A lot of my philosophical reading recently has been in the domain of classical American pragmatism, and some of the things you said here made me think more deeply about the connections between that line of thinking, internet rationalism, and Lacan.
I think I need to do some more reading on the rationalist side, but it seems to be like the rationalist theory of truth is fairly similar to the pragmatic theory of truth proposed by Charler Sander Peirce, which is essentially that we approach true belief by continuously inquiring about the world around us until we shave away proved falsehoods. In a more general sense, the pragmatic conception of beliefs are that they are tools we use to understand the world and aren't coherent unless they are useful in that way.
I also see a lot of similarities to Lacan, or at least to Freudian psychoanalysis. Classical pragmatism, especially William James and John Dewey, saw their ideas as key to incorporating the recent corpus of Darwinian findings and early psychological research into modern philosophy. The pragmatic psychological view tends to center things more like habits of action and methods of inquiry than drives and desires, but both are asking the same questions around why our minds evolved the way that they did. I also see a commonality when you express that Lacanian thought is meant to outline a series of intermediate principles or theories to interpret the world through, as I see pragmatism taking a similarly middle-distance route instead of shooting for either absolute or specific principles.
Anyway, not sure if this is helpful to you, and I don't mean to just be evangelizing an approach I already like and understand, but I thought this might at least be interesting to you.
This is absolutely helpful! My friends over at tis.so (where I wrote a somewhat related blog post: https://tis.so/introspection-vs-extrospection-and-psychoanalytic-epistemics) are much deeper into pragmatism than I am. They've got a lot more direct experience reading James and Dewey, so I typically lean on them for that kind of thing, and try to "counterbalance" with the theories I have a stronger familiarity with. And they've also noted significant overlap.
I am quite sympathetic to pragmatist viewpoints; it's rather a sort of naive positivism that I have trouble with, because it presupposes a degree of intersubjectivity that is impossible to achieve when it comes to "deeper" psychological and psychoanalytic theory, and so the Rationalists end up dismissing interesting ideas off-hand because they don't satisfy their epistemological requirements. I had some thoughts on this on twitter a while back, but nothing clear or precise enough to write up more thoroughly.
I'm absolutely interested in reading Peirce, a friend actually sent me some reading on his metaphysics this morning, and it seemed really interesting for reasons beyond his theories of truth. I would want to read more Kant and Aristotle first, though!
Thanks for the link! I'm always interested in more readings on this type of stuff.
On the naive positivism and intersubjectivity, I think the base instinct here is to say that "science" as a principle can be used to distinguish the true and false in some objective way. A pragmatist like Dewey has a similar starting point but drops the more absolute conception of objectivity. Instead, the idea is to figure out how scientific communities have solidified their beliefs. No one doubts e.g. the existence of electrons, given that they're worked into so many theories in physics and chemistry, and even if I have no personal evidence of electrons it would not mean very much for me to doubt them and do nothing further to convince others. In other words, we can find guidelines for resolving beliefs across intersubjective communities by looking at real world exemplars, which then help confirm that reaching such agreements is a good thing to do.
I would take the implication of all this to be that we should treat heterodox epistemic communities, even ones that have "woo-ey" beliefs, with some respect, as something has compelled people about it over the years. Just as you described Freud doing coke trip reports, James' Varieties of Religious experience is a lot of him trying drugs and spiritual practice from unique communities.
This also makes me wonder about how Lacan or those who have developed his thought further think about how society as a whole comes to beliefs, since everything I've read so far seems to pose the individual as struggling to find accommodation with a fairly fixed society. I might be missing something, but it seems to me like most pragmatists take a more wide view of things rather than looking at deep individual psychology and Lacan takes the opposite stance (not that either is worse than the other).
Peirce is great, though like Lacan famously inscrutable-- his most read stuff is articles where his editor hammered him over and over to write more clearly. One thing that's easy to miss as context with Peirce is that he codified a whole lot of the logic and statistics you learn in 100 and 200s level math and philosophy classes in college, as well as being a practical scientist, all of which inform his metaphysics.
Thanks for writing, I've enjoyed what I've read so far!
