Hello again, hypothetical baby!  I’m back to offer you yet another chapter to help you to navigate this convoluted world into which you have been plopped.  I’m trying to teach you things that I did not know while I was growing up. I learned these lessons the hard way. You can find links to all of these (soon to be 100) lessons in one convenient place: Here.

To begin, here is a “thing,” a work of art that I created:

What is this thing? It started out as a part of a 2-D paint splatter I intentionally created–paint on canvas. I then photographed it and carted it into Photoshop and blended it with other layers until it looked like this.  It’s now a thing that that looks almost 3-D. I call work of art “Risen.”  Is it really a “thing” or does it just look like a thing?

As you grow up, you will constantly deal with “things,” physical and otherwise. It will surprise and annoy you that human animals constantly disagree about what a particular thing is and even whether that “thing” exists at all. Philosophers tuck these disagreements into the branch of philosophy called “ontology,” but these disagreements aren’t limited to philosophy classrooms. They occur constantly out in the real world.

You will find it a challenge to determine whether there are such things as violence, justice, love, intelligence, humility, courage or happiness. In the year 2022, people argued a lot about “race” even though there is no such thing as “race” (though there are plenty of instances of ”racism.” Consider the work of Sheena Mason on this issue).  None of the real-world instances of these things come with labels pasted on them. People often disagree about whether these things exist in particular situations. Some people stick these words on some situations and other people disagree. In other words, these things have no ”objective” meaning. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (who I mentioned in Chapter 18) explain the term “objective” in their classic book, Metaphors We Live By (1980):

Our concern with the way we understand our experience has led us to a view of definition that is very different from the standard view. The standard view seeks to be “objective,” and it assumes that experiences and objects have inherent properties and that human beings understand them solely in terms of these properties. Definition for the objectivist is a matter of saying what those inherent properties are by giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept. ” Love,” on the objectivist view, has various senses, each of which can be defined in terms of such inherent properties as fondness, affection, sexual desire, etc. Against this view, we would claim that we comprehend love only partly in terms of such inherent properties. For the most part, our comprehension of love is metaphorical, and we understand it primarily in terms of concepts for other natural kinds of experience: JOURNEYS, MADNESS, WAR, HEALTH, etc. Because defining concepts (JOURNEYS, MADNESS, WAR, HEALTH) emerge from our interactions with one another and with the world, the concept they metaphorically define (e.g., LOVE) will be understood in terms of what we will call interactional properties.

Here’s another conundrum. Is there a “self”? You will spend much of your life talking to yourself, assuring yourself, arguing with yourself but then wondering whether there even is a “self.” How can it be that something so central to our understanding of the world might or might not be there at all?  As noted above, much of the problem is that we assume that the words we use are somehow automatically tethered to the correct real world objects for every person who uses those words. But there is no tethering between our mouths and the things we are trying to call attention to. Instead, we making grunting noises or make scribbles after seeing something and we want to believe that every other person would feel compelled to do the same. But, alas, there are often big disagreements on how and when to use words.

Whether or not there is a “self,” people will recognize you by calling out your name and coming up to talk with you. But maybe you will have an argument and they will conclude that you are “not yourself.” People often change over time. You arose from one fertilized egg, but they you will grow into a large person. Are those the same person? Who you “are” at any particular time will depend on how many years of experience you have and how much education.  And also what your mood is today. And whether you are in a hurry—if you are in a hurry, you will be not nearly as kind-hearted to others:

In a now well-known experiment conducted in 1973 by Darley and Batson, seminarians at a religious seminary were sent on their way to deliver a practice sermon.  The topic of the sermon was “The Good Samaritan.”  The devious experimenters set up the experiment so that some of the subjects would be in a hurry to get to the sermon and others were allowed to take their time.  On the way to deliver their practice sermons , each of the subjects

came upon a man slumped in a doorway, head down, coughing and groaning.  As predicted practice by the experimenters], the late seminarians seldom helped; in fact, only 10% offered any assistance.  By contrast, with ample time on their hands, 63% of the early participants helped.

The actual behavior did not correlate well to the experimenters’ pre-sermon predictions based on the seminarians’ dispositions.

