Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

@JonHaidt @sapinker (unfinished)

REGARDING A PHILOSOPHER’S CRITICISM OF HAIDT (PSYCHOLOGY) AS AUTHORITATIVE

A subject near and dear to my own work. I am going to flip the criticism around and ask how can I test wether one is engaging in truthful speech warrantied against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fraud, and deception, and which speaker is forcing me to bear costs to test the truthfulness of his speech?

PART 1

As far as I know, ethics can be discussed using these methods of decidability:

– Normative: (Empirically Demonstrated) cooperation

– Descriptive: Scientific(Causal) ethics of existential cooperation.

– Philosophical:Theoretical Ethical Substitutes of rational origin

– Religious: Authoritative Ethical Substitutes of supernatural origin.

– Legislative: Authoritative ethical substitutes of discretionary origin.

– Natural Law: (universal scientific) Necessary(legal) for rational cooperation.

As far as I know, the discipline of ethics consists of these categories:

1) Crime: prohibition on material parasitism using physical actions.

2) Ethics: prohibition on interpersonal parasitism using asymmetry of information that could be resolved.

3) Morality: prohibition on parasitism using asymmetry of information that cannot be resolved.

4) Right Action, Moral Action, Ethical Action: any means of personal fulfillment that does not impose costs upon others (parasitism) by means of criminal, ethical, or moral means.

5) Wrong action: the imposition of NET costs upon others with whom one is cooperating.

This set of definitions in themselves make it difficult to engage in philosophical obscurantism, loading, framing, overloading, and suggestion.

I say this to illustrate false definitions in the critic’s article.

Now lets explain why he can engage in his definitions and reasoning.

PART 2

Sadly, the distribution of philosophers is worse than that of psychologists prior to Operationism. For the same reason.

Psychology has rescued itself (partly) from pseudoscience by the self imposed adoption of Operationism as a replacement for subjective interpretation (introspection).

This movement of self correction in psychology also succeeded partly in physics (Bridgman), and partly succeeded in philosophy(Popper), but failed in mathematics (Brouwer/Poincare), failed in economics (Mises).

Because of these failures, most scientists specialize in the elimination of error, bias, wishful thinking, and deceit from our free association. Meanwhile, most philosophers continue to specialize in wishful thinking, loading, framing, overloading, obscuring, suggestion and justification.

Most philosophy, and we can say all continental philosophy, continues the Kantian Rousseauan tradition of post supernatural literature, in search of a replacement for the bible: to find an excuse to advance their social methods by rational means. Whereas anglos and particularly americans, avoid such acts of conflation, by using literature for the construction of hypotheses, and science for the construction of truth propositions. As far as I know we remain the only people (english speakers) who make this separation, and avoid conflation of truth and creativity. But why? Because anglo social science has always been constructed by the common law, leaving the middle class its philosophy and the lower classes its religion.

The scientific method is of course, a problematic study because while it produces remarkable results, it works by requiring that we warranty our SPEECH has been subject to due diligence in every dimension we know of:

1) unique identity (non-conflation),

2) internal consistency (logical),

3) external consistency (correspondence),

4) existential possibility (Operationalism, Operationism, Intuitionism),

5) Parsimony(clarity)+Limits(boundaries)+Full accounting(no selection bias),

…and lastly, and most recently..

6) “Morality” (natural law of voluntary transfer).

So to flip the criticism around, if we can warranty that we have done our due diligence, why can many philosophers not do so?

While natural philosophy (Science) has been a boon since the days of Aristotle, all other branches of philosophy have a pretty horrible record as little more than the use of various means of verbal deception by members of the middle class, to attempt to seize political power. In fact, it is unclear that philosophy outside of natural philosophy, has not done more harm than good. Certainly Kant, Marx, Freud and Boaz have done catastrophic damage to mankind – damage that it is almost impossible to price (determine the costs of).

You see, truth(perfect parsimony) we can never know that we speak outside of tautologies or reductio absurdities. But we *can* know what survives all known criticism by the same means. We call those LAWS. As in free-association->hypothesis->theory->law. (Not as in legislation as a law-substitute.)

And worse, since the purpose of scientific(warrantied/truthful) language is to reduce the cost of the audience’s testing of the truthfulness of statements on the one hand, and to do the least harm on the other, then my question of such a philosopher is why he imposes the cost upon us of testing his language for error bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism and deceit. And as such makes no warranty that he does not speak falsely, or attempt to engage us in some manner of criminal, ethical, moral fraud.

It isn’t that the language and method of science produces truth. It is that we use scientific methods, language, and warranties, as methods of reducing the cost of testing statements, and of warrantying that we do no harm in our speech.

