived in cooperative groups, and language is a cooperative enterprise in furtherance of other sorts of cooperation. Dishonesty violates the social contract, more or less -- except when being a little dishonest upholds it. Someone like Trump thumbs his nose at the idea he is under any sort of social obligation, and that extends to his use of language. But that potential is built in: one of the selling points of language is that utterance is, for the individual, inexpensive, but that also means that talk is cheap.

Upholding the cooperative use of language is upholding the cooperative basis for society per se. If you want to describe that as an obligation to mostly "tell the truth," I won't complain. The way we talk about truth serves our social needs, but I think it's a mistake to construct a theory out of that talk.

Cultural change couldn't stop Tinky Winky from being purple, but they could turn Tinky Qinky into a queer symbol. — fdrake

I don't actually get the point here. Tinky Winky wearing a frilly tutu can arbitrarily be a queer symbol, or can be one by aligning with our hyper-local conditions, but there's no reason to think this symbolism has any essential connection to queerness beyond that, is there? So in time pointing to Tinky Winky as a queer symbol will seem distinctly peculiar. You'll have to explain when and where and why they were taken as such.

Are you making a comparison between this sort of opportunistic symbolism and a person's gender identity? I don't want to guess.

What type of intuitions are you talking about Srap Tasmaner? — fdrake

Let's say, the conscious output of unconscious processes of inference (often performed by mental modules that are domain specific). Meant really as a replacement for "belief" which has all the wrong connotations.

And you can test for them. You can do research. The part I'm iffiest on is whether they must be conscious, because I don't see why, but that's just the problem of consciousness, and it seems like they often are. Maybe that's just because in doing research you elicit self reports.

That's a great example, thanks — fdrake

Thank goodness. I wasn't sure at first why that occurred to me.

The act of treating something as manly, womanly etc informs what it means to be a man or a woman. — fdrake

Does it? I mean, you say this, and it fits the usual way we talk about socially constructed whatever, but it's exactly what people are fighting over. The claim is exactly that your treating me as a woman or as a man doesn't make me one, anymore than treating slaves inhumanly made them inhuman. (How's that for a pointed comparison?)

This is exactly the sort of thing that made me wary of picking a level or a style and then crafting an explanation for that framework. You will always be able to do that, but the evidence that doesn't fit might be on another level. I think.

I thought you were addressing an arbitrary functionalist, rather than specifically Isaac. — fdrake

You might be right. (I wanted to make sure you didn't think it was you, and that it was clear I wasn't saying it but mentioning it.)

My reference point here is the manifest and scientific image concept in Sellars. — fdrake

Yeah I noticed you'd been in that recently.

If we end up saying the social categories don't mean anything, what question are we asking again? — fdrake

There's still behavior to be accounted for, including verbal behavior. One of the key linguistic markers for what region of the US you grew up in is whether you say "stream" or "creek" or "crick" (possibly also "kill" though I think that's preserved more in names than speech). There might be others I'm forgetting. Point being, there's no distinction at all among these, each is a Nash equilibrium, but they do indicate something about your personal history (statistically). On one level, they're equivalent; on another, a key distinction. Denying that they denote distinct types of small river doesn't change the differences in usage patterns.

I'll try to give another answer to this later.

Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.
— Srap Tasmaner

I think as a "manifest imagey" conception this makes a lot of sense. — fdrake

Dang. It was meant to be scientific.

we could all agree that the sole criterion for being a man, in this sense, is an honest report that one is — fdrake

Ah, now that's a whole different thing. I'm not sure the sort of intuitions I'm talking about could bear that kind of weight, and I wasn't anywhere near proposing that they should.

What's the difference between psychological, physical and social explanatory styles? — fdrake

Hmmm. You left out philosophical. Maybe I'm just excessively interested in psychology at the moment but I don't really want to make this kind of distinction. I think talking about behavior, human or otherwise, requires moving relatively freely up and down these levels. Maybe it's just that I've also recently sworn off boundary policing. Maybe it's that I think finding the right explanation means finding the right level at which to give an explanation.

If we go the other way and climb from "bottom up", all of the social categories we were trying to "climb toward" would dissolve since they're not derivable from, or identical with, their neural-dynamical conditions of actuation. — fdrake

I get that. It's like Fodor's argument for the ineliminability of the 'special sciences'. (You can't just absorb meteorology into physics.)

