Authoritarian Future

What proportion of people who voted for Trump would support his overthrow of electoral democracy in his favor? Nearly all. The evidence is overwhelming. That way they get what they want without the inconvenience of democracy. Democracy is an instrumental value not an intrinsic value, so they support it only when it gives them what they value intrinsically. Trump and his allies are anti-DEI: Democracy, Elections, and Integrity. And it’s only going to get worse. What they are in favor of is BLS: Bullying, Lying, and Stupidity. These are always the tactics of the would-be authoritarian.

Democrats and Republicans

Do you want to hear what’s wrong with contemporary party politics in America? Do you want to know what the root of the problem is? I am going to tell you—and you won’t like it. The Republican party is the party of winning and success. The Democratic party is the party of morality and caring. Trump has tapped into that streak in Republican politics—he aims to win by whatever means possible. He is unconstrained by morality. The party politicians have simply capitulated to that amorality. This is obvious. What is not so obvious is the plight of the Democratic party, and here the problem is more disturbing, because irremediable. Party members want to be guided by morality but they are no good at moral thinking. They are morally illiterate (I wrote a book called Moral Literacy and I meant it). So, we get a kind of ersatz morality: a load of blather about God-given rights, the Constitution, pop psychology, bodily autonomy, “who we are”, the great American experiment, religious fervor, victims and predators/oppressors, the patriarchy, humorlessness, literalism, silly slogans (“me too”), virtue signaling, safe spaces, etc., etc.  This leads to a barrage of catch-phrases and mumbo-jumbo. The Democrats have succumbed to the self-proclaimed guardians of virtue who spout nonsense. Accordingly, they have lost support and lost their way; they flounder in phony moral rhetoric. What is the solution? A university course in ethics would help, but it’s an uphill battle (I used to teach such a course and had to spend two whole classes demolishing moral relativism, which nearly every student thought was indisputable; and then I had to go on to demolish God-based ethics). The American mind is just not comfortable (a favorite word) with morality, the genuine article. They think it interferes with their “freedom”—and yes, it does. They are shameless and guilt-free. They worship popularity above all else. They have no idea of justice. They think morality has something to do with the law. They just don’t get it. Thus, the Democratic party lacks what it advertises itself as being—the party of right and wrong, of justice, of the good (as opposed to the successful, measured by money and “likes”). In the absence or morality, everything turns into a power struggle. That’s the state of things now.

Are the Laws of psychology Necessary?

There are laws of physics and laws of psychology, but are these laws of the same kind? Of course, they are about different things, but do they have the same modal status? Are they both nomologically necessary? The laws of physics are: they are universal and unalterable by human action. Everywhere you go the law of gravity holds; physical laws aren’t local. These laws are rightly called laws of nature—they characterize nature as a whole. They are as widespread as the universe itself (so far as we know). And no one can change them: nothing you can do will suspend the law of gravitation (or the electromagnetic laws, etc.).  The laws of physics are unconditional, ubiquitous, and immutable. They are not restricted to our solar system or even our galaxy. You can boldly go anywhere and they will be there waiting for you, always the same. But the same is not true of psychological laws: these laws are species-specific (in a broad sense of species). Some of them are species-specific in the usual sense of “species”, but if they apply more widely than this, they are still restricted to specific animal groups.  The law “Praise increases self-esteem” is presumably limited to humans, but other laws of psychology will be restricted to mammals or vertebrates or terrestrial life. Let’s take the example of memory laws, such as the frequency and recency laws: the more frequent or recent an experience the more it will be remembered. This law holds for many groups of animals, but does it hold for all? What about worms or wasps? Couldn’t there be a species that doesn’t exemplify these laws but still remembers things? It might obey the intensity law: the more intense the stimulus (louder, brighter) the more it will be remembered. What about laws relating emotion and memory—such as that strong emotion can enhance memory? That would hardly apply to an emotion-free organism that nevertheless remembers. Mr. Spock’s mind is free of emotion, so the laws governing it will not have an emotional component—it works by non-human psychological laws (he is not upset by insults). Thus, we have no trouble with the thought that in remote galaxies there might be minds that obey quite different laws from those with which we are familiar. Psychological laws are not going to be universal, invariant, built into nature; they are local, variable, parochial. They are more like anthropological laws, which vary with the society being considered: what holds of one society may not hold of another (science fiction is full of such societies). Psychological laws are not universal necessities.