This works in Psychology principally because the field was certain to be eliminated by the field of cognitive science unless it abandoned projection and authoritarianism imposed by freud’s new feminine pseudoscience. So to survive the field had to reform. It did, by adopting the gold standard: operational language. Operational language guarantees (mostly) that we speak in existential terms.

The movement failed in mathematics, which is why we have this persistent nonsense of multiple infinities (and possibly why we have stalled in physics) because the method of construction and the method of generating hypotheses in mathematics is marginally indifferent.

It failed in economics because the ability to use pseudoscientific macro correlations to legislate immoral transfers by use of fiat credit, so that accumulated long term capital by prior generations could be consumed in by the present generation, was such a political incentive under democracy that we could not overcome it.

It failed in social science because the introduction of women into the academy’s customer pool and into the political voting pool provided more incentive to produce Boazian pseudoscience than to simply continue western social science: The family as the unit of production and reproduction, Natural law, Common law, Universal standing, Rule of law (universal application) as the only empirical science. And because democracy provided so much utility in the manufacture of legislation, and by conflating legislation (command) with law (natural law of cooperation) thereby converting law from an empirical science of cooperation to a moral scripture of popular will (pseudoscience).

So it is better to see Pinker/Haidt in the academy and press (and to a lesser degree, in politics and law in my work) as attempting to reverse a century of pseudoscience in the social sciences. A century made possible by the combination of the industrial revolution and the sale of the conquered american continents to generations who could be fed by the new means of organizing production distribution and trade.

So my reversal would be to ask whether the philosopher in question is engaging in a warranty of the truthfulness of his statements, just as Haidt has tried to do with his.

Natural law would not as first whether something may be true, but first, whether something may be a deceit. And only after we have determined it is not a fraud of some kind, or a perjury of some kind, do we attempt to ascertain whether such a statement is in fact true.

This is how our anglo courts work really. They do not try to find the truth so much as try to find a lie.

(So, did you see what I just did there?)

PART 2

Haidt solved part of the Wilsonian Synthesis problem by connecting biology, psychology, politics. (Bypassing ethics) and starting with individual and group (survival) evolutionary strategies. It is from the comparative analysis of these group strategies, yet the universal value of cooperation, that we can make fairly certain statements about ethical and moral intuitions.

What Haidt did not do (not having studied economic history) was tie his work in moral intuitions, political bias, and evolutionary strategy, to social sciences of cooperation:

i) Natural(Common) – the Law of cooperation. Or that all of THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS can be broken into two categories: personal property prohibitions against free riding and common property prohibitions against free riding. And that the distribution of the biases reflect the three points of the political compass: female consumption bias, libertarian production bias, and conservative concentration of resources bias. Or that these three biases represent an intertemporal division of labor.

ii) The problem of the distribution of perception, cognition, memory, labor, and advocacy between the genders and classes.

iii) The problem of the distribution of creativity (openness to experience), impulsivity, aggression, and intelligence between groups and the different evolutionary strategies that are not only preferable but necessary for each group, and the problem of monopoly production of commons that defines popular democracy as incompatible with the preservation of cooperation.

iiii) Economics(production of consumable goods and services), and

Political institutions(production of non consumable commons), and

v) Group evolutionary strategy. Variations in manners, ethics, morals, and laws to allow a group to compete using it’s abilities or lack thereof. Various violations of natural law codified in myth, tradition, norm, and law that enable the group to survive competition.

Examples: Anglo meritocratic military and commercial universalism as a method of seeking rents on technological advancement. Greek/Teutonic Domestication of farming Tribes, Flood Plain organization of tribes into irrigation labor, Steppe-Desert containment of raiding by herding tribes, islamic, jewish and gypsy ethical asymmetry.

BUT, IF WE DO…

By using the language of these fields of cooperation, we can then convert from the subjective point of view of the language of experience, psychology, sociology, to the objective point of view of cooperation, creating an operational, existentially possible, unloaded, unobscured, language for use in those fields that we today call epistemology, psychology, ethics, sociology, politics, group evolutionary strategy, war+religion, and aesthetics.

PART 3

Cooperation is disproportionately rewarding. At least up until the externalities inhibit group competitiveness.

It is these externalities no longer in the service of the group that is causing political conflict under democracy.

Democracy = Monopoly rule over the Monopoly production of commons. As differences decline, monopoly becomes impediment.

Contrary to ideology. Evidence is in. We vote our group evolutionary strategies. Period. It is all we can decide.

This is the great problem of our age. The end of monopoly rule over groups with heterogeneous strategies.