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[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]
Readers who come to David Hume through the Treatise may be forgiven for thinking that he wasn't an especially learned or scholarly philosopher deviating from the reigning tendency toward eclecticism. I include myself among these, until I heard a paper (which may still be unpublished) by Ken Winkler on the way Hume carefully edited his notes engaged with Locke through the successive editions of the Enquiries. In fact, Hume's long essay on population exhibits him as quite learned. So much for set-up.
After offering his famous definition of convention in the third Appendix to the Second Enquiry (paragraphs 7-8), Hume adds a note suggesting that this "theory concerning the origin of property, and consequently of justice, is, in the main, the same with that hinted at and adopted by Grotius," (De jure belli & pacis. Lib. ii. cap. 2. §2. art. 4 & 5.) which he then quotes in Latin. There are four peculiarities pertaining to the passage from Grotius that Hume quotes.
First, throughout it his writings, Hume himself had explicitly denied that property had its origin in an explicit/verbal convention (that is, social contract), whereas Grotius explicitly allows that this is a possible source: "Simul discimus, quomodo res in proprietatem iverint; non animi actu solo, neque enim scire alii poterant, quid alii suum esse vellent, ut eo abstinerent, & idem velle plures poterant; sed pacto quodam aut expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem." (emphasis added.) Yes, Grotius does more than hint at his preferred account of tacit contract of property, so I am not suggesting Hume gets this wrong.
But, second, as readers of Hume would have been quite aware that's developed by Locke (and Pufendorf). In fact, I have been arguing that Hume completely effaces how much of the distinctive details his own definition of convention (including that of property) is already present in Locke (recall here; here; and see here for slightly more scholarly version).
Third the passage from Grotius cited by Hume is utterly banal. He could have cited any number of ancient authors here (from Plato's Laws to Lucretius) as one can readily see in Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Book IV, chapter IV, paragraphs viii-X.
In fact, in Book IV, chapter IV, paragraph IX Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Pufendorf had partially commented the very passage from Grotius that Hume quotes. I quote Pufendorf in Basil Kennett's translation (from the fourth, corrected 1729 edition which includes Barbeyrac's notes):
Thus far Grotius is in the right, that were the first negative Communion to continue, without disturbing the general Peace, Men must live with great plainness and simplicity, contented to feed on what they found, to dwell in Caves, and either to go naked or to cover their Bodies with the Barks of Trees, and the Skins of Beasts: Whereas, if they grew more inclined to a Life of Elegance and Refinement, the Conveniences of which must be acquired by Diligence; there was a necessity of introducing distinct Properties. But when he adds, That this Communion might have lasted, had Men lived under the Influence of an eminent Charity and Friendship towards each other; he confounds negative Communion with positive; such as was observed by the Essenes of old, by the primitive Christians inhabiting Jerusalem, and by those who now follow an Ascetic Life: For this can never be constituted nor kept up, except amongst a few Persons, and those endued with singular Modesty and Goodness. When Men are scattered into different places, and fixed at a distance from each other, it would be a foolish Labour to gather all the Provision into one Heap, and to distribute it out of the common Mass. And where ever there is a great Multitude of People, many must of necessity be found, who through Injustice and Avarice, will refuse to maintain a due Equality, either in the Labour required for the getting of the Fruit, or afterwards in the Consumption of them. Plato insinuates as much as this, when he makes only Deities, and the Sons of Deities, Members of the Republic where he would have this Communion absolutely obtain. But 'tis idle to believe, that when Men were divided into numerous Families, they neither actually established, or had any design to establish such a Communion. Lastly, it's a true Remark of Grotius, That things were at first turned into Property, not by the bare Act of the Mind, or by Thought and inward inclination. For neither could others know what any Person intended to keep for his own, to direct them in abstaining from it, and besides, it was very possible that many should be Competitors for the fame thing. There was need therefore of some external Act of the Mind formal seisin [sign?],* which, that it might be capable of producing a Moral Effect, or an Obligation in others to forswear what each Man had thus taken for his peculiar, must necessarily have depended on the force of some precedent Covenant: When things which lay together in Common were to be parted amongst many, then the Business was transacted by express Covenant. But a tacit Covenant was sufficient, when Men fixed a Property in things which the first Dividers had left for waste. For we must suppose them to have agreed, that whatever in the primary Partition had not been assigned to any particular Owner, should belong to him who first took possession of it. [emphases in original; modernized spelling by ES]+
What's neat, given my present purposes, is that Pufendorf praises Grotius for exactly the passage that Hume cites as the origin of his own theory. In fact, Pufendorf's criticism of Grotius here also kind of anticipates Hume's account because Pufendorf implies that Grotius theory is too naïve: because Grotius' approach presuppose a too rosy picture of human nature ("singular Modesty and Goodness") and cannot scale up ("except amongst a few Persons"). That is, the question is, as Pufendorf shows, how can large-scale tacit social conventions be established among potentially self-regarding people? Pufendorf's own answer seems to be: through trial and error and habit/custom.