Why is this? The answer, presumably, is that minds are adapted to specific types of environments and life-styles: what works for a mammal may not work for a mollusk. The laws of the octopus mind will not coincide with those of the bonobo mind. Just as an animal’s phenotype is shaped by its environment via natural selection, so the laws of that phenotype will be so shaped, including its mental phenotype. Psychological laws are evolved, selected, and modified over time. They are the children of selfish genes. Nothing like this is true of the laws of physics and chemistry. Artificial selection drives the point home: you could breed for certain psychological laws to obtain. Take the laws of conditioning, classical and operant: these hold for many animals, but we could intentionally breed them out and replace them with new laws. We could select for reproduction only dog minds that fail to acquire conditioned reflexes, or only pigeon minds that are bad at responding to positive reinforcement. We might get dogs that can never be made to salivate to bells, or pigeons that never learn to peck at levers that have supplied food pellets in the past. It all depends on genetics and brain wiring, which are manipulable. Likewise, we could breed for humans that don’t obey the frequency and recency laws of memory; or we could just interfere with the brain of humans to bring about this result. The laws depend on the mechanisms that depend on the selection history that depend on the environment. They are created by the local environment; they aren’t written into nature as such. Psychological laws are biology-dependent; they are contingent in that sense. Not even the laws of psychophysics are guaranteed to apply to all organisms capable of responding to a graded stimulus. Physiological laws are also species-specific, depending on the kind of body in question, and psychological laws are no different. The worm has a different physiology from the human and its mind (such as it is) is not operationally the same as a human mind—the governing laws are quite different.

Are there any psychological laws that apply universally? Does every animal act to fulfill its desires, say? This is certainly a very general law, but is it as universal as the law of gravity? Every physical body has mass (more or less) but not every organism has desires, though it will doubtless have biological needs. Some animals may be highly illogical, some models of rationality; some emotional, some clinical. It is hard to think of any psychological law that is written into nature—that is, intrinsically universal. Every mind obeys some set of psychological laws, but there is no set of psychological laws such that that set applies to all minds. Certainly, we can say that generally psychological laws are species-specific. The law of gravity (or the laws of motion in general) applies to every material body in the same way to the same degree, but psychological laws never apply identically to every organism with a mind. Bodies are nomologically homogeneous, but minds are not. Animal minds vary tremendously, and so do the laws governing them. Zoology isn’t like chemistry: the elements always behave in the same way—not so animals. Our Earth-centered zoology may have little application to the animals on other planets, but our chemistry will carry over nicely. Strange beasts, familiar chemicals. None of our species may exist on some distant planet, but surely our chemicals will be all present and correct (ditto our atoms).

This means that psychology will never be quite like physics. Physics envy is folly. This isn’t because there are no psychological laws, or that all such laws are ceteris paribus not strict, or that psychological laws can never be quantitative in the way physical laws are; it is because they lack universality. Even if they exist in plenty and are strict and quantitative, they would not have the range of physical laws—they would always be contingent and parochial. Nothing wrong with that—we should give up our craving for generality—but it is misguided to try to imitate the universality of the physical sciences. If you imagine what psychology will look like in the age of intergalactic travel, it will surely be a multi-faceted subject: there will be departments of human psychology, of Vulcan psychology, of Klingon psychology—not to mention the many animal species that need a psychology department of their own. A comprehensive Department of Psychology will be a vast undertaking, including many divisions and subdivisions; but the physics department will be a small operation employing relatively few professors, physics being a smaller field. Pan-galactic zoology is a vast area of study well beyond the capabilities of even the most learned man or woman, while pan-galactic chemistry is relatively confined and manageable. So, zoology and psychology will never have the range of physics and chemistry, but it will outdo them in manpower and variety. There will be many more doctorates in those fields than in the physical sciences. Indeed, physics and chemistry may long ago have come an end, everything having been discovered, while zoology and psychology are still in their infancy, with many living planets awaiting investigation. Physical science comes to a natural end while psychological science marches on.[1]