Good question re: Lacan et al. I'll try to give a brief answer here. As I describe in that tis.so blog post, psychoanalytic epistemology is based on observations from within the context of an analytic session, so in that context, notions like "society" aren't actually real, beyond as signifiers that stand in some relation to [gestures at the world outside of the room]. This "enclosed space" means that all knowledge derived directly through observation is of a "radically subjective" form, in that there is no possibility whatsoever for intersubjective and thus scientific understanding.
The only way to bridge this is what Lacan does, as I explained in this blog post: move up a level of abstraction and derive formal structures (like a "mathematics of psychology") that "capture" the radically subjective content. The problem Rationalists have is that these formal structures aren't so much observable or verifiable in-themselves but instead function as interpretive tools, that can apply more-or-less to any particular material. This is why psychoanalytic theory functions at the "paradigmatic" rather than the scientific level, and why it can't be falsified, and why it requires judicious application, etc.
I think this comment has finally given me an understanding of what Lacanian psychoanalysis actually *is*. It's a set of axioms that can be applied to understand an individual, and, like in mathematics, as you gather more information about the subject you're trying to describe you can develop new descriptions as more information reveals your old descriptions to be false, but the axioms change less frequently.
And, importantly, the axioms of lacanian psychoanalysis are derived with respect to the language people use to describe their own psychology.
I feel like this would have been a lot more obvious to me if I had ever attempted to engage with non analytic philosophy.
This is a big difference between how a lot of pragmatists think about knowledge (maybe not Peirce?) and Lacan. Dewey wrote in several places that he felt like society had gone too far into individualism, I can't help but see the subjective versus communal aspect as part of that type of difference.
Like I said before, I view both Lacan and Dewey to be operating on this intermediate level between abstraction and specificity, and I think mathematics is a good example-- I view it as like a mold that only becomes visible once you pour something into it. A more platonic sort of philosopher might presuppose that God or some other organizing agent must exist, or a Hegelian might say that human life is teleologically drawn towards a certain type of liberal society. Dewey, by contrast, wouldn't say that a democratic society has to exist, but only that once we start to see democracy we can figure out a set of rules that structures it. The equivalent for Lacan I think is that our minds may have evolved in some other way, but once it came about that our minds were adapted for the use of symbols and language, the rest of Lacan's system is entailed. There are rules to building skyscrapers, but we find them out only once we've started with the idea of skyscrapers.
Anyway, one consequence of my way of thinking about this is that I think ideas like Lacan's are subject to verification in the sense that they have to be helpful in a practical setting. I take the fact that so many therapists and psychoanalysts find Lacan to be helpful as a credit to this set of ideas.
Speaking off the cuff here, I feel like one of the key ideas in rationalism is a social framework that values truth qua truth, in order to try and align "having accurate beliefs" with "social status", since typically peoples intrinsic goal is acquisition of social status, but having accurate beliefs is important for doing things. But, for this to work claims to truth must be externally verifiable and ideally highly legible.
I mostly agree, although I'd also claim they place a particular value on having novel beliefs as well (by way of sites like LessWrong, which have a voting mechanism etc), recapitulating the academic game. This seems to get somehow coupled with a high valuing of "intelligence".
And yeah -- the key here is that "truth" = "accuracy" which makes intersubjective verification NECESSARY to their social gaming, so ideas like Lacanianism (and also mathematics in its most abstract, non-applied form) "don't make sense", because they don't "do" anything verifiable in themselves. And yet the Rationalists depend on the existing corpus of such ideas as forms/logic for their claims, which is IMO something they miss (and why some of their ideas can seem "shallow" to me). I guess my one prescription would be for them to value *creativity* for its own sake a little more! But alas, it is a non-rational thing, even irrational.
Admittedly one of the things I've been meaning to look into since getting involved with rationalism is Karl Popper vs Bayesian Epistemology (Bayesian epistemology =! Bayesian inference) but I think that the goals of rationalism, i.e rationality is about winning, aren't terribly stunted by a lack of deep familiarity with epistemology.
