Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Why Self-Deception Research Hasn’t Made Much Progress

by Neil Van Leeuwen

I’d like to talk frankly about why research on the topic of self-deception hasn’t made much progress—as far as I can see—despite a steady-stream of on-going interest. There’s been some excellent work, but it doesn’t seem to me that the topic on the whole has moved forward all that much.

In both philosophy and psychology there has been a tendency to talk about self-deception as if it were one thing. If it’s one thing, we can just figure out what that is. Right?

 The philosopher’s approach is to try to solve the paradox of self-deception and come up with an analysis of self-deception in terms of necessary and/or sufficient conditions.

 The psychologist’s approach is to try to demonstrate experimentally that certain behaviors require positing a mental state of “self-deception.” (This approach is excellently illustrated by the classic 1979 article from Ruben Gur and Harold Sackheim, entitled “Self-Deception: a Concept in search of a Phenomenon.”)

 Neither approach is exactly wrong. But here’s the problem. “Self-deception” is a term that only loosely refers. If we were to survey all the psychological states that the term can aptly be applied to, we’d find vast differences within that set of perfectly real phenomena. There are, at least, what I would call classic self-deception, self-inflation bias, semi-pretense, and false emotion, all of which seem to me to be distinct—but all of which get loosely termed “self-deception.” I’ll turn to those shortly. For now, let’s stay focused on the methodological problem.

 The implicit assumption that self-deception is a unified phenomenon creates problems for philosophers and psychologists in different ways.

 For philosophers: any good analysis of one of the self-deceptive phenomena (which ends up being an “analysis of self-deception [full stop]”) is subject to apparent counterexamples from someone who points to one of the other self-deceptive phenomena. For example, theorist number 1 (who has classic self-deception in mind) may produce an “analysis of self-deception” that theorist number 2 (who has false emotion in mind) presents a “counterexample” to. The two theorists are in fact talking past each other without realizing it, because of this mistaken assumption of unity. They are both talking about “self-deception.”

 For psychologists: the problem is even simpler to describe. Bodies of data can seem to contradict when they in fact don’t, simply because a data set about one phenomenon is labeled under the same heading (“self-deception”) as a data set that’s in fact about a distinct phenomenon. Something like this may be what happened in the debate in the 1990s consisting of Shelley Taylor (and colleagues) versus Randy Colvin (and colleagues). The “self-deceptive” phenomena that Taylor found conducive to success and happiness are just not the same mental states as the “self-deceptive” phenomena that Colvin found detrimental to social well-being. (I do some untangling of that particular debate in “Self-Deception Won’t Make You Happy,” in case you’re interested.)

 This whole situation impresses upon me one thing that Robert Trivers told me once. He said that what I should be doing with my time and philosophical ability is logically analyzing and distinguishing different kinds of self-deception, which could be a benefit to everyone. I think he was implying that it was a mistake to look for one holy grail analysis of self-deception.

 So here I’d like to make some progress on his suggestion. The following four phenomena are distinct, although they could all (in some cases more loosely than others) be called “self-deception.”

 Classic self-deception. This is a phenomenon of motivated irrationality, in which motivational forces in the agent somehow drive him/her to form a belief that runs contrary to the wealth of evidence that she possesses. The mind is in some sense divided. Thus, classic self-deception is rightly said to involve some sort of epistemic tension. This is the phenomenon that philosophers are most focused on, since it seems paradoxical. But being focused on classic self-deception hasn’t saved us from accidentally labeling cases of the other phenomena as “self-deception.”

 Self-inflation bias. We often hear statistics along the following lines. “94% percent of college professors believe they are above average in their scholarly abilities.” “85% of people think they are above average at driving.” And so on. These statistics are evidence of a general tendency people have to think better of themselves than rigorous analysis of the evidence would warrant. Importantly, I don’t think this self-inflation bias needs to involve an epistemic tension like self-deception does. The self-inflator is wholehearted in her high opinion of herself. Furthermore, this general tendency isn’t motivated by specific desires and insecurities, as is the case in classic self-deception.

 Semi-pretense. Often we go about imitating others without any intention to imitate or pretend. Sartre’s waiter is a great example of this. We take on the trappings of a certain character, without even being aware that that’s what’s happening. If the character I’m unwittingly imitating is inappropriate to my actual circumstances, someone might say I’m deceiving myself. But I prefer to call this phenomenon semi-pretense, because it’s in between plain action and full pretending. (But note that semi-pretense can contribute to classic self-deception, if the agent goes on to form beliefs on the basis of the semi-pretense.)

 False emotion. As Robert Frank discusses in Passions within Reason, people often have emotions for strategic social reasons. Often that’s good. We may cry because we genuinely need help. But crying may well be disproportionate to the amount of genuine need—a way of manipulating other parties into doing one’s will. Importantly, such manipulative false emotion needn’t be (and perhaps usually isn’t) consciously planned. The agent is convinced by her own false emotion! This, again, may be loosely called self-deception, although it is rather different from the preceding three phenomena.

 There are other distinct phenomena, too, that pre-theoretically get thrown into the basket of “self-deception.” Progress will require greater precision going forward.

I’d like to close this blog with a note to anyone who, like me, takes an interest in the evolutionary status of “self-deception.” I have argued in various places that self-deception is not an adaptation evolved by natural selection to serve some function. Rather, I have said self-deception is a spandrel, which means it’s a structural byproduct of other features of the human organism. My view has been that features of mind that are necessary for rational cognition in a finite being with urgent needs yield a capacity for self-deception as a byproduct. On this view, self-deception wasn’t selected for, but it also couldn’t be selected out, on pain of losing some of the beneficial features of which it’s a byproduct. This view seems opposed to the view of Robert Trivers, who maintains that self-deception is an adaptation to facilitate interpersonal deception. But it could be, in light of the foregoing distinctions, that Trivers and I were talking past each other.

I hereby wish to suggest the following. Self-inflation bias and false emotion are evolutionary adaptations that serve interpersonal deception, as Trivers has theorized. But classic self-deception and semi-pretense are in fact spandrels. Whether or not I am right in these particular hypotheses, I think the methodological point of this blog still stands.

Self Deception

posted by KT

Our topic this week is self-deception. 