Building non-trivially on Locke (whose contribution is ignored), Hume's explicit answer is "through a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions." This answer may seem to work if one allows, as Hume stipulates, that one generally benefits from the common interest.
However, Adam Smith recognizes that Hume's answer puts the cart before the horse, because it is not obvious how the common interest is recognized before the convention is relatively stable, and so Smith suggests that the convention itself originates in and is stabilized by drawing on our reactive attitudes (especially resentment and gratitude). But that story I have told elsewhere.
*A seisin is a possession of a fief. But it seems more likely that 'sign' is intended here in light of Pufendorf's account of the origin of social/moral entities.
+I thank Dario Perinetti for nudging me back to Pufendorf. And I thank Bart Wilson and Vernon Smith for emphasizing the importance (alongside Buckle and Haakonssen) of Pufendorf to the Scots.
In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories.
The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.
The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances."
Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds. Okay, so much for set up.
The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.
Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):
Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy.
Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.
Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).
Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature.
What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.
Claire Rydell Arcenas, America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life – University of Chicago Press, 2022
The influence of polymath philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) can still be found in a dizzying range of fields, as his writings touch on issues of identity, republicanism, and the nature of knowledge itself. Claire Rydell Arcenas’s new book tells the story of Americans’ longstanding yet ever-mutable obsession with this English thinker’s ideas, a saga whose most recent manifestations have found the so-called Father of Liberalism held up as a right-wing icon.
The first book to detail Locke’s trans-Atlantic influence from the eighteenth century until today, America’s Philosopher shows how and why interpretations of his ideas have captivated Americans in ways few other philosophers—from any nation—ever have. As Arcenas makes clear, each generation has essentially remade Locke in its own image, taking inspiration and transmuting his ideas to suit the needs of the particular historical moment. Drawing from a host of vernacular sources to illuminate Locke’s often contradictory impact on American daily and intellectual life from before the Revolutionary War to the present, Arcenas delivers a pathbreaking work in the history of ideas.
stuartelden
Proponents of “transgenderism” would have us believe medical transition is the only path for children identifying as “transgender,” but a growing number of detransitioners belies this stance.
On February 18, Panacol Productions released a new documentary about the medical transition of young people on the popular video platform Vimeo. Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine shines a timely spotlight on a medical scandal in the making. Four days later, after it had been viewed 19,000 times, Vimeo removed the film.
Affirmation Generation’s producer, Vera Linder, told me via email last night that when Vimeo removed her documentary she received an email from the company informing her that her content violated Vimeo’s Terms of Service. She also speculated, “It’s possible that getting 19,000 views in three days generated too much traffic.” Linder said she submitted an appeal.
Today Linder contacted me again to say Vimeo had reinstated her documentary. She believes the about-face is due to the outpouring of support the film received on Twitter.
The one-and-a-half-hour film features interviews with half a dozen detransitioners and desisters, as well as doctors, therapists, and journalists. It is organized into three parts: Dysphoria, The Only Path: Affirmation and Transition, and Detransition.
Like another recently released (and promptly censored) documentary, Dead Name, which shines a light on parents of children who claim to be the opposite sex, Affirmation Generation foregrounds a group neglected by mainstream media: detransitioners.
Affirmation Generation centers on “gender dysphoria,” defined in the film as per a report by Reuters as “a feeling of distress from identifying as a gender different from the one assigned at birth.” According to this document, over 42,000 children aged six to 17 were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 in the United States alone — a 70% increase from 2020.
Captions inform viewers that in 2011, 0.1 to 0.3% of the U.S. population was estimated to be “transgender. In 2021, a study of 5000 public school teens found 9% claimed a transgender identity.
The detransitioners — three young men (Joel, David, and Abel) and three young women (Cat, Laura, and Michelle) — share their heartbreaking stories, discussing what led them to attempt a medical “transition,” the side effects of the cross-sex hormones they were given, the permanent damage to their bodies, as well as their reasons for detransitioning and regrets.