I think the key is that rationalists very highly value legibility. Abstract mathematics doesn't draw any ire, arguably because it's very legible in a way that a lot of continental philosophy isn't so much.
Also, valuing novel ideas seems directly correlated with valuing creativity. I feel like your objection is probably better phrased as "insufficiently things which generate creative thought" and I can see why people would get that impression but frankly it isn't mine.
That's a good start as to a rephrase, I guess I would also add that, since the aim is "winning", creative ideas within the rationalist space seem to have some requirement of being "applied" in some way. So the rationalists may be keen on some mathematics (statistics) and not others (number theory) given their relative applicability to the core problems they're trying to solve within the space (AI, EA, etc).
Let me make a distinction about truth claims you'll often see in philosophy, that is between ontology (what truth is), justification (in what cases we can hold a belief to be true), and speech-act theory (what does it mean when we say something is true). The pragmatist move has usually been to put ontology aside and try to come up with a united theory of justification and speech acts. I get the sense that rationalists don't really care about explaining standard language use, but that they are looking for an idea of truth that is both ontological and justificatory.
I think this can get incoherent pretty quickly, especially since the idea of having beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience is a subjective way of thinking of the issue. People may have radically different experiences and toolboxes to approach the world with, so you can imagine many scenarios in which two people could have diametrically opposed beliefs that are both optimal for each of them to produce the most accurate anticipations of their real experience. Thus, the rationalist would be saying that both have true or accurate beliefs, even when both cannot logically be true from the perspective of a single subject.
>"Neurotic" is thus "normal" and not inherently "maladaptive", in that the vast majority of humans feel bound by social rules, and most cultures had ways of handling individuals who take other strategies toward satisfaction, mainly in terms of special social roles.
Basically that (a) almost everyone is neurotic to some extent, it's not a pathology in itself (or, it evades the framing of pathology in Lacanian theory), and (b) "psychosis" is something that has always been around (i.e. people who are unable to apprehend "the rules of society") and that most cultures had ways of dealing with, historically speaking.
A lot of my philosophical reading recently has been in the domain of classical American pragmatism, and some of the things you said here made me think more deeply about the connections between that line of thinking, internet rationalism, and Lacan.
I think I need to do some more reading on the rationalist side, but it seems to be like the rationalist theory of truth is fairly similar to the pragmatic theory of truth proposed by Charler Sander Peirce, which is essentially that we approach true belief by continuously inquiring about the world around us until we shave away proved falsehoods. In a more general sense, the pragmatic conception of beliefs are that they are tools we use to understand the world and aren't coherent unless they are useful in that way.
I also see a lot of similarities to Lacan, or at least to Freudian psychoanalysis. Classical pragmatism, especially William James and John Dewey, saw their ideas as key to incorporating the recent corpus of Darwinian findings and early psychological research into modern philosophy. The pragmatic psychological view tends to center things more like habits of action and methods of inquiry than drives and desires, but both are asking the same questions around why our minds evolved the way that they did. I also see a commonality when you express that Lacanian thought is meant to outline a series of intermediate principles or theories to interpret the world through, as I see pragmatism taking a similarly middle-distance route instead of shooting for either absolute or specific principles.
Anyway, not sure if this is helpful to you, and I don't mean to just be evangelizing an approach I already like and understand, but I thought this might at least be interesting to you.
This is absolutely helpful! My friends over at tis.so (where I wrote a somewhat related blog post: https://tis.so/introspection-vs-extrospection-and-psychoanalytic-epistemics) are much deeper into pragmatism than I am. They've got a lot more direct experience reading James and Dewey, so I typically lean on them for that kind of thing, and try to "counterbalance" with the theories I have a stronger familiarity with. And they've also noted significant overlap.
I am quite sympathetic to pragmatist viewpoints; it's rather a sort of naive positivism that I have trouble with, because it presupposes a degree of intersubjectivity that is impossible to achieve when it comes to "deeper" psychological and psychoanalytic theory, and so the Rationalists end up dismissing interesting ideas off-hand because they don't satisfy their epistemological requirements. I had some thoughts on this on twitter a while back, but nothing clear or precise enough to write up more thoroughly.