Self-deception is rampant in human affairs.  And although too much self-deception is probably a bad thing, a little self-deception may be just what a person needs to get through the day.   One should never underestimate the power of positive illusions.  For example, psychological studies show that people who are overly optimistic about their own abilities often have enhanced motivation, which enables them to do better in the face of challenges than people with more realistic assessments of their own talents.

Of course, it may be that for every one person who benefits from self-deception, there are scads who are burned by it.  Think of the pathological gambler who goes bankrupt betting on a “sure thing” or a battered wife who keeps returning to her abuser, confident that he won’t do again. Or think of the mass self-deception that causes the American electorate to believe we can have lower taxes, more government services, and a balanced budget all at the same time.   Clearly,  people subject to this sort of self-deception run a real risk of ruin.

Still,  I’m prepared to say that self-deception always leads to ruin.   I suspect that self-deception, like many facets of human life, has both a dark side and a light side.  Perhaps key to happiness is to staying on light side and avoid the dark side.  But doing that would be no easy task.   I doubt that there could be a formula or even a set of rough principles that told you when it would be happiness making to deceive oneself and when one needed to be relentlessly honest with oneself.

Moreover, when you stop and think about it, self-deception borders on the paradoxical.   It’s easy to see how you can deceive somebody else.  Maybe you hide or distort some evidence or maybe you straight-out lie to them and, like a fool, they believe you.  There may be something morally wrong with deceiving others, but there’s nothing incoherent about it.  It can certainly be highly advantageous for me to get you to believe what I know to be false.    But in the case of self-deception the deceiving party and the deceived party are one and the same.  That’s what makes it so puzzling.

At first blush, it looks as though in order to be self-deceived you have to believe things that you know to be false.   But if you know something to be false, how can you believe it?  You can’t just self-consciously will yourself to believe things you already know to be false.  You can certainly pretend to believe things that you know to be false.  But self-deception doesn’t seem like a form of pretense, not exactly anyway.   Though some have denied it, self-deception seems to involve straight-out believing and believing something that, at some level,  you know to be false.

That suggests that when you are self-deceived you simultaneously believe and disbelieve the same thing.  At some level that gambler mentioned earlier knows he’s betting on a losing proposition.  But at another level he really believes he has chance of winning.   That sounds pretty darned irrational.   It’s not immediately obvious how such irrationality is even psychologically possible. 

That’s  one question that a good theory of self-deception needs to answer. Self-deception is pretty obviously possible,  but explaining just how it’s possible is not a simple matter.

A good theory of self-deception had also better explain how self-deception manages to be so pervasive.  Self-deception is not a rare and exceptional thing for us humans.     We humans pride ourselves on being paragons of rationality.  And there is more than a little justification for that pride.  After all, our brains have created science, art, mathematics politics and philosophy.  But the problem is that right along side all these amazing capacities sits a capacity for rampant self-deception.   Why do we have such a capacity in the first place?   Did natural selection specifically design our brains for self-deception?

And then there’s the original question that I started out with.  Can self-deception sometimes be the key to human happiness or will self-deception always lead you to misery and ruin, at least in the long run? Those are just some of the questions we’ll put to this week’s guest --   Neil van Leeuwen.  Besides being one of the world’s up and coming authorities on self-deception,  Neil has deep connections to Philosophy Talk.   When he was a graduate student at Stanford,  working on his very fine dissertation on self deception – he served as Philosophy Talk’s  Director of Research.  He’s now gone on to bigger and better things, obviously.  But we’re really pleased to welcome him home. 

Social Reality

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

Culture and Mental Illness

Posted by Ken Taylor

Our topic for this week is Culture and Mental Illness.  Our aim is to consider the ways in which culture influences and shapes the very idea of mental illness and the also the way culture conditions the way particular mental illnesses express themselves. 

Start  with the way culture shapes the very idea of what counts as a mental illness.  Take the case of koro.   Koro is mental disorder, characterized by a debilitating fear that that one’s genitals are retracting into ones body and that once they are fully retracted you will die.   You don’t find many instances of in Western societies.   But Southwest Asia koro epidemics have been known to break out.   There was such an epidemic in 1984-85 in Guangdong, China.  And between 997 and 2003 in several different West African nations,  there were local outbreaks of koro-like panics.   Koro seems to be at least partly based on a set of culturally specific beliefs about sexuality.   Most koro sufferers appear to be immature, younger men, who lack self-confidence, who engage in a lot of auto-erotic activity, and who suffer extreme guilt and anxiety as a consequence.  Culturally conditioned views about sexuality seem to play an important role in causing  their guilt and anxiety to express themselves in a certain way.

One could think that it makes little sense to call koro a mental disease at all.  Koro seems very much like a form of culturally conditioned fear or panic or something.  But is that enough to make it a mental disease?   A mental illness, one might think,  is is something that happens to you because your brain goes haywire in a certain way  -- like in schizophrenia, for example.   A mental disease isn’t something that happens to you because you have weird beliefs.   Indeed, if you look up koro in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual – the book that covers all mental health disorders for both children and adults --  you will find koro listed there.  But you’ll find it listed toward the back of the book --  with what are called  “culture-bound syndromes.”   That’s a way of recognizing koro and its cousins, like amok, which was once prevalent in Maylasia,  or zar, which occurs mostly in the Middle East,  are real things – sort of.   But it’s also a way of saying that they are not quite your garden variety mental disorders,  more or less directly rooted in the physiology of the brain 

 But  this isn’t to suggest that only certainly weird and exotic conditions are shaped and influenced by culture.  Take schizophrenia. Though there is some disagreement about what exactly Schizophrenia consists in, nobody would deny that schizophrenia is something real and something really devastating.   And it occurs everywhere, not just in this or that culture.  But even a disease as “transcultural” as schizophrenia seems to be culturally and socially conditioned in certain ways.     Schizophrenics often suffer from various kinds of delusions.  And  it wouldn’t be at all surprising if the content of those delusions were keenly sensitive to locally culturally  shaped beliefs and practices.