So who are you?  It depends.  Regardless of how you will act today, people will call you by your name, which suggests that you are the same from moment to moment.  But you are not the same. You are a complex adaptive system, an armada of trillions of cells that constantly changes and interacts with itself and the environment in ways so complicated that it would stun even Heraclitus.

And while we are talking about “selves,” where is the self?  Point to it!  In Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997), Philosopher Andy Clark persuasively argues that our cognitive processes are not bounded by skin and skull.

For although specific thoughts remain tied to individual brains, the flow of reason and the informational transformations it involves seem to criss-cross brain and world. Yet it is this flow of ideas that, I suspect, we most strongly associate with the idea of the mind as the seat of reason and of the self. This flow counts for more than do the snapshots provided by single thoughts or experiences. The true engine of reason, we shall see, is bounded neither by skin nor skull . . .

[T]he nature and the bounds of the intelligent agent look increasingly fuzzy. Gone is the central executive in the brain-the real boss who organizes and integrates the activities of multiple special-purpose subsystems. And gone is the neat boundary between the thinker (the bodiless intellectual engine) and the thinker’s world. In place of this comforting image we confront a vision of mind as a grab bag of inner agencies whose computational roles are often best described by including aspects of the local environment (both in complex control loops and in a wide variety of informational transformations and manipulations). In light of all this, it may for some purposes be wise to consider the intelligent system as a spatio-temporally extended process not limited by the tenuous envelope of skin and skull. Less dramatically, the traditional divisions among perception, cognition, and action~ look increasingly unhelpful. With the demise of the central executive, perception and cognition look harder to distinguish in the brain. And the division between thought and action fragments once we recognize that the real-world actions often play precisely the kinds of functional roles more usually associated with internal processes of cognition and computation.

Clark makes a compelling argument that we offload cognition into the environment: In hundreds of ways, we make the outside world smart (e.g., consider the cash registers at McDonalds) so we don’t need to be so smart. Your “self” thus extends to your laptop, to your personal journal and to the thought processes of your significant other. And if she dies before you, you will, in a significant way, be going to your own funeral.

I know that what I’ve said so far is counter-intuitive. Let’s look at something that might be more straight-forward: the word mother.  How can you tell whether someone’s  a “mother?”  It depends. George Lakoff looked at the term extensively and concluded:

Here are some kinds of mothers:

– The central case, where all the models converge, includes a mother who is and always has been female, and who gave birth to the child, supplied her half of the child’s genes, nurtured the child, is married to the father, is one generation older than the child, and is the child’s legal guardian.

– Stepmother: She didn’t give birth or supply the genes, but she is currently married to the father.

– Adoptive mother: She didn’t give birth or supply the genes, but she is the legal guardian and has the obligation to provide nurturance.

– Birth mother: This is defined in contrast to adoptive mother; given an adoption ICM, the woman who gives birth and puts the child up for adoption is called the birth mother.

– Natural mother: This was once the term used to contrast with adoptive mother, but it has been given up because of the unsavory inference that adoptive mothers were, by contrast, “unnatural.” This term has been replaced by birth mother.

– Foster mother: She did not give birth to the child, and is being paid by the state to provide nurturance.

– Biological mother: She gave birth to the child, but is not raising it and there is someone else who is and who qualifies to be called a mother of some sort.

– Surrogate mother: She has contracted to give birth and that’s all. She may or may not have provided the genes, and she is not married to the father and is not obligated to provide nurturance. And she has contractually given up the right to be legal guardian.

– Unwed mother: She is not married at the time she gives birth.

– Genetic mother: This is a term I have seen used for a woman who supplies an egg to be planted in someone else’s womb and has nothing else whatever to do with the child. It has not yet to my knowledge become conventional.