I'm absolutely interested in reading Peirce, a friend actually sent me some reading on his metaphysics this morning, and it seemed really interesting for reasons beyond his theories of truth. I would want to read more Kant and Aristotle first, though!
Thanks for reading and dropping a comment!
Thanks for the link! I'm always interested in more readings on this type of stuff.
On the naive positivism and intersubjectivity, I think the base instinct here is to say that "science" as a principle can be used to distinguish the true and false in some objective way. A pragmatist like Dewey has a similar starting point but drops the more absolute conception of objectivity. Instead, the idea is to figure out how scientific communities have solidified their beliefs. No one doubts e.g. the existence of electrons, given that they're worked into so many theories in physics and chemistry, and even if I have no personal evidence of electrons it would not mean very much for me to doubt them and do nothing further to convince others. In other words, we can find guidelines for resolving beliefs across intersubjective communities by looking at real world exemplars, which then help confirm that reaching such agreements is a good thing to do.
I would take the implication of all this to be that we should treat heterodox epistemic communities, even ones that have "woo-ey" beliefs, with some respect, as something has compelled people about it over the years. Just as you described Freud doing coke trip reports, James' Varieties of Religious experience is a lot of him trying drugs and spiritual practice from unique communities.
This also makes me wonder about how Lacan or those who have developed his thought further think about how society as a whole comes to beliefs, since everything I've read so far seems to pose the individual as struggling to find accommodation with a fairly fixed society. I might be missing something, but it seems to me like most pragmatists take a more wide view of things rather than looking at deep individual psychology and Lacan takes the opposite stance (not that either is worse than the other).
Peirce is great, though like Lacan famously inscrutable-- his most read stuff is articles where his editor hammered him over and over to write more clearly. One thing that's easy to miss as context with Peirce is that he codified a whole lot of the logic and statistics you learn in 100 and 200s level math and philosophy classes in college, as well as being a practical scientist, all of which inform his metaphysics.
Thanks for writing, I've enjoyed what I've read so far!
Good question re: Lacan et al. I'll try to give a brief answer here. As I describe in that tis.so blog post, psychoanalytic epistemology is based on observations from within the context of an analytic session, so in that context, notions like "society" aren't actually real, beyond as signifiers that stand in some relation to [gestures at the world outside of the room]. This "enclosed space" means that all knowledge derived directly through observation is of a "radically subjective" form, in that there is no possibility whatsoever for intersubjective and thus scientific understanding.
The only way to bridge this is what Lacan does, as I explained in this blog post: move up a level of abstraction and derive formal structures (like a "mathematics of psychology") that "capture" the radically subjective content. The problem Rationalists have is that these formal structures aren't so much observable or verifiable in-themselves but instead function as interpretive tools, that can apply more-or-less to any particular material. This is why psychoanalytic theory functions at the "paradigmatic" rather than the scientific level, and why it can't be falsified, and why it requires judicious application, etc.
I think this comment has finally given me an understanding of what Lacanian psychoanalysis actually *is*. It's a set of axioms that can be applied to understand an individual, and, like in mathematics, as you gather more information about the subject you're trying to describe you can develop new descriptions as more information reveals your old descriptions to be false, but the axioms change less frequently.
And, importantly, the axioms of lacanian psychoanalysis are derived with respect to the language people use to describe their own psychology.
I feel like this would have been a lot more obvious to me if I had ever attempted to engage with non analytic philosophy.
Sorry for a late response here.
This is a big difference between how a lot of pragmatists think about knowledge (maybe not Peirce?) and Lacan. Dewey wrote in several places that he felt like society had gone too far into individualism, I can't help but see the subjective versus communal aspect as part of that type of difference.