[1] One reaction to these reflections would be to announce that there are no genuine psychological laws, the emphasis indicating that genuine laws must be universal. The question is somewhat verbal, but one sees the point of such a declaration. A local law sounds like a contradiction. We might also consider the question of whether local psychological laws must be backed by non-local physical laws, thus deriving the conclusion that minds must ultimately be physical (cf. Davidson). We also have psycho-physical laws on the books: these combine the local with the universal, inviting the question of whether they are local or universal. It is certainly true that the physical laws were there first and that the psychological laws somehow rest on them (psychological laws are physically supervenient). These are topics for further study.

Conceptual Analysis Mathematized

Frege mathematized meaning by invoking the concept of a function, the central concept in modern mathematics. Concepts are conceived as functions from objects to truth-values, etc. This enables Frege to give a systematic rigorous account of the workings of language, modelled on mathematical notation. I propose to do the same for conceptual analysis: the analysandum is viewed as a function from the elements constituting the analysans. For example, knowledge is a function from belief, truth, and justification to a propositional component (intuitively, the concept of knowledge viewed as a constituent of thought). There are several ways of constructing the arguments and values of such functions, but the important point is that the function exists: it takes us from the primitive elements of the concept to the concept itself. It operates as a kind of binding function: it unites the several elements into a conceptual whole, glues them together. Thus, the concept is not just a list or conjunction; there is a natural unity. We define the function as second-level because it takes first-level functions as arguments—since belief, truth, and justification are functions from objects to something else (truth-values or states of affairs). The idea is that complex concepts like knowledge are mappings from simpler concepts, themselves mappings from one kind of entity to another (ala Frege). There is a hierarchical structure, representable by a tree diagram, linking complex concepts to simpler concepts. Of course, the concepts used in the analysis will often have analyses of their own, so that the tree will be ramified and many-branched. We could assign a number to its complexity and compare analyses in respect of cardinality (the concept of a game, say, might be twice as complex as the concept of knowledge, computed according to the number of functions in the analysis). A whole proposition (thought) would combine several analyzable concepts (“John knows what a game is”) and this entity would contain the full analysis of all the concepts that compose it. It would be mathematically quite hairy. The structure is familiar from linguistics and descriptions of conceptual constituency; I am merely adding the Fregean apparatus of functions, arguments, and values. We view the basic concepts as inputs to a function that gives as output a complex concept containing the input concepts. Think of the concept-forming function as a binding function: it fuses the elementary concepts into a conceptual whole that is available for cognitive use. Geometrically, it is defined over a space of basic concepts (also functions) that can be assembled into complex wholes; it is not unlike atoms and molecules, or words and sentences, or organs and bodies. We have a kind of mereological mathematics applied to the conceptual domain. Concepts can share parts and hence be available for intersection—one concept may incorporate an element also possessed by another concept. Set theory may thus be brought to bear. Formal methods can be applied to the domain of concepts, because of their compositional structure. We get a mathematics of the conceptual—primitive perhaps but mathematically formulated. It will yield equations like “Knowledge equals the combination of Belief, Truth, and Justification” (K=BTJ), i.e., “The thought-content of the concept of knowledge is the value of a second-level function from first-level functions corresponding to the attributes of Belief, Truth, and Justification”. This should satisfy the ambitions of mathematically inclined analytical philosophers wedded to the project of conceptual analysis.[1]

[1] Nothing says that this is the only way to mathematize conceptual analysis; I offer it as one way to impose mathematical structure on the underlying reality—illustrative not definitive.