These subcategories of mother are all understood as deviations from the central case. But not all possible variations on the central case exist as categories. There is no category of mothers who are legal guardians but who don’t personally supply nurturance, but hire someone else to do it. There is no category of transsexuals who gave birth but have since had a sex-change operation. Moreover, some of the above categories are products of the twentieth century and simply did not exist before. The point is that the central case does not productively generate all these subcategories. Instead, the subcategories are defined by convention as variations on the central case. There is no general rule for generating kinds of mothers. They are culturally defined and have to be learned. They are by no means the same in all cultures. In the Trobriands, a woman who gives birth often gives the child to an old woman to raise. In traditional Japanese society, it was common for a woman to give her child to her sister to raise. Both of these are cases of kinds of mothers that we don’t have an exact equivalent of.

The category of mother in this culture has what we will call a radial structure. A radial structure is one where there is a central case and conventionalized variations on it which cannot be predicted by general rules.

Whether something is a particular thing occurs at the intersection of reality, human perception, human categories and human language. It’s quite complex, far more complex than simply looking in a dictionary.

Here’s another “simple” example.  Surely, the sky is blue.  But scientists have demonstrated that wavelengths are not colored. There are no blue light.  Colors only happen in our bodies, which includes a lot more than eyes.  Bodies include a profoundly complex brain that interprets what the eye sees. Further complicating things, some cultures do not see colors the way that other cultures see colors. George Lakoff explains in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987):

Colors arise from our interaction with the world; they do not exist outside of us. Color categorization is also partly a matter of cultural convention since different cultures have different boundaries for basic color categories. Color categorization also involves cognitive mechanisms, which are needed to account for the existence of focal nonprimary colors, like orange. Thus colors are categories of mind that do not exist objectively in the world exclusive of seeing beings . . . Take, for example, Rosch’s study of color categories among the Dani people of New Guinea (Rosch 1973). Dani has only two basic color terms: mili (dark-cool) and mola (lightwarm), which cover the entire spectrum.

As you grow up, you will burn a lot of energy determining whether various things exist. You will get into a lot of arguments and you won’t find any of the answers by using the objectivist approach of looking to see whether necessary and sufficient conditions are satisfied. You won’t find the answer in a dictionary or a philosophy journal. You will need to consider the meaning of meaning, the limitations to the power of words, the pervasiveness of conceptual metaphors and the complex biological cognitive functioning of human animals.

Being a human animal is thus going to take a lot of work.

[Added March 12, 2022]

From Tara Henley who, earlier this year was kicked out of her job as a reporter at the CBC because her heterodox thinking didn’t play well with partisan story-telling that portrays itself to be “news.” Once we lose the ability to collectively identify the “things” that exist out in the world, we lose our ability to work with each other and negotiate with each other. We were never able to do the with precision, but in the last few years, we have entered a crisis situation.

It is a time in history that calls for deep contemplation and cautious, measured action. A time in which we must think critically about the complex reality we find ourselves in.

But we are ill-equipped to make sense of this moment. And that is because things stopped making sense some time ago.

Our ability to reason things out has been compromised by a society-wide abandonment of principle. There is no longer any coherent, collective set of guidelines with which to judge reality.

In other words: Things are no longer expected to make sense.

It is now normal in the public discourse, especially on Twitter, to pick a side and bend one’s perspective, one’s arguments, and even one’s facts, to fit its dominant narratives. We feel less and less compelled to answer the most basic of questions: Does this make sense? Is what I am arguing governed by logic? Would I extend this same principle, this same line of thought, this same conclusion, to an issue that I disagree with?

All of this is why I’ve been doing so much reading and interviewing on affective political polarization, and will continue to do so.

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One more footnote . . . we are not in a world where our collective understanding of words is affecting only obscure and peripheral “things.” We are entering a new era where the meaning of words central to our lexicon are being gutted.

Here are the latest examples of things that purportedly no longer mean what we thought they mean. These things are now purportedly different things.

Dangerous
Conversion Therapy
Woman. Man.
Phobia
Healthy
Vaccine
Science
Freedom
Pandemic
Insurrection
Vaccine
Racism and Racist
Gain of Function
Public health expert
Gender
Misinformation
Left Wing and Right Wing, Liberal and Conservative
Peaceful
Violence
Fact-Checker
Truth
Equality
Fascist
Conspiracy Theory
Safe
Trusted
Freedom
Infrastructure
Progressive
Fact
Anti-vaxxer
Inclusion
Diversity
News Reporting
Tolerance