On the other hand, we need to be careful here too not to overstate the case for actual cultural variations in the way mental illnesses express themselves.  Just like with everything else in our the rapidly globalizing economy, there are forces that threaten homogenize away cultural differences --  including cultural differences in the way we experience, treat, and understand mental illness.  In fact, this week’s guest is Ethan Watters author of Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.  He argues that the American Psychiatric establishment is, in effect, changing the way mental illness is experienced, treated, and understood, around the globe. Is the rising hegemony of the American model of mental illness noticed by Watters  a good thing or a bad thing?  Does it represent scientific progress or a kind of cultural imperialism?    Would it be better to let a thousand cultural flowers bloom in the treatment, understanding, and experience of mental illness?  Those are just some of the questions we hope to address. 

The Philosophical Legacy of Charles Darwin

Today our topic is Darwin's Philosophical Legacy and our guest is the one man in best suited to help think this through. That would be Dan Dennett, author of many books inspired by Darwinian ideas. Dennett thinks that Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection is both the single best idea that anyone has every had about life and how it works and also a deeply unsettling even "dangerous" idea. You can join the conversation by posting to this open blog entry.

Flirting as a two-step dance

posted by Ken Taylor

Ah the glories of summer. Though lots has been happening behind the scenes at Philosophy Talk -- much of which you will hear about very soon -- not a lot has been happening on this blog of late. But now that our summer more or less hiatus draws to a close, we will be in the studio more often, producing more live shows. That should mean more blogging too.

I can't honestly say that today's show is about an age-old philosophical question. In fact, as a philosophical topic, flrting is, like, so last second. As far as I can tell, it was put on the map by today's guest, Carrie Jenkins, and her mate Daniel Nolan in a pair of dualing articles. You can download Carrie's by clicking here and Daniel's by clicking here. Also, be sure to check out Carrie's blog Long Words Bother Me, where she mostly doesn't flirt, but does serious philosophy.

I don't profess to have a well worked-out theory of flirting. In my youth, before I settled down, I was nothing like a master flirt, though I tried hard. So I don't even speak from rich experience. But I'll offer a few quick takes just to get the juices going before this morning's show. I'm sure Carrie's thinking will be much more sophisticated than my own feeble attempts.

I start out thinking that flirting probably has a sort of "Gricean" structure. By that I mean a couple of things. First, it seems to me that you flirt with someone by intending to flirt with them. It's one thing to cause sexual arousal in another person by a look or a walk or a word or your tone of voice or the tilt of your head. But unless you intend to cause arousal by that means, it doesn't seem right to my ear to say that you are flirting with them.

But it also doesn't seem right that merely intending to cause arousal by a certain bit of behavior -- verbal or non-verbal -- suffices for flirting. First of all there's the point that you might intend to cause arousal but be so clueless as to how to go about it that you utterly fail. A clueless and crude teenage boy who thinks that mooning girls is a cool way to flirt, isn't really a flirt (though maybe he's an attempted flirt, according to Daniel Nolan). He's just crude and obnoxious.

More interesting -- to me at least -- than cases of attempted flirtation that fail to arouse or intimate sex or romance because they are so inept are cases in which you do succeed in causing arousal by a behavior that's intended to cause arousal, but in which you, nonetheless, don't flirt. Psychologists have long known that sexaul attraction is facilitated during states of strong antecedent emotional arousal -- whatever the antecedent emotional state. There's a famous and widely cited study that compared guys crossing a scary bridge in a beautiful setting who were approached by a woman claiming to be doing research on beautiful places with guys on a secure bridge in a similar setting approached by the same woman. The woman asked a few questions, gave them a questionnaire, and gave them her number in case they had follow up questions. The guys on the scary bridge rated the woman more attractive and were more likely to call her afterwards than the guys on the secure bridge. Clearly the guys on the scary bridge were more emotionally aroused than the guys on the secure bridge, but they (mistakenly?) attributed their arousal to the presence of the woman.

Well what's that got to do with flrting, you ask? Well now that you know about this study, if you didn't already, here's a way to arouse a potential partner and cause that person to be interested in you. Take your target on a roller coaster ride on your first date. He or she will find you more attractive and be more interested in you than he or she otherwise might have been. Suppose you do this intentionally. Though you are manipulating your partner's level of sexual arousal by behavior intended to do just that, it doesn't seem right to say that you are flirting with with your target just by inviting her or him on the roller coaster ride. (Although, once you get the person on the ride your flirtations may be more successful.)

This brings me to the quasi-Gricean part. I think you flirt only when: (a) you behave in ways intended to intimate the possibility of sex or romance and (b) you intend to make that intention manifest to the other.

I'm not sure this is enough to constitute flirting. But it seems to me that if you don't intend to make it manifest that you intend to be intimating romance or sex then probably you are not flirting. You may be doing something else sexually charged. But you're not flirting.

Here's another quick thought about the "speech-acty" character of flirting. It seems to me that flirting is sort of like two speech acts in one. On the one hand, there's a kind of self-presentation involved in flirting. I present myself as potentially available to you. But in that self-presentation, I thereby invite you to present yourself to me as available to me. if you don't take up the invitation, I have flirted with you, but you haven't flirted with me. If you do take up the invitation, we're flirting with each other. Suppose that after you have openly declined my invitation, I continue to flirt with you -- that is, continue to present myself as available and thereby invite you to so present yourself to me. My flirtation turns into something else, it seems, though I'm not sure exactly what. An unwanted advance? Rudeness?

Suppose on the other hand, you accept my invitation to present yourself to me as available. But suppose that I decide I don't like you so much after all. I give you the buzz off sign. What then? Are you being similarly rude or obtuse or overly aggressive if you don't get the message? Was I being a mere tease? Once I begin a flirtation and you take me up on my invitation, am I or am I not entitled to take my invitation back without sanction? Or is it taking it back like refusing to let you in the door when you show up with your invitation to the dance?

Of course, there must be some limit, some off-ramp. To begin to flirt isn't to commit to carrying all the way through to romance or sex. To flirt is only to initmate a possibility. As the flirtation develops, we each get to decide at some point or other that the merely possible will not, in this case, be actualized. Or so it seems. But how exactly we manage that in a mutually agreeable way, now that's a tricky question.