The detransitioners’ stories and experiences are supplemented by interviews with a number of licensed therapists and medical professionals, including: Stella O’Malley, a psychotherapist from Ireland and author of Bully-Proof Kids and Fragile; Dr. Lisa Littman, the American physician-scientist who coined the term ROGD (Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria) and serves on the advisory boards of GenSpect and Gender Dysphoria Alliance; American endocrinologist Dr. William Malone; Lisa Marchiano, American LCSW, psychoanalyst and author; Sasha Ayad, an American licensed professional counselor, the co-host of Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast (with Stella O’Malley), and a founding board member of several organizations, including the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine; and Stephanie Winn, American LMF therapist and host of the You Must be Some Kind of Therapist podcast.
Other interviewees include Joey Brite, an American desister and activist; journalist Lisa Selin Davis, the author of Tomboy; and Jennifer Bilek, the investigative journalist behind The 11th Hour Blog.
The film opens with footage of rallies, protests, and media clips addressing the medical transition of children. In a televised address to the American nation, Joe Biden says, “To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know that your President sees you.” In another clip, Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage; The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, asks an important question: “So the puzzle is, why, out of nowhere, in the last decade, have we seen a sudden and sharp spike of teenage girls, who have no childhood history of gender dysphoria, suddenly deciding they’re trans — often with their girlfriends?”
Cat, Laura, and Michelle provide some answers.
Cat, who appears to be in her twenties, recalls dressing up in her father’s clothes as a child. Her problems with “gender dysphoria,” however, only began when she reached puberty. Then, she says, “I just started to feel very uncomfortable in my body — very uncomfortable with the changes that were happening.” She recalls browsing the internet at 13, and coming across a forum for FTM (female to male) people:
“… It had tips on how to pass. It had people telling their stories of transitioning and saying that they’d had chest surgery, that they used to have female genitals and now they had male genitals. And just the way they were talking about it, they made it sound like it was entirely possible to change sex.”
Cat’s parents brought her to see a gender therapist. “He affirmed my trans-identity within two appointments — really the first appointment — and I think it was the third appointment that he suggested I start testosterone,” she said.
Cat started hormone therapy, and initially enjoyed the changes happening to her body. However, after a few months she noticed concerning side-effects: almost daily heart palpitations, frequent nausea, weight gain (she gained 20 lbs.), edema, as well as discomfort speaking and singing. Cat, a singer, was also binding her chest.
Cat reflects on the reasons she began to feel so uncomfortable with her body at puberty, explaining, “I think that being sexually assaulted absolutely contributed to my gender dysphoria getting stronger and wanting to be a woman even less.” She also notes that before “transitioning” she had had an eating disorder and a suicide attempt.
Laura had a history of depression, anxiety, and autism before her medical transition, which included hormone therapy and a double mastectomy. When she was 15, she was introduced to the concept of “gender identities” on Tumblr and at school in the gay-straight alliance club. She adopted labels like “androgynous” and “gender-queer” at first, before becoming convinced “transitioning” into a gay man would mean being loved and accepted. In truth, she says:
“The transition didn’t help. It actually made things worse for me, physically, mentally, and socially. Testosterone really worsened my mental health: depression, mood swings, anger issues, social issues. I lost a lot of friends because I was in a bad mental state.”
Eventually, Laura discovered the work of radical feminists who were challenging gender identity ideology, and began to understand the link between trauma and trans-identification:
“I started talking to detransitioners — this very small group — and I realized that it was all due to trauma and nothing had changed and I wasn’t really any different and I wasn’t any better off. The worst part is that I sort of learned that I could have just dealt with it.”
Laura says her double mastectomy was “one of the worst mistakes that I’ve made.”
Echoing the experiences of other detransitioners interviewed in the film, Laura says she turned to professionals, but was “ushered along very mindlessly,” adding, “I have permanent damage because of it.”
Michelle, now in her thirties, says Tumblr and her peers also played a role in introducing her to the concept of gender identity.
Though she had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, borderline personality disorder, and PTSD, it was “gender dysphoria” that made sense to her:
“It answered the question: Why am I being bullied when I was in elementary school? Oh, it must have been because I was transgender. Why didn’t I like dresses? Why didn’t I want to wear makeup… Oh, all of this is because I’m transgender. Like, so many of my friends are starting to identify as transgender and are starting to transition. It feels like something that is really catching fire.”