On the other hand, my first commitment for 'what we're climbing toward' is "saving the appearances," so I want the bottom-up theory to explain why we hold the usual view, but I don't know that we need to preserve its categories and explanations. It's crucial to Fodor's argument that meteorology is an actual science. That it can't be reduced to physics is not at all the same as saying that pre-scientific ideas about weather and climate would need to be reconstructed for physics to be a threat to them. If those categories are inadequate, we can pass right by.

I'm okay saying that because my interest is almost entirely 'scientific' rather than political, so that's a limitation to my approach.

Your functionalism is just unwelcome.
— Srap Tasmaner

Yeah! — fdrake

Was it clear that the "you" there is @Isaac? (And also that I was again speaking in another voice.) Just checking.

gender is a performance — fdrake

I do still think we end up there, and maybe I like the word "performance" here because once we're this far along even I will have given up disentangling the cultural and the biological.

On the other hand, I'm pretty strongly committed to what I came up with after this, which is that identity, and so gender identity, seems obviously about intuitions. It has all the earmarks. You just know the answer when asked, even if you have trouble explaining it, you might not think about it much otherwise, sometimes the words for expressing it strike you as inadequate, there's confusion about whether you should even have to defend it with reasons, on and on. It's textbook. Your sense of your gender, or your identity more broadly, comes to you as an intuition. Seems obvious to me.

But that doesn't tell you much about where that intuition comes from. Your intuitions about how language works might be innate, but your intuitions about your native language are learned through socialization. We can have socially formed intuitions, and those will be realized in biology, but that doesn't make them biological meaning "innate". So the source and purpose of identity intuitions -- open question for me. @Moliere tells me the self is entirely social (I think), and for the record that strikes me as nuts. As nuts as thinking our ideas about sexuality are entirely cultural. But I don't have a theory to offer about our identity intuitions, and if I did have one it wouldn't be worth much. That's a research program, far as I'm concerned.

@fdrake

One thing on my mind is that both the hypothetical explanatory accusations I was considering are functionalist: one points to sociological function, one to psychological.

Functionalist explanations of speech behavior are going to be inherently unsatisfying to some people because they appear to ignore the content, or at the very least to ignore the truth-value of the content. (We had that discussion a long time ago too.)

The other thing is that functionalist explanations are most convincing when there's no competition (why on earth do they do that?) or when existing explanations have a serious flaw. (My example for the latter is Mercier and Sperber's explanation for why reason appears to have defects, the answer being that it doesn't if you recognize what it's actually for.)

And I think some of us see a prima facie case against the currently offered explanations for why someone with the anatomy of one sex would claim to be of the other sex. Some might see no need of an explanation at all, but it needn't be a political issue just, you know, the spirit of inquiry. The explanations on offer seem to depend on (a) ideas about identity or (b) ideas about language. Your objections to (a) and (b) are what provide the opening for a functionalist explanation. But not everyone accepts those objections, so to them you're just offering a competing theory, but on ground functionalism does not find congenial. Your functionalism is just unwelcome.

snarled sentence — BC

It's a lovely sentence.

"I'm not here because I'm awaiting a sentence, I'm here because (something to the effect that I'm minimising some neurological loss function defined over my body states)" - and it would be true. — fdrake

Right, right. I used to have this argument with @Isaac, the space of reasons vs the space of causes, that sort of thing. Driving a car isn't just moving your arms and legs in a certain way. Been there done that.

I do tend to stop at some level above surprise minimization, although I think it's fair to keep that in mind. Damasio gets a lot of mileage out of homeostasis. You can use that lowest level as a constraint: if your theory requires something where the cost would outweigh the biological value, it's a non-starter. (Okay, at species level. Individuals get up to all kinds of shit.)

I suppose I assume that to get anything that will look like an explanation to me -- of identity, for instance -- you have to move at least in the direction of biology, so down to the level of mental mechanisms that would produce intuitions about identity, say. But it also makes sense to move up, to take essentially a functionalist stance -- what social purpose could this behavior serve?

Best to do both, right? I worry that there's a little more room for bullshit moving up rather than down. But either way you almost immediately run into these unresolvable differences -- "You're only saying that because you're a lackey of Capital," "But you're only saying that because it makes you feel special and in-the-know." The first is probably an abuse of "because" and what it really means is that by saying that you *become* a lackey of Capital. The latter is too general and would account for any heterodox view I might hold, and so doesn't account for my Marxism.