[added after show.] I also think it's the fact that a flirtation intimates a mere possibility -- a possibility whose non-actualization is also presupposed as a possibility -- that lends flirtation an air of what we might call intrinsic playfulness. It's partly because it's made mutually manifest that this may or may not go any further that flirting sort of is bound to have a playful air. If flirtation were always intended to get you all the way to romance or sex, there would be a kind of intrinsic seriousness to it that flirtation lacks. Of course, at some point when there's mutual and continuing uptake, things can get serious indeed. And surely we want that out of some our flirtations.

Why I am not a Wittgensteinian

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about Wittgenstein. Our guest will be Juliet Floyd.

Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I don't share that view. But there's no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime -- a book that he later basically repudiated -- he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy. Indeed, Wittgenstein has to be regarded as one of the great founding fathers of 20th century analytic philosophy, especially of the so-called linguistic turn in philosophy.

Now I don't profess at all to be an expert on Wittgenstein. I did read a fair amount of Wittgenstein as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where a number of my teachers had an enduring fascination with his work. I don't doubt that Wittgenstein was a deep, ingenious, and highly impactful philosophy. Nonetheless, I find myself resistant to much of his philosophy -- especially his later philosophy. In the rest of this post, I'll try to say a bit about why.

When I say that I find myself resistant to much of Wittgenstein's philosophy, it's not so much this or that particular claim of his that I resist. There's lots of things that Wittgenstein says in his great work the Philosophical Investigations, for example, that I find intriguing, deep, challenging, and well worth thinking about even today. I presume we'll talk about some of his more intriquing philosophical claims today -- his picture theory of meaning, his claim that the limits of my language are the limits of my world, his later (and highly influential) view that meaning is use, his argument against the very possibility of a private language. All this is rich and provocative stuff. And though I probably ultimately reject a lot of it, it isn't these things that I find so hard to swallow from Wittgenstein. It's really his "metaphilosophical" outlook that I find myself constantly recoiling from. That is, it's his views about how to do philosophy and what you can and cannot achieve by doing philosophy that I most firmly reject.

Let me explain. Wittgenstein, especially the later Wittgenstein, viewed philosophy as it had been practiced more or less up his own arrival as mostly a budget of confusions. Philosophical problems and "theories" one and all arise, he says at one point in the Philosophical Investigations, from language gone on a holiday. The rough idea is that a whole lot of philosophy gets going by taking terms like say "knowledge" or "mind" or "idea" or -- take your pick -- and raising questions that have nothing to do with our sort of everyday use of such terms in the context of the "language games" in which they are at home.

Take the so-called problem of other minds. How does this problem get started? Well, Descartes convinced many philosophers that we have immediate and incorrigible access to the contents of our own minds, as if the mind were somehow completely open to itself. It's clear we don't in the same way know the contents of the minds of others. Starting with that observation, it really wouldn't take much argument to get yourself into the frame of thinking that one can reasonably and intelligibly wonder whether we have anyway of knowing about the minds of others. And once you got yourself into that state of wonder, it wouldn't take a whole lot of further argument to convince yourself to be an utter sceptic about our knowledge of other minds. Of course, at least some other philosophers will be unmoved by your scepticism. They may take themselves to be the guardians of common sense. But as soon as they admit that your arguments at least deserve answering, that there really is a problem about our knowledge of other minds, then we're off and running on a race to see which set of philosophical arguments will carry the day. Sceptical arguments will war with anti-sceptical arguments. the debate will go on -- probably interminably, with no real resolution ever being achieved.

We philosophers tend to think of our problems as "enduring." But the Wittgensteinian thought is that that may just be another way of saying intractable, however. And Wittgenstein can be seen as offering us an explanation of why we find the problems so intractable. That's the point of his saying that philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday. This is not for him a sign that the problems of philosophy are deep. It is rather a sign that they are grounded in utter confusion and abuse of language.

Now I won't try to reconstruct the arguments that might lead one down the primrose path of worrying about our knowledge of other minds. I'll leave that as exercise to the reader for now. What Wittgenstein wants to do for philosophy is to give us a way of avoiding taking even the very first step down such paths in the first place. The secret, he thinks, is simply to look at how we actually use such terms as 'knowledge' 'self' 'others' etc in the real life language games and "forms of life" in which those terms are at home. Philosophy should simply stick to describing use. It should abandon the grand hope of building philosophical theories of things like mind, knowledge and self. It has no particular resources for enabling it to construct such theories in the first place. And all of its past attempts to do so have led to intractable confusion.

Once we abandon the urge to build grand philosophical theories designed to get at, as it were, hidden philosophical essences, and simply look at how language is actually used, it's not so much that we thereby solve the traditional philosophical problems, It's rather that we dissolve them. If we simply look at our actual practices, we will see that the idea that we know the contents of our own minds in some immediate, incorrigible fashion that is different from the way in which we we know the minds of others cannot be sustained. The very problem that gets the whole intractable debate about our knowledge of self vs. our knowledge of other minds is based again on "language gone on a holiday." And once you see this, the problem immediately dissolves itself.

There's something profound about Wittgenstein's approach. Not without reason did generations of later philosophers find it a potent rallying cry. It's certainly true that we want to pay attention to how our language is actually used and we don't want, through mere inattention to the facts of use, to generate pseudo problems. But I have to say that I think it is a serious mistake to think that all the so-called traditional problems of philosophy are mere pseudo-problems borne of insufficient attention to how we actually use certain quite ordinary terms, that, in their everyday use, are completely unproblematic.

Since I'm going to have to leave for the studio pretty soon, I'm not sure I can spell this all out before airtime. Probably I'll come back to it after the show and provide an update. But here's a couple of quick takes on why I don't share Wittgenstein's assessment of the "enduring" philosophical problems and his assessment of what to do about them. First, I think it's wrong to say that if we just look at how the language is actually used the problem about other minds would simply go away. One needn't doubt that we do know the minds of others. One can simply wonder both how possibly we could know the minds of others and how actually we do, in fact, do so. Both of these strike me as important and interesting questions. The former is the kind of question that you'll find a philosopher more likely to be asking. And the second -- the how actually question -- is one you'll find a psychologist/cognitive scientist more likely to be asking.