Like I said before, I view both Lacan and Dewey to be operating on this intermediate level between abstraction and specificity, and I think mathematics is a good example-- I view it as like a mold that only becomes visible once you pour something into it. A more platonic sort of philosopher might presuppose that God or some other organizing agent must exist, or a Hegelian might say that human life is teleologically drawn towards a certain type of liberal society. Dewey, by contrast, wouldn't say that a democratic society has to exist, but only that once we start to see democracy we can figure out a set of rules that structures it. The equivalent for Lacan I think is that our minds may have evolved in some other way, but once it came about that our minds were adapted for the use of symbols and language, the rest of Lacan's system is entailed. There are rules to building skyscrapers, but we find them out only once we've started with the idea of skyscrapers.
Anyway, one consequence of my way of thinking about this is that I think ideas like Lacan's are subject to verification in the sense that they have to be helpful in a practical setting. I take the fact that so many therapists and psychoanalysts find Lacan to be helpful as a credit to this set of ideas.
Speaking off the cuff here, I feel like one of the key ideas in rationalism is a social framework that values truth qua truth, in order to try and align "having accurate beliefs" with "social status", since typically peoples intrinsic goal is acquisition of social status, but having accurate beliefs is important for doing things. But, for this to work claims to truth must be externally verifiable and ideally highly legible.
I mostly agree, although I'd also claim they place a particular value on having novel beliefs as well (by way of sites like LessWrong, which have a voting mechanism etc), recapitulating the academic game. This seems to get somehow coupled with a high valuing of "intelligence".
And yeah -- the key here is that "truth" = "accuracy" which makes intersubjective verification NECESSARY to their social gaming, so ideas like Lacanianism (and also mathematics in its most abstract, non-applied form) "don't make sense", because they don't "do" anything verifiable in themselves. And yet the Rationalists depend on the existing corpus of such ideas as forms/logic for their claims, which is IMO something they miss (and why some of their ideas can seem "shallow" to me). I guess my one prescription would be for them to value *creativity* for its own sake a little more! But alas, it is a non-rational thing, even irrational.
Admittedly one of the things I've been meaning to look into since getting involved with rationalism is Karl Popper vs Bayesian Epistemology (Bayesian epistemology =! Bayesian inference) but I think that the goals of rationalism, i.e rationality is about winning, aren't terribly stunted by a lack of deep familiarity with epistemology.
I think the key is that rationalists very highly value legibility. Abstract mathematics doesn't draw any ire, arguably because it's very legible in a way that a lot of continental philosophy isn't so much.
Also, valuing novel ideas seems directly correlated with valuing creativity. I feel like your objection is probably better phrased as "insufficiently things which generate creative thought" and I can see why people would get that impression but frankly it isn't mine.
That's a good start as to a rephrase, I guess I would also add that, since the aim is "winning", creative ideas within the rationalist space seem to have some requirement of being "applied" in some way. So the rationalists may be keen on some mathematics (statistics) and not others (number theory) given their relative applicability to the core problems they're trying to solve within the space (AI, EA, etc).
Let me make a distinction about truth claims you'll often see in philosophy, that is between ontology (what truth is), justification (in what cases we can hold a belief to be true), and speech-act theory (what does it mean when we say something is true). The pragmatist move has usually been to put ontology aside and try to come up with a united theory of justification and speech acts. I get the sense that rationalists don't really care about explaining standard language use, but that they are looking for an idea of truth that is both ontological and justificatory.
I think this can get incoherent pretty quickly, especially since the idea of having beliefs pay rent in anticipated experience is a subjective way of thinking of the issue. People may have radically different experiences and toolboxes to approach the world with, so you can imagine many scenarios in which two people could have diametrically opposed beliefs that are both optimal for each of them to produce the most accurate anticipations of their real experience. Thus, the rationalist would be saying that both have true or accurate beliefs, even when both cannot logically be true from the perspective of a single subject.
>"Neurotic" is thus "normal" and not inherently "maladaptive", in that the vast majority of humans feel bound by social rules, and most cultures had ways of handling individuals who take other strategies toward satisfaction, mainly in terms of special social roles.
wait what does this mean
Basically that (a) almost everyone is neurotic to some extent, it's not a pathology in itself (or, it evades the framing of pathology in Lacanian theory), and (b) "psychosis" is something that has always been around (i.e. people who are unable to apprehend "the rules of society") and that most cultures had ways of dealing with, historically speaking.