I think there is a consistent pattern here. Cultural explanations tend to overdetermine individuals, biological to underdetermine them. It's another way to put the point you were making: the farther down you go, the greater the range of behavior accounted for, which is fine, unless you wanted an explanation of *this* behavior. If apo is right, I stop at this specific store, for milk, after work, in order to accelerate the heat death of the universe. That is not an answer to any of the everyday questions I might be asked. (Why *this* store? Why milk? Why after work?) But it is an answer to some question.

I need to work and think some more about the kind of explanations I want, but am I in the neighborhood of your concern here?

I think we're thinking along the same lines except you remembered to mention filtering and I forgot again.

absolutely nothing of social life, no "mental furniture", ideology or even motivational state, survives the parsing — fdrake

This is too meta for me to understand. :(

I think by and large you're taking stories as cultural moves we can make in defense or explanation of our opinions and behavior, and I keep trying to find a role for them in production.

Fox News, for example, is like an experiment in how many different ways you can say "Shut up you fucking hippy!" They're still fighting retrograde actions against the sixties, and experience an intuitive revulsion toward the counterculture. (The eloquent version of this can be found elsewhere, Saul Bellow or Allan Bloom, etc.)

One way or another the label "hippy" gets attached to the object of revulsion. But are you a hippy because I find you revolting? Or do I find you revolting because you are a hippy? Most people will tend to go for the latter because it sounds more like a bit of reasoning, even if they think it's based on faulty premises. Your version is the former, in which "hippy" is available as a story that makes sense of the feeling of revulsion, and is more radical.

I want to go with your version, because the usual version just feels more computational and I no longer trust that model. On the other hand, I want an explanation for the initial feeling of revulsion and people keep telling me that culture can reach right down to your feelings and shape your responses; if culture can be effective in this way, it has to get into the game earlier than our post-facto stories and justifications and rationalizations.

On the third hand (the gripping hand), we needn't pretend this is all linear; you could have the revulsion, reach for an explanation, and also react to the explanation, almost as if it were being presented to you with the expectation that you will react.

The other role of stories, on this view, would be as feeling management strategies. Depending on the story the feedback might be positive or negative: this is a big deal, dial up your response; or, this isn't that important, dial it down.

This I like. I'm not clear on why this has to be conscious, but this seems to be where consciousness comes in, these very high-level sorts of management.

And it jibes with experience, I think. We've probably all had the experience of working ourselves up to a level of anger we didn't have at the beginning of a disagreement, or building up a simple infatuation into our One True Love, or literally telling ourselves that something isn't worth getting worked up over.

I've left the initial feeling of revulsion toward hippies unexplained, but I'm not sure it matters. (To young progressive this is everything!) The narrative feedback loop gets started somehow and it might have close to nothing to do with whatever got it started. (The genealogical analysis believes that uncovering the real source of that initial reaction reveals the real meaning of the narrative, and that's tempting but I suspect deeply mistaken. We can talk more about that.)

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell. — Srap Tasmaner

"Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. " — unenlightened

It's doing what the word "true" is actually useful for, which is allowing me to endorse by reference the account denoted by "that".

There's a very good reason "It's true that Billy ate all the cupcakes" is equivalent to "Billy ate all the cupcakes" and to "'Billy ate all the cupcakes' is true": it's because we want to be able to express agreement without repeating everything, so we have "That's true" (and "That's not true" and so on) as a construction where "that" refers to something someone has already said.

There are some complication but I think such a prosentential theory of truth is fundamentally on the right track.

I think when you say, "Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story. ", you are deceiving yourself, and saying something that is not true. I believe it is true that my key will open the front door, and if it should turn out not to be true because the lock is broken, or my wife has changed the lock or someone has blown the bloody door off, or the god of locks is angry with me, then I will have to admit I was wrong. — unenlightened

There's the past tense again, just like with Painter and the chromosomes.

Let's go with that. The examples we come up with always have to do with someone turning out to have been wrong in the past. That suggests that there is an "accounting" use for words like "true" and "false" in judging past performance. If we want to make good predictions, we need some way of judging the past performance of an inference engine, so we regularly look back and tally up the successful and the unsuccessful predictions. We do the same thing at the macro scale when we have a new theory or forecasting model: we try retrodicting the events already in the books and see how well we do.