I could say a lot about the nature of how possibly questions. Think of what you're doing when you ask and try to answer a how possibly question like this. You've got an initial budget of concepts -- maybe concepts of mind, knowledge, self, others. And reflecting on these concepts you find yourself puzzled as to how these concepts "coordinate" with one another. You can see how possibly a thinking being can know itself, but your puzzled about how a thinking being can know the contents of the mind of another thinking being. You start to imagine the possibilities. In so doing, you are, as it were, taking an imaginative walk through a range of alternative possible worlds, trying to see if there are any in which one mind knows the contents of another mind. If you find one, and if it's not too far away from the actual world, you conclude that yes one mind can know the contents of another mind. If you don't find one, or if the ones you find are very very far from the actual world, you become a sceptic or conclude that one can only know the contents of one's own mind.

You can read Wittgenstein as arguing that we don't really have any discplined way to walk through the range of possibilities in any way likely to produce stable conviction. Instead of trying to take unconstrained and undisciplined walks through a range of imagined, but un-ordered possibilities, we should just look. Look at how we actually talk about mind, self, knowledge and other in the actual language games we play when we do so in the context of the lived forms of life that give those games point.

I think there is something to this advice. But not everything that Wittgenstein seems to think.

Consider the practicing cognitive scientist. What we do when we walk through a range of alternative worlds in the imagination can feel a lot different from what we do when we do science. Take your practicing cognitive scientist who wants to know how minds actually cognize one another. How does she go about constructing a theory of how people actually manage to know the minds of others. Well one thing she doesn't do is to simply look at how words like "knowledge" "mind" "self" "others" etc are used in ordinary language games. She might take such use as data points. But she's perfectly prepared to find out that people don't actually have much of a clue as to how we actually go about figuring out what other people think and believe. So what does she do? She deploys more or less tried and true methods of hypothesis generation and testing. She does experiments, she builds models, etc. That is, she draws on all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to try to figure out exactly how, in fact, we so regularly, reliably and systematically figure out what other people feel, believe, and desire. [She also notices that we are not so good at figuring out our own thoughts and feelings.

But what about the poor philosopher? The psychologist cum cognitive scientist in her attempt ot answer the how actually question about our knowledge of other minds is armed to the teeth. She has all the ways and means of empirical inquiry to draw upon. But what do we poor philosophers have to draw on in trying to answer our how possibly question? One worry might be the one we discussed above. We philosophers really don't have much to draw on except our own unconstrained philosophical imaginations. But philosophical imagination unmoored to the everyday forms of life that give our language games point, is a paltry thing, a thing more likely to mislead than illuminate. So perhaps what Wittgenstein is trying to do by suggesting that we look at how language actually works is simply to give us a way to constrain the imagination in ways that prevent it from just running rampant.

I applaud that instict, if that was the instinct. But take it a step further. Why restrict ourselves to just in tact "language games" in which the problematic terms and concepts supposedly have their homes? You wouldn't recommend that procedure to the practicing psychologist cum cognitive scientist would you? You wouldn't say look only at what people say. Don't do clever experiments designed to ferret out the hidden inner mechanisms or regularities not immediately evident in our everyday practices and our everyday descriptions of those practices.

WHy should the evidential base for our philosophy be more restricted than the evidential base for the construction of psychological and other theories.

Because philosophy is, well, different, and sui generis? I don't think so. Philosophy, on my view, is very much continuous with science. I don't mean to say that philosophy is just one science among others. It isn't. For one thing philosophy really is much more concerned, often, with "how possibly, if at all" sorts of questions than the sciences typically are and less concerned with the "how actually" than the sciences typically are. But how possibly questions should really be thought of as "how possibly, given what we know" questions. And as science increases our knowledge of the actual, we get greater and greater resources for constraining our answers to the how possibly questions that are our stock and trade.

Since I'm writing at sort of break-neck pace because I want to get this up before I leave for the studio, I'm not sure if I'm being clear. So let me try a quick statement of a kind of anti-Wittgensteinian bottom line, that concedes something but far from everything to Wittgenstein. Just starting out bare, with a bare "how possibly question" isn't likely to get you very far. All you have to go on, from square one, is one's own philosophical imagination. But an imagination unconstrained is probably not a reliable guide to anything very deep. Looking at actual language in practice can be one source of constraints. There is a way we actually do talk about the minds of others. There is the actual evidence that we do use to support our actual conclusions about the contents of others minds. And its wise advice that we start out by looking at such things. But we should also be prepared to look eslewhwere -- at, for example, the deliverances of cognitive science -- and constrain our imaginations by those deliverances as well. And we should also be prepared to find that our everyday practices are sometimes infected with all sorts of illusory material, founded on all sorts of historical mistakes and misdiagnosis that achieve through the mechanisms of cultural transmission the status of received wisdom. That is, we should be prepared to find that common sense and ordinary usage may themselves stand in need of thoroughgoing reformation.

But once we see that we can constrain our imaginations in lots of different ways, from lots of different sources, in its walk through a space of possibilities, why believe that we are prevented from even beginning the walk? Why despair that we will only end in confusion and chaos and intractable fruitless debate? Maybe we will, but we are not bound to.

Of course, another worry is that if we make more and more progress on the how actually questions, the how possibly questions will eventually cease to grip us. And at least that part of philosophy will come to an end. Maybe. But we are often gripped by how possibly questions when we cannot even begin to get a grip on how the thing actually works. I don't know what mechanisms are actually in there, but let's see what mechanism might be in there. And once we consider which ones might be there, let's see if we can eliminate some of the possible ones and hone in on the actual ones. Is the elimination of possibilites a scientific or a merely philosophical undertaking? I think the answer must be really both and. And as long as there are domains ripe for conceptual reconfiguration, there will always be room for philosophy. Philosophy will end only when conceptual puzzlement itself comes to an end.

With that, I really gotta go, as Ian Shoales is found of saying.

Music, Meaning, and Emotion

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about the philosophy of music. Our guest will be Peter Kivy, a leading philosopher of music and a former colleague of mine from Rutgers University.

I fancy myself a pretty accomplished philosopher. I've been at this philosophy thing for about 25 years now. I also consider myself a decent musician. In my youth I played a lot of music -- trombone, violin, piano. Plus I sang in various choirs. I don't perform much anymore, but I still consume music of all sorts.