She joined TransFam Support Group, for people considering “transitioning,” run by two trans-identified therapists. One day they told her a clinic nearby was looking for transgender patients. “They want experience with transgender patients,” they told Michelle. We learn that one of the clinic’s therapists wrote her a letter recommending testosterone after seeing her for approximately one hour.
Michelle remembers finding the changes to her body interesting at first. She then got a double mastectomy. A video she made afterwards shows her bare-chested and breastless. Looking stunned, she says, “I don’t know what to say, really.”
Eventually, Michelle came to the realization that the childhood bullying she suffered was due to her autism, not because she was “transgender.” But not before undergoing an elective hysterectomy — “the worst thing” she did as part of her attempt to transition. “Even before I detransitioned there was a part of me thinking, ‘Actually, I do want children now.’”
Michelle’s detransition began with her roommate, who had detransitioned and encouraged her to read online posts by other detransitioners. Initially she refused, believing these kinds of posts were written by bigots simply trying to take away “trans healthcare.” However, Michelle eventually realized she was “chasing something that ultimately I was never going to be able to achieve.” She explains:
“If you live as someone who has transitioned, you’re spending the rest of your life either denying your own material reality or trying to convince other people that they need to deny your material reality in order for you to be comfortable in society.”
David, a gay man, began noticing the stigma surrounding homosexuality when he was a child: “I recognized the guilting [and the] the shaming of same-sex attraction within society and culture.” He decided he would be happier as a woman and began calling himself Paige, taking estrogen, and wearing women’s clothing and make-up. He also got silicone implants.
David says the estrogen he was taking led to severe bone loss — initially osteopenia, which turned into osteoporosis, causing him to become hunched over, needing a walker.
David went to New York City to get castrated, and spoke with two transvestites who had undergone complete sex-reassignment surgery, and who dissuaded him from undergoing the procedures himself. David recalls that one of them told him:
“Don’t do it… All of my life I thought that if I could just become a woman I would find peace and joy and happiness… now that I am legally and medically a woman, I’m more miserable now than I was my entire life. I think about taking my life every day.”
The other man also told him he thought about killing himself “several times a day, every day.”
David recounts experiencing severe unhappiness after his transition — feelings he kept hidden even from his friends:
“Everyone that knew me, they would have argued with anybody that ‘Paige’ was content and secure and happy and just being the person she was meant to be and none of them had a clue that I was depressed, that I was bitter, that I hated myself, that I attempted to take my life quite a few times… I recognize that I didn’t just live a lie, I became the lie. I was the lie.”
Joel is a soft-spoken, thin young man who now sports a beard. He developed anorexia at the age of 11, which led to body dysmorphia and eventually a belief that he was “transgender.”
Joel lives in Indiana and says it is incredibly easy to obtain hormone treatments if you live in an area that has adopted the “informed consent model.” He made an appointment with a doctor in Chicago, and just two weeks later received estrogen. He describes his initial honeymoon phase with hormone therapy, saying, “Everything felt great. My body felt great… I was also becoming an internet influencer pretty quickly.”
Joel had developed a large following on TikTok — in one clip, we see Joel celebrating six months of estrogen injections. He is clean-shaven, heavily made-up, and holding a syringe up to the camera.
Three months later, Joel made another video. He now has a beard and mustache and says his medical transition just made him “more dysphoric.” He explains, “The more that happened to my body, the [more scared] I got, and I came to the realization that I don’t feel like I’m actually transgender.” Joel stayed on hormone therapy for less than a year.
Joel realized that hormone therapy was not having a satisfactory effect on his health, but his desire to stop the treatments was hindered by his social media following. Joel recalls:
“… I had a lot of social media followers, people that looked up to me and made me feel like I was important to them. I felt like I couldn’t go back and that the only option was to just keep pushing forward.”
As a result, Joel became depressed and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
Abel is a young bearded man whose medical transition included hormone therapy and breast implants. The sadness and defeat in his voice as he tells his story are palpable. And yet, he says that when he decided to transition he was nearly 100% certain he would never regret it. In the end, Abel had his breast implants removed.
Abel, too, speaks of how easy it is for young people to access wrong-sex hormones. He had just one session with a therapist and was given a letter to transition right away.
Pediatrician Julia Mason reveals that, in many states, young people can walk into a Planned Parenthood and leave with hormones. She explains that Planned Parenthood operates on the “informed consent model” Joel mentioned, and that if youth “sign a piece of paper saying that they acknowledge the risks then they can be given these powerful hormones with irreversible side-effects.”