It would be nice if we really could "check" a previous prediction against "what actually happened", but I just don't see how we would do that. All we have is our current understanding based on the evidence we have, and we can say the prediction squares with the evidence or doesn't, but all of this is (a) a lot squishier than it sounds, because we mostly deal in probabilities and (b) all of the accounting we're talking about is handled by inferential mechanisms in our minds the workings of which we are not aware of and do not control. We're accustomed to giving reconstructions of the reasoning process we "must have gone through" to reach conclusions, but the truth (!) is that our beliefs arrive in our awareness as finished products. You don't consciously "work out" your beliefs as the rational consequences of your other beliefs much at all, if at all.

None of which is to say that some beliefs aren't more defensible than others, of course they are. I don't doubt that the very stable genius you mentioned has defective belief formation equipment, but the real problem is that his behavior is dishonest. We expect people to aim at saying things that square with the evidence and are defensible, but he aims at saying things that will materially benefit him. We don't have the option of only speaking the truth; if we had some way of just knowing how things really stand, it wouldn't take so much work to find out. But we do have the option of only saying what we do in fact believe, and what we believe aligns with the available evidence, and what we believe we can give good reasons for that others should find convincing.

it might be better to finish with some other kind of identity -- like identity in general — Moliere

Forgot you said this, and it's kind of what I ended up writing about above.

A heterosexual child doesn't have to wait long for his or her culture to supply the "guide book" for what "heterosexual" means. On the other hand, a rural homosexual child may recognize that he likes other boys, and understands that this is an outlier desire, best not discussed. He may not have a "homosexual identity" until he comes into regular contact with urban homosexuals who can supply the gay "guide book". — BC

This is an excellent point, but, as you note in the next paragraph, it's not the gay guide book, but a gay guide book. Which is interesting.

Having these broad stories for ourselves helps us make sense of our own actions and thoughts, put them into context, give them a purpose and a coherence (that they might otherwise lack). — Isaac

All of which is fine, but one of the things that's troubling about your "off the shelf" metaphor is that it suggests mass production, that more or less identical narratives are available to everyone (or maybe people within a given culture or speech community, whatever), and I'm not sure that's quite right.

It seems to me that in taking up a narrative, you don't so much buy a copy as make a copy, so even though there's going to be some, maybe considerable, family resemblance among the copies of a story each member of a community are carrying around, they are still going to be idiosyncratic. And if you consider how we get access to these stories, we're making copies of copies of copies of copies ... The archetype may still show through, but quite a few of the details might have changed. In fact, over time one narrative might split into two, if there are populations that started with different versions of the original. And by now it should be really, really obvious that what we're looking at here is evolution.

Which is no surprise, but what I'm really curious about is the copying process itself. What I don't want to slot in here is that bullshit sort of "recipe" account you always get of musicians. (Grew up listening to country on the radio, got into funk in high school, and then I discovered Ella Fitzgerald --- and out of all that came "Walking on Sunshine.") But I think we have to say something about how whatever you've got before you acquire the new story (to use on yourself or others) is going to color your version of the story. At the very least, what else is already in your repertoire is going to shape your use of the new script -- some people will use it more and some less, depending on what else they've acquired and how they use them. (You can know a hundred stories and always reach for the same two or three.)

It's not that I want to push back against psychology's legitimate pursuit of generality; it's just that I'm interested in the mechanisms of acquiring and using these stories. The individual's narrative repertoire will be idiosyncratic in exactly the way their genes and their idiolect are, but we can say general things about how people are individuated in these ways.

Which might get us some ways toward @Moliere's sense of individuality.

Idiosyncrasy might also explain some of the strange bedfellows politics makes, and the failure of people to recognize their allies.

Have a nice day.

The part I think is noteworthy is that when you claim that P, my reasons for believing you -- your trustworthiness, reliability, honesty, likelihood of having first-hand knowledge in this case, etc -- those now count as reasons for believing that P. That's an incredibly useful inference pattern, so useful that it runs on automatic most of the time: if I'm accustomed to getting the truth from you and you tell me you bought milk, I assume (that is, infer) that you did. Reasons only come into it if your claim has to be defended -- maybe against someone who doesn't know your many fine qualities as an evidentiary source.