But I have to admit that although I'm not bad at philosophy and pretty good at music, I've never given music a great deal of philosophical attention. That's one reason I'm so looking forward to our conversation with Peter later today. He has given a very great deal of philosophical thought to music. I think he's written something on the order of five or six books specifically about the philosophy of music. So I expect to learn a lot from him.

Just to get the juices flowing, I thought I'd ruminate in my elementary, not yet completely well work-out sort of way on some things that I personally find philosophically puzzling about music. Here goes.

First worry. What distinguishes music from non-music? The world is replete with sound -- both man made sounds and the sounds of nature. Many of these sounds are quite beautiful -- the cries of various animals, the sound of the ocean, the whistling wind, the human voice, the majestic boom of the space shuttle as it rockets into space. But only a few of the sounds with which the world is replete count as music. Is there anything deep to say about what distinguishes music from non-music?

I'm not sure. One initially tempting thought is that music can be demarcated from non-music by its structure and organization. Music comes with a key signature, with meter, with melody, harmony and all that. Certainly a lot of music is organized and structured in this way. Almost all music that I enjoy listening to, for example, has some or all of these features. But there are probably instances of music that have none or few of these features -- late twentieth century and early 21st century "classical" music comes quickly to mind. That suggests that there may not be any necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as music rather than non-music. It probably doesn't matter that there aren't such conditions. Most of us certainly know music when we hear it, even if we couldn't define it.

Second Worry. Music is often quite emotionally gripping. By turns, it can make us feel sad or elated, It can convey a sense of unfulfilled longing, of awe and wonder. It can make us laugh or cry. Music may even convey anger or regret.

It's not, I think, hard to come up with a first pass explanation of how music with lyrics or that accompanies other contentful representations might convey such emotion. When we set words to music, the words retain at least the expressive and representational powers that they have all on their own. But even here there are some complexities, I think. Music may certainly enhance the expressive power of the words, images, or scenes it accompanies. Imagine a scene in a scary movie. First imagine it without any music. Then imagine it with a subtle but creepy melody rising slowly. Which is more effective? It will depend, of course, on the details. But we've all seen movies in which the music greatly enhances the sense of doom lurking around the corner. (When I was a kid I used to imagine that when I finally fell in love, and declared my love to my beloved, an invisible orchestra would begin playing some swelling romantic tune as my beloved and I exchanged our first tender kiss.) But if music can enhance the expressive power of a scene or a speech, then it's not the words or the scene alone that does the expressing, even when we have words accompanied by music.

It's also possible I suppose for there to be a mismatch between the music and the words (or other representations). Imagine angry words sung to a happy uplifting melody. I suppose, also, that it's possible to exploit such mismatches intentionally and creatively. The result I guess would be a kind of irony or perhaps even satire.

"Pure" music -- for lack of a better term -- probably does raise the issue more accutely, though. By pure music I mean music entirely devoid of representational content -- music accompanied by no scenes or words or images or narration. Just pure sound (ordered and structured to be sure) but still just pure non-representational sound. How does such music achieve such astounding emotive power in the absence of all representational content?

I don't really know the answer, to be frank. I'm not sure I have even a proto-theory. I do wonder, though, whether the emotion is, as it were, "in the music" or merely in our reaction to the music. Let me explain what I mean. You could, I suppose, think that when we called music sad or mournful or happy or said that it expresses unfulfilled longing, we mean nothing more than that it evokes such sentiments "in us." And there might be no deep explanation of why just these sound sequences should evoke just these sentiments or feelings in us. Maybe psychology might eventually reveal something deep. But there might be nothing more than brute fact or something about evolution or something about cultural constructions.

On the other hand, you might think that when we call a piece of music sad we are getting at some sort of response-independent facts about the music itself, about, as it were, the internal qualities of the music.

I tend to think it's a "both and" sort of thing -- though it wouldn't take much to talk me out of this half-formed view.

My thought is that when we call a piece of music sad, we are saying both something about its, as it were, intrinsic musical character -- albeit indirectly -- and also something about our response to it. In particular, by calling the music sad, we "license" certain emotional reponses as "appropriate" in light of the intrinsic musical character of the piece. If you aren't moved to sadness by sad music, you've in a way misperceived the music. Or that, at any rate, is what I believe at the moment. Let's see if it holds up after a conversation with a world-class expert.

The reductive metaphysician in me would like it to be the case that we could eventually say, in non-emotive terms, just what it is about the intrinsic musical character of a piece of music that makes it correct to say that the music is sad. But the music lover in me, wonders if we would really understand music better if we really could do such a thing.

There's a lot more that could be said about all this. Unfortunately, I've got to take off for the studio now. And one certainly shouldn't drive and blog at the same time. (DWB is surely at least as dangerous as DWI.

Strange Behavior (Or: On Watching Sports—a follow-up to Tuesday’s show on basketball)

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

Aristotle’s characterization of man as the rational animal will seem flattering, if you think about many behaviors we people engage in regularly. While many people in our society are overworked, short on knowledge, and pressed for time, many of us take time out to watch unusually tall individuals get together in groups to hurl a spherical object through a suspended ring. These tall individuals get dressed in outfits with shiny colors and are glorified for the ability to hurl the sphere through the ring. Whole buildings fill up with people who want to watch the hurling of the sphere and pay good money to do so, often sacrificing the valuable time and money they could have used for more sensible things like food and shelter.

Of course, I’m talking about watching basketball, which, when I put it in familiar terms, doesn’t seem strange at all. “Watching basketball isn’t irrational,” the indignant fan might reply, “because it brings entertainment!” But the indignant fan here is missing the point of my inquiry. My question is: why do humans get entertained by such a contrived and bizarre ritual? Or, what is the human mind such that it takes pleasure in the activity of watching sports competition?

So my question starts out as anthropological, but cuts very quickly to being psychological. To see how puzzling the phenomenon of sports watching actually is, let’s take the perspective of a Martian anthropologist and compare her impression of human sports watching to her impressions of other human activities. Keqen is the name of our anthropologist from Mars who comes to observe us humans.