According to the documentary’s captions, the informed consent model “allows clients to access hormone treatments and surgical interventions without a mental health evaluation or referral from a mental health specialist.”
Stella O’Malley explains:
“I’ve met way too many people — way too many detransitioners — who said: ‘I was constantly trying to fight against the onslaught of nature. I was always fighting against it with the hormones I was taking.’ As somebody said, ‘It’s like putting diesel in the petrol tank.’”
Dr. Malone challenges the claim that puberty blockers are reversible, saying this is “disingenuous on multiple levels.” He says 95% of children who take puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones and that puberty blockers cannot be considered a stand-alone intervention. Moreover, Dr. Malone points out that studies show most children (somewhere between roughly 65% and 98%, depending on which study you look at) who develop gender dysphoria will have resolution of that gender dysphoria by the time they reach adulthood. “This fact seems to be forgotten by medicine currently,” he says.
Dr. Malone enumerates the risks of cross-sex hormone therapy. Males who start estrogen treatments risk blood clots, breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, gallstones, and elevated cholesterol. Females who go on testosterone risk thickening of the blood, severe liver dysfunction, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and breast or uterine cancer.
Close-ups of documents from the Mayo Clinic reveal other complications linked to feminizing and masculinizing hormone therapies, including infertility. “The fact they’re being offered outside of clinical trials, despite the fact there’s so much unknown about long-term risk, is a scandal, in and of itself,” Dr Malone says.
He says there are psychological impacts as well:
“Something that has not gotten a lot of attention but I think will, in the coming years, is the psychological impact of being told by people in positions of authority — physicians in particular — that these interventions would improve that person’s mental health, then coming to discover that not only did the intervention not improve that person’s mental health, but there actually was no evidence to begin with that it ever would.”
Dr. Lisa Littman was the first to produce a study about how social contagion factors into the trans trend, finding that in around 2013-2014, “one after the next teenager was announcing a trans-identification in numbers that greatly exceeded what would be expected.” She says, “It was apparent that these kids were all from the same friendship group.”
Dr. Malone, too, addresses the increasing number of children claiming a transgender identity:
“This has been documented. Not only at clinics in the United States, but also across Europe, a several thousand percent increase in teenage girls in particular. The ratio now is about 80% girls, 20% boys for gender dysphoria.”
Stephanie Winn explains that the idea of transitioning is “highly contagious” because it “appeal[s] to so many of the things that we long for and provide[s] the kind of illusory hope that there’s a way out of normal human struggles like the discomfort of puberty.”
Winn isn’t just critical of the trans trend, but of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-5) description of the criteria for gender dysphoria:
“It’s really just a list of stereotypes and then someone saying that they don’t fit these stereotypes or that they are uncomfortable in the body that they have. So what’s wrong with that is that you’re recommending some invasive, risky, experimental, and costly medical treatments for something that you’re saying is not a medical condition.”
Sasha Ayad argues that professionals need to “hold space for this being an exploratory thing that teenagers do,” rather than “rubber stamping the identity and encouraging kids to medically transition.” She adds, “This is really the potential of a serious epidemic of medical interventions that are probably going to be inappropriate for many of these kids.”
Oftentimes, discussions of “supporting trans kids” are connected to risk of suicide, should these youths not be encouraged to transition. Winn says “Parents are being intimidated and coerced,” told, “If you don’t affirm right away your kid’s going to commit suicide.” She believes this is incredibly dangerous. “It’s our responsibility to believe in our patient’s capacity for resilience, even and especially when they don’t believe in it themselves.” Winn says:
“We should never tell anyone, under any circumstances, that if you don’t get what you want or if you don’t get what you think is a solution to your problems, you will kill yourself. That’s really damaging. I would call that malpractice.”
Moreover, the data around suicidality in this context is being misrepresented. Ayad explains, “All of the clinicians that are actually tracking current rates of self-harm and suicide will tell you — luckily — the suicide rate is quite, quite, quite low,” adding, “We don’t know medicalizing reduces suicide.”
Interviewees discuss young transitioners’ other (neglected) conditions, including autism, unresolved past trauma, and internalized homophobia and misogyny. Ayad says that “once a kid identifies as trans or describes gender dysphoria, all of the other conditions that they were struggling with before become attributed to the distress of being trans.” O’Malley points to findings in a study done by Tavistock, the largest gender clinic for children in the world (before it was told to shut down last year after an independent review), showing that 48% of the children seeking to medicalize their gender identity were autistic.