And around we go. Suppose now I vouch for you. Our skeptic might have reason to trust what I tell him, but what does he know about my reliability as a judge of other people's trustworthiness? Might never have come up for him, so he'll believe you only to a degree because he doesn't know yet whether I've made the smart move believing you, whether that's something else about me he can rely on.

And at no time has what is true changed, but only what we believe to be true. Although it could also happen that the number of chromosomes might change.

By all means let us be open to revision and reversal of what we believe according to what we later learn to be true, but not according to what we later find to be convenient — unenlightened

Just not clear to me what the word "true" is doing in this story.

If a belief is true, there can be no evidence that it's false, so you'll never need to revise your belief. If such evidence does turn up, in addition to revising your belief, you also remove the "true" sticker from it. So what? What was the sticker doing anyway?

Now when we accuse someone of holding a belief because it's convenient for them, I think often we're talking about something they're not aware they're doing. What we perceive is that holding such a belief serves some need of theirs, again probably something they're not aware of.

And basically that's true for all of us, so far as I can tell.

Ask 'em to get you a pair of your socks; if they succeed, then that'll do, won't it? — Banno

It'll mostly do, sure, but the question isn't whether the way we talk is fine, of course it is.

I think we ought to have a theory about how we do things like keep track of socks and find them on demand. (Or acorns. Squirrels do more caching than recovering, sometimes much more, but it's not entirely clear yet whether the unrecovered acorns are actually lost.)

And we also talk a lot, so that's more behavior we want a theory for.

The question is whether the sorts of stuff we usually say about the sorts of stuff we usually do is a good start on a real theory of what we do, and there I think it's a pretty mixed bag.

We do tend to treat what we say as a kind of theory, so we say things like "He can get the socks because he knows where they are," or "He can't get the socks because he doesn't know where they are." And that's theory-ish, because it looks like you could make a prediction, right? People who know where the socks are will be more successful and more efficient at retrieving them than people who don't, than people who are just guessing or searching.

But of course you just said that your test for knowing where the socks are is fetching them. That's a no good. We want to be able to sort people first by what knowledge they have and then test the theory that knowledge is predictive of performance.

You can keep your performance criterion like this: sort people first by whether they have successfully performed the task in the past -- pause for a moment and say this is a strong indicator of knowledge -- and then test whether those we've attributed knowledge to out-perform those we haven't.

But that's just induction. There's a flourish in the middle involving the word "knowledge" but you're really just testing whether past performance predicts future performance. Now it's starting to look like this is not a theory of behavior at all, but about how we use the word "knowledge." That is, we're not so much leaning on knowledge as an explanation of behavior, since we've given no independent criterion for its presence or absence, as noting that we make inductive inferences about behavior straight up and then label some behavior "knowing" and some not.

But even as a theory about how we use the word "know" this is pretty weak, because we allow all sorts of exceptions. I might not usually know whether the trash has been picked up but this time I do because I happened to see them stop this morning and take the trash.

Squirrels don't talk about where they've cached acorns; we (at least when doing philosophy or laundry) do talk about where we've put our socks. The fact that we talk about it doesn't change the fact that our sock caching probably relies on abilities we share with squirrels. (They sort and organize acorns, for example.) And that's why a theory of how we talk, though intensely interesting in its own right, is not the same as a theory of how we find our socks.

The final word on this whole socks business:

There are a few ways to not know where your socks are kept. One is pragmatism, in which the location of your sock draw can never be known, but only approximated asymptotically. Such brilliance derives not only from Charles Sander Peirce. — Banno

Why is it so hard to tell the difference between someone who knows where your socks are and someone who thinks they know? Why is it so hard to tell the difference even about yourself?

I think there are two issues here, and they are separable: (1) Is the idea of knowledge helpful for modeling our mental lives? (2) What's going on when someone says "I know"?

For the first, no, it's probably not. Even Hume knew that reasoning concerning matters of fact is probabilistic, but we didn't listen. We have probabilistic expectations about our environment and our own state, these eventuate in dispositions to act, and everything is subject to revision as we go.

For the second, I think it turns out Sellars was right, that "I know" puts your claim in "the space of reasons," meaning you commit to the claim and indicate a willingness to attempt to defend it with reasons. If you assure me that you know something, I might take your confidence into account, or I might not, but that depends on a lot of other factors. I won't, as a rule, take it as a fact about you from which I can infer the truth of your claim. Why would I? If you're wrong about one, you're wrong about the other. What does hold, for me, is that reasons to believe you count as reasons to believe what you claim, and that might be very helpful. (For you, this is useless, since you already believe both you and what you claim.)