When Keqen first comes to Earth she notices farming, which they don’t have on her planet. At first she’s puzzled at why humans spend so much time pushing around dirt and putting things in it. But when she sees how humans get food out of it and survive, her curiosity is satisfied. Next she’s puzzled by all the little pieces of colored paper we carry around in our pockets and make such a big deal out of. It seems odd that humans, who are so careless with other pieces of paper, should be so protective of the little colored slips. But Keqen soon realizes that these little slips act as symbols in a societal convention that allows humans to exchange goods and services across the whole society. Quite clever, she decides. Other things look more familiar to her, like the ritual of having young people who don’t know a lot sit down in a room and get knowledge from older people who know more. That makes sense, because the young people can then put the knowledge they glean to any number of purposes—even purposes not dreamed by the instructors themselves.

Keqen is so far quite impressed by humans. She notices that a good number of humans engage in various activities that keep their bodies healthy. They run; they swim; they ride a miraculous two-wheeled contraption that somehow doesn’t fall over when moving; and they even do this thing of running up and down a rectangular surface in groups throwing a ball around and trying to put it through a hole. The complexity of the last activity is a bit puzzling, but Keqen can easily explain why a rational animal would do it, since it results in increased health and fitness like the other activities. She decides to call these activities “fit-maker activities,” since making fitness is their obvious function—as far as she can tell. The people who do them are “fit-makers.”

When she notices that other people often gather around to watch people who are particularly good fit-makers, she has a ready explanation for this as well. “Why, they’re trying to learn how to do the fit-maker activity better themselves.” On closer inspection, however, this explanation falls to pieces. Many people, for example, watch the ball-throwing fit-maker activity and never even attempt to do it for themselves. Worse yet, some humans stay inside and get heavy watching the ball-throwing fit-makers on the flickering-image-box. If they were trying to learn it for themselves, presumably that’s because they want to be fit. So why do they stay home and get heavy watching it and never go outside?

So Keqen has a mystery. Why do humans watch the fit-maker activities? Her first attempted explanation doesn’t work, since too few of them bother to learn the fit-maker activities for themselves from watching them.

She tries a second explanation. Humans have a notion, which she has never well understood, of ‘beauty’. For them, things that are ‘beautiful’ are considered to be intrinsically worth watching, touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, or even just thinking about. Now, why humans have this particular notion is possibly the deepest mystery about them. But she’s willing to grant for the time being that they do have the notion and to consider that they watch the ball-throwing fit-makers because their motions are ‘beautiful’—whatever exactly that means.

But the ‘beautiful’ explanation fails as well. For Keqen’s other research reveals that humans actually have houses of things ‘beautiful’ they call “museums” that receive far fewer visitors than the buildings for watching fit-maker activities. If ‘beauty’ were what they were after, humans, she reasons, would spend far more time in the museums and far less time watching the ball-throwing fit-makers on the flickering-image-box. But that’s not the case. Furthermore, humans get excited just about numbers on printed paper—statistics—having to do with the fit-makers, which aren’t ‘beautiful’ at all. So whatever it is that gets humans excited about watching fit-maker activities, it can’t be ‘beauty’.

So Keqen tries a third explanation, already starting to get flustered. She has noticed that people who watch the fit-maker activities make approving noises when the people from their own area put the ball through the hole, or whatever they’re trying to do. Perhaps, she hypothesizes, the fit-makers are used when there is something two places are fighting over to decide who gets it. That would explain why people from one place or the other take such an active interest. Perhaps, for example, there is something that “New York” and “Philadelphia” both want, the possession of which will be determined by the outcome of the ball-throwing fit-maker activity between people from both of those places. Having just a few people fight, Keqen reasons, is in fact somehow more civilized than having the whole town fight, so maybe she can make sense of it that way.

But Keqen finds again that this explanation fails. The only thing that the outcome of the fit-maker activity determines is the right to engage in more such activities, ‘games’. And apparently the people want their ‘team’ to be able to go to more ‘games’. But that presupposes that people want to watch the fit-maker activity; it certainly doesn’t explain it. The fit-makers themselves who are watched have incentives like getting lots of the colored paper slips, but that doesn’t explain why people get so excited watching them. Keqen remains confused . . .

***

Enough Martian anthropology. My claims are that (i) human minds, in a quite widespread fashion, have a psychological property of gaining enjoyment from taking in sports and that (ii) it is quite mysterious what that property all involves and where it came from. Feel free to offer your own explanation in the comments, but I’m skeptical about any simple story’s doing the trick. The right thing to say as a start about why humans like watching sports is that it activates many different centers of enjoyment all at once, and that’s what’s so appealing about it.

None of the explanations that Keqen attempted was sufficient on its own to explain sports watching, but all of them hint at part of what is so appealing. In watching professional basketball, one observes a certain virtuosity of movement that one can attempt to develop in one’s own game. But there’s also a certain beauty in the virtuosity observed, which may not be the beauty of a Monet painting, but still adds appeal to watching sports competitions. And there may not be much reward at stake for people watching sports competitions, but if one of the teams playing is from your school or city, it sure feels that way. Why that is is a whole different question.

A complete explanation of why humans like watching sports will probably have many more components still, all of which would need to be sketched out and argued in detail. But the basic idea is this: sports somehow manage to have a combination of elements that activate many centers of excitement in the human brain at once. Does that make them worth watching? Probably—at least once in a while.

Self-Deception and the Problem with Religious Belief Formation

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

A quote: “He who eats the bread and drinks the cup with an unbelieving heart eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” This line is from the communion liturgy of the Church I grew up in—the Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The word “judgment” in the quote is a way of saying damnation to Hell. The word “unbelieving” refers to disbelief in the core metaphysical doctrines of the Church. The effect of regular repetition of lines like this in the service is to strike fear in the person who may be questioning such doctrines. Fear in turn squelches inquiry and creative thought. I was only eight years old when I first heard that line and understood what it meant.

The point of this blog is not to criticize religious beliefs. I think many are wrong, many right, and many we just can’t know about. My focus is rather on the character of the belief formation process inherent in much religious practice. The phrase “belief formation process” will refer broadly to the way that beliefs in a human mind come about, are maintained, or are extinguished (or not). We all have beliefs, which have to get there somehow.