"I know" is a sort of exaggeration of the reliability of our cognitive state, which makes it suitable for the back and forth of argument, but not as a description of how we navigate the world and keep tabs on our own thoughts. Or maybe it does have some introspective use, as a sort of marker for what is not at the moment being questioned, even if it isn't altogether unquestionable. Some of our ideas, habits of inference, are so close to wired in (I'm thinking of things like the physics we already 'know' as infants) that it takes a lot of work to question them at all.

if the truth becomes a matter of choice, or convenience, then language itself loses its value — unenlightened

The trouble is this:

The number of human chromosomes was published in 1923 by Theophilus Painter. By inspection through the microscope, he counted 24 pairs, which would mean 48 chromosomes. His error was copied by others and it was not until 1956 that the true number, 46, was determined by Indonesia-born cytogeneticist Joe Hin Tjio. — Wiki

Wiki says now we know "the true number", simple as that. But of course that's not exactly true, because there are variations in the number, types, and arrangement of chromosomes listed on that very page. More importantly, for more than 30 years every biologist and every doctor believed it was a fact that humans have 48 chromosomes. Of course, we now believe they were all wrong, but it ought to give one pause.

None of this is a question of choice or convenience. This chaos magic business would be a non-starter even if beliefs created reality as imagined, because you can't choose your beliefs. Painter didn't choose his incorrect belief and Tjio didn't choose his improvement on Painter; he certainly didn't prefer 46 to 48 because it had the virtue of being true, as if he had some other way of determining that besides looking through a microscope. He looked and found 46. Others looked and also found 46 and said he was right.

If there's virtue here, it's not in eschewing choice or convenience, but in (a) looking and (b) holding your beliefs as open to revision. That's what pragmatism was aiming at, even if the talk of utility obscures that now and then.

If you want to convince someone that flying is safer than driving, one of the things you will have to say is, "Yes, you will take action, but your actions will not save you, your actions may in fact be what kills you." That's a tough sell. Action is our whole thing.

This was the problem with COVID lockdown orders, telling people that the best thing they could do was do nothing, don't go to work, don't go to school, don't shop, don't go to the movies. --- I don't want to relitigate the wisdom or necessity of lockdowns, but the deep resistance some people felt, the revulsion for having their freedom curtailed, was accompanied by this message that they had much less agency than they wanted to believe, that if they went about their regular lives they would get sick and make others sick and it would just happen, not up to you, not a matter of choice.

We understand the story of being oppressed directly because we can relate (we think we can), we've all been told to do stuff we don't want to do, we've all been to school. — Isaac

That's quite good. I think my point was actually a little garbled, but another way to say it might be that we have a prejudice in favor of situations where we perceive ourselves as free to act, or, better, that we filter out predictions that we interpret as curtailing our freedom to act. Such situations are just unacceptable.

--- I'm struggling with getting this right because you could imagine this realizing as a preference for political oppression over poverty -- at least you can fight the bastards but how do you fight being hungry. So it is a matter of narrative, that if the story begins "Suppose you have no freedom," that one's automatically binned. (The most appalling gulf war anthem, "Proud to be an American" or whatever it's called features the peculiar line "Where at least I know I'm free." At least? Seems like a lot of injustice is being allowed in by that little "at least".)

Maybe you're right that we prefer the one we think we understand to the one we're clueless about.

But I still think there's some prejudice for perceived agency, and maybe it's just that people think "poverty doesn't take my freedom" because they don't understand it.

You're right that none of this economic pressure amounts to direct threats to life, but life expectancy reduction due to poverty kills more people than any authoritarian regime could ever muster. — Isaac

Okay, that is roughly where I thought you were.

People think driving is safer than flying, simply because they give too much weight to their perception of control, or at least to the chance of having control. (I can at least try to avoid a collision, but if my plane is going down I just sit there doing nothing until I die.)

Maybe there's a similar mistake here: under an authoritarian regime, you have no freedom, no opportunity to control your fate; if you're poor but free, at least there's a chance you can do something. People do across the board refuse to believe that great, impersonal, historical forces affect them, so they reject the idea that poverty would be as deadly for them as a bullet.

This is why removing "bad people," and putting "good people," in doesn't fix systemic issues in more complex organizations. The organization's have their own priorities and are adapted to their own survival. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Certainly, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But that observation will strike American libertarian conservatives as being at odds with this:

The state is so important because it is (one of) the most evolved systems out there, but even moreso because its survival needs line up with those of its citizens in the way a corporations' won't. A state will tend to evolve systems that promote the welfare of its citizens for the same reason that bodies will tend to evolve capacities that meet the needs of their cells (although this doesn't stop things like cancer from existing in particular instances). — Count Timothy von Icarus

They see the state as an institution bent on preserving and increasing its own power.

The state does have power, and corporations are mindful of this fact, hence their continual efforts to capture the state. This is @Isaac's "it's just a tool" view.

But I would say the state is one sector of the entire political system, and fights over the use of state power don't end once the votes in elections are counted, but continue within government. So I see government as, in part, a battlefield, where interests vie with one another, and even though money wields tremendous influence in these contests, it is not the source of the power in play and cannot completely control the process. Even Amazon gets sued. Even Microsoft gets regulated. There is always a chance of government rising to the occasion, if pushed hard enough the right way.

Ukraine's sovereignty is like the handbag. It's not worth fighting for — Isaac

Ukrainian's freedom... that might be worth sacrificing a generation for, that's not just a handbag. But fighting for freedom is not a matter of changing borders, it's a matter of changing systems, and even then not just exchanging one form of exploitation for another. — Isaac

I share your gut-level disbelief in borders -- though I'm sure your disbelief is better grounded -- but I suspect this skepticism is a luxury. The sovereignty of my nation is not in question. For some, achieving sovereignty is the necessary first step to securing freedom.

Here's one thing about your position that puzzles me: you argue that war is the worst option because of the loss of life and destruction it entails, and military defeat plus political resistance is a better option. Let's grant that. Why do you also think there's little to choose between being under Putin's boot and the IMF? Surely there's more room to maneuver against an enemy that puts you in debt than one that assassinates or imprisons you.

Louisiana wasn't bombed into submission. Corporate assassination is exceptionally rare. (Karen Silkwood?) There may have been actual corruption among regulators and inspectors, I don't know, but often even that is unnecessary. It would have been difficult to organize against the petrochemical industry or to hold government's feet to the fire, perhaps as difficult as organizing against Putin, but no one would be risking their life or their freedom by speaking at a meeting or going to a rally. With the right resources and effective oversight from the federal level, Louisiana might have gotten the jobs without the cancer and environmental destruction. The key would be for other communities to make the same demands, else the jobs will just go there instead. (Although geography is leverage and ports matter; this whole war is about ports.)

I don't share your broad cynicism, but I'm cynical enough to believe that anything I say in response will be met with some variation on "All is vanity," so I think I'll leave you to it.

I recently reread Beowulf, and one of the peculiar features of that society is that there seems to be a prize for honor and heroism and this is why they are good: fame. Over and over again, we are told that the point of slaying monsters and gaining treasure is future generations singing of your deeds, and I don't recall any hint that an explanation is required for why you would, in turn, want that. The highest praise is that your fame will never die.

It's a companion to the point Conrad makes:

You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. — Heart of Darkness

Conrad's neighbor speaks to you, but only of what people would say about you, not of Heaven and Hell, not of the Categorical Imperative.

And as the individual must keep in mind what others will say, so each generation must keep in mind what future generations will say. It is the same dynamic, arranged across time rather than space.

That P. D. James quote is brilliant.

Unfortunately, this not the universal practice of humankind, and hasn't been for some 6000 years. — Vera Mont

I think we can do better, and I suppose one reason for believing that is that some people do better by their descendants. Whether it will be enough to save us, I don't know. It's hard for me to believe we have, in such a short span, already exhausted the possibilities for humanity.

This is an impressive performance, but the force of it comes from your audience recognizing that

Kids have been bought and sold, beaten and exploited and browbeaten since long before the industrial age. — Vera Mont

is wrong, which means we are expected to recognize there is an alternative. I have not sold, beaten, exploited or browbeaten any of my children, nor have I forced my religion onto them or sent them to die in a pointless war. Am I doing it wrong?

You do have an argument here -- I'm not saying it's just rhetoric -- that there are pressures, there are interests that drive the exploitation of the young. I don't deny that. But those interests are not the whole story, and it is not impossible -- or at least not shown here -- that those interests will not always be decisive.