I choose this focus because I suspect my experience with the Grand Rapids CRC is representative of what goes on in a much broader spectrum of religions. This topic is also timely for Philosophy Talk, since we’re approximately halfway between our show on the existence of God and our upcoming show on the intelligent design argument. I also think that although particular religious beliefs have been much discussed and criticized, there still needs to be clearer discussion and criticism of the mental pathways by which such beliefs characteristically arise and are maintained. My view is that the a-rational nature of the religious belief formation process is pernicious and ultimately more destructive than any individual religious belief, or system of beliefs, taken by itself. That process critically involves self-deception.

There is, to start, a beautiful thing about being human. We’re equipped with senses, capacities for reasoning and logical comparison, and an imaginative faculty for generating new ideas. The beautiful thing is that just by our getting up in the morning and walking around the capacities we have compel us to the generation of new knowledge and more subtle beliefs. The data that come to our senses because of our daily actions spark our reasoning capacities to call out for explanation; our imagination answers with the generation of ideas that, if all goes well, provide answers. This is how detailed knowledge of nature—individual plants and animals, and systems of them—has come about in so many diverse human societies. The particular answers and beliefs will come and go—if one belief doesn’t work, another takes its place—but the beautiful thing is the process and the nature we have that allows us to participate in it. Let’s call this the healthy belief formation process; it’s driven by curiosity.

The process of religious belief formation stands in stark contrast. Let’s return to the quote I started with. There’s no doubt that the repetition of such threatening lines has played a role in the formation of many religious beliefs. But how? Those lines provide no evidence of their claims. Why should they bring about belief?

The first thing to note is the vilification of unbelievers. Those with an unbelieving heart will be judged, for, presumably, they’ve done something (morally?) wrong. The vilification of unbelievers threatens exclusion from the group to anyone on the fence. And then there’s the fear of Hell that’s engendered. The net effect of the vilification and fear is that a desire to believe comes about in the mind. “ . . . eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” I certainly had such a desire in my youth.

Once there is a desire to believe the metaphysical doctrines of the religion, the mind is ripe for self-deception. Self-deception has essentially two components. First, a person forms a belief in violation of his usual standards of evidence and judgment—what philosophers call epistemic norms. Second, a desire with content related to the content of the belief causes the deviation from the healthy belief formation process. Because vilification, fear, and desire bring about the religious credence—while that credence is at odds with usual standards of judgment—the process by which religious beliefs come about is one of self-deception. (For a similar view, see this piece by Georges Rey.)

A religious advocate might respond that I’ve gotten it all wrong, that it’s direct encounter with the spirit of God that brings about religious belief. But then why is religious practice so full of methods that have the precise effect of establishing credence by a-rational means? The singing, the chanting, the repetition of lines that vilify unbelief, the stress on believing only on faith? Surely the existence of such methods is no coincidence. And even if some have been touched by something divine, surely there are many who formed their religious beliefs in response to the constant pressures of liturgy. And that’s the religious belief formation process I’m talking about.

What exactly is wrong with this process? First, it’s at odds with the healthy belief formation process. It stagnates and undermines the healthy process just when it could be most beneficial to reflecting on our core beliefs and values. Fear, not curiosity, is the driving force. By representing as evil disbelief in any of a long and specific list of doctrines, the factors involved in the religious belief formation process cause us to disengage with the normal and healthy creative process of belief generation and revision. Persons attending a religious ceremony are made to fear the prospect that something else might strike them as true. The mind loses its flexibility. Consider some examples. How else could the belief that the earth is at the center of the universe persist for so long in the face of Galileo’s new evidence? How else could members of a church that canonized a woman, Joan of Arc, for her leadership hold the belief that women are categorically unfit to lead congregations? Why do evangelicals who have seen pictures of the changed color of the peppered moth believe natural selection has never occurred? How else should we explain the belief at high levels in the Catholic Church that it’s wrong to teach about and distribute sexual protection in a South Africa crippled by AIDS? Responsiveness to reality is needed here. But that’s precisely what the religious belief formation process lacks. The beautiful thing about the human mind is undermined.

Why else do I think the religious belief formation process itself is worse than any particular belief? As I’ve been stressing, I think the healthy belief formation process is central to our humanity; it’s a tragedy for that to be undermined. But as importantly, human actions take on a vicious and inflexible character when they are driven by beliefs that are unresponsive to reality. The problem with Crusaders and Jihadists is not primarily that they think their enemies are evil; it’s that their beliefs are unresponsive to being moved by the simple humanity of their victims. One belief can explain a skirmish, but it takes a degenerate, self-deceptive belief formation process to explain the systematic maintenance of a set of beliefs underlying a Crusade. Other examples are abundant: the Inquisition, the longtime inability of the Catholic Church to respond appropriately to child molestation by its clergy (how could we fire someone ordained by God?), and the malicious condemnations of Jerry Falwell (and those who listen to and act on them), to name a few. All these cases involve false beliefs that would have been changed by a simple bit of responsiveness to reality if they hadn’t been insulated by the religious belief formation process. Dogmatically held beliefs give rise to destructive behaviors. The further danger is that acceptance of such a degenerate belief formation process can spread and lead to wider corruption of our cognitive economy.

So what of the intelligent design argument, the argument that posits an intelligent creator to explain the ordered complexity of life in the natural world? It’s fine; these criticisms don’t touch it. I don’t think it ultimately works; nor does it fall in the domain of science. But I wish all religious thinking had such a rational character. The reasoning involved in that argument is an instance of the healthy belief formation process in action. We’d all be better off if religious people thought so rationally all the time.

What, finally, of faith? I know of two ways in which the word “faith” is used—one pernicious, one laudable. At its worst, “faith” is used rhetorically to bring about a-rational, unreflective credence in what the “wise” men of the Church would have you believe. I think I’ve said enough already to indicate what I think is wrong with this kind of “faith.” But the word is also used in another sense. Faith in this sense is the action-guiding confidence that good will come about if we pursue goodness uncompromisingly. Having this kind of faith is consistent with uncertainty about what the good, in terms of outcome, will ultimately be. And, despite what religious leaders may suggest, having this faith is also consistent with active questioning of religious dogma. In short, faith in this sense is not opposed to intellectual curiosity.