Lack of international law. — Isaac

Certainly. What I had in mind before talking about government.

But I was also thinking about the other side.

just give them your handbag, it's not worth your life — Isaac

I'm not sure "teaching them a lesson" is the only other possible goal in refusing. I think there are times when people acknowledge that you might be able to take what you want from them, but you're going to have to take it, they're not going to give it to you just on the threat that you'll take it.

Think of the inquisition or other uses of torture. Of course resistance is irrational, on a first reading, but so is altruism. For torture to be efficient as a means of controlling a population, it has to be used sparingly. You don't want to have to torture everyone individually to secure compliance. So if a population could sustain a strategy of not complying, they raise the cost of control for the would-be boss, and that's rational, even if you can't be sure you're raising the cost enough to deter him.

Things like 'gay', 'woman', 'trans', 'geek', 'leader', 'hippy',... are pretty much needed as almost fully built units because the cost of building from scratch is just too high. — Isaac

That's a nice idea, but as you say below, we might also kind of know these are only useful approximations -- even when they're descriptive not of a person but of a role we need them to play.

The construction of something as complex as a selfhood is really difficult, I don't believe it's even possible outside of a social context where key parts are available to build from. — Isaac

Fair. I'd like to be distinguishing here and there between 'cultural' and 'social' but without doing that I've been giving short shrift to the necessary social context. -- Sexuality is obviously a social thing even when it's not cultural (among other mammals, say).

It's like the police always say to mugging victims "just give them your handbag, it's not worth your life". It doesn't somehow become less sensible advice at different scales. International legal action is the way to deal with criminal acts of invasion, not utterly devastating your country to somehow 'teach them a lesson'. — Isaac

That's a nice analogy, so what's wrong with it?

Sure, but there's rules for that too. Like how all neologisms evolve, I suppose someone started them, but "I declare 'bobby' is now a type of cake!" isn't going to make it so, it's not a legal move in the game

So, sure, we ought to add some dynamics to the model, but dynamics isn't anarchy. — Isaac

I don't really have much to go on here. I think the structuralist phase of linguistics and anthropology was so thrilled to be able to make sense of things at all that they accidentally created these static 'cultures' and 'languages', and that's a necessary first step, but we also know both of these literally evolve. The rules of these games are in play. I don't have a model for that to offer.

choosing involves more than just a good fit, and there's no denying these other motivators. — Isaac

Oh I agree. I would never suggest there's just a biological layer that's inherently right or even striving to be right. The lowest level I'm thinking of is still inferential and it's just trying to find something that works, for some definition of 'works'. What that layer comes up with might be puzzling sometimes, not just to others but to ourselves, and obviously that's an opportunity for culture to step in and offer to tell you what you actually think or feel, since you're evidently confused.

but at that level it's just axons firing, nothing of the sort we could categorise into natural kinds — Isaac

Natural kinds would be both a simplification and an exaggeration of our intuitive inferences about sex and gender, or rather about our behavior and the behavior of others, codified as sex and gender. Those inferences might be in some ways more nuanced and in some ways less -- they don't care how elegant or comprehensive or consistent the taxonomy we make out of them is.

I just don't believe in this notion of a 'true self'. People tell themselves stories and usually these stories are ones they pick from those society offers, or construct from parts thereof. I don't think these are true (nor false either). They just more or less provide a way of understanding the sometimes contradictory mental goings on they have. — Isaac

Which I think amounts to saying that there's a sense in which individuals don't own these stories, or the words they use to tell them; 'society' does. Which is fine so far as it goes because nobody wants to argue for Humpty-Dumpty-ism. And you're highlighting the fact that claiming an identity is a move in a language-game.

So, if a reasonably explanatory story offers good social capital, it's a selling point. Truth doesn't enter into it. — Isaac

But here's the problem, and it's the reaction everyone has to the language-game analysis: it all seems too static, as if 'society' has a list of acceptable moves and you have to pick from those else you're speaking nonsense.

But exactly what we're talking about is creating the social capital you acquire by changing the rules of the game.

For my part, I'm assuming our sense of our own sexuality and that of others is partially innate, but the machinery for making these inferences may be optimized for stereotypes of cis male and cis female,. The stories we tell and the social moves we make may have to work with conflicting intuitions. I'm not going to be on board with sexuality being purely social, that just seems crazy to me.