There is also concern over the troubling numbers of gay and lesbian youth identifying as “transgender.” Lisa Marchiano says:
“When you realize that most of the young kids who get gender dysphoria will eventually desist — and what the evidence tells us [is] that most of those who desist will then be lesbian or gay — what we may be doing, actually, is sterilizing and destroying the sexual function of kids who may have grown up to be gay or lesbian.”
Lisa Selin Davis notes that some European countries are reevaluting their approach to medical transitions, as systematic reviews did not find evidence to support the idea that these interventions are either medically necessary or qualify as “life-saving treatment.” She says they have issued “very strict guidelines so that children are very carefully evaluated before medically transitioning.” Some of these countries have even begun urging against social transition, as “it appears from preliminary research that social transition generally leads to medical transition.”
Notably, Sweden and Finland both have backtracked on medicalizing so-called “trans kids,” opposing puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors. Mason says Sweden, Finland, and England all followed a commissioned, systematic review of the evidence, finding “either no benefits to youth gender transitions or even that the harms outweighed the benefits.”
Despite these U-turns, Davis says both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health are refusing to do a systematic evidence review.
Dr. Littman discusses her 2021 study, in which she surveyed 100 detransitioners, saying, “The most frequently endorsed reason for detransitioning, in my study, was that their personal definition of male or female changed, so they became comfortable identifying as their natal sex.”
Others expressed concern about medical complications from transitioning, found that their mental health did not improve while transitioning or even worsened with transition, experienced dissatisfaction with the physical results of transition, or discovered that their gender dysphoria was caused by trauma or a mental health condition.
Dr. Littman also comments on the fact that nearly one quarter of survey participants reported internalized homophobia was associated with their gender dysphoria and desire to transition. Accepting themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual was related to their detransitioning.
After listening to the six detransitioners’ stories, we are hardly surprised when Marchiano relates something she has heard repeatedly from detransitioners: “I have ruined my life. I’ve ruined my body. I’ve ruined my health. I had a perfectly good body and now it’s ruined.”
Affirmation Generation: The Lies of Transgender Medicine, directed and edited by L. E. Dawes and produced by Vera Linder, is available on Vimeo, free of charge.
Alline Cormier is a Canadian film analyst and retired court interpreter with a B.A. Translation from Université Laval. In her second career she turns the text analysis skills she acquired in university studying translation and literature to film. She makes her home in British Columbia and is currently seeking a publisher for her film guide for women. Alline tweets @ACPicks2.
The post ‘Affirmation Generation’ tells truths about ‘trans youth’ the media won’t touch appeared first on Feminist Current.
Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume:
But if by convention be meant a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.
In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):
I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.
Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).
But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.
In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention. And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.
If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.
That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.
The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)
The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."
To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved.
This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.*
* I am not denying that Aristotelian formal and material causes get reinterpreted in Locke. I am grateful to discussion with Susan James, Martin Lenz, Charles Wolfe, Spiros Tegos, Katarina Peixoto and others in Budapest.
But that the Nature of Discourse may be more throughly understood, it must first be known, that there is a two-fold Obligation respecting Discourse, whether exprest with the Voice, or written in Characters. The first is, that those who make use of the same Language, are obliged to apply such certain Words to such certain Things, according as Custom has made them to signify in each Language. For since neither any Words nor any particular Strokes form’d into Letters can naturally denote any certain Thing (otherwise all Languages and Characters for writing would be the same; and hence the Use of the Tongue would be to no purpose if every Man might call every Thing by what Name he pleas’d;) it is absolutely necessary among those who speak the same Language, that there be a tacit Agreement among them, that this certain Thing shall be so, or so call’d, and not otherwise. So that unless an uniform Application of Words be agreed upon, ’twill be impossible for one Man to gather the Meaning of another from his Talk. By virtue then of this tacit Compact, every Man is bound in his common Discourse to apply his Words to that Sense, which agrees with the receiv’d Signification thereof in that Language: From whence also it follows, that albeit a Man’s Sentiments may differ from what he expresses in Words, yet in the Affairs of Human Life he must be look’d upon as intending what he says, tho’, as was said, perhaps his inward Meaning be the clear contrary. For since we cannot be inform’d of another’s Mind otherwise than by outward Signs, all Use of Discourse would be to no purpose, if by mental Reservations, which any Man may form as he lists, it might be in his power to elude what he had declar’d by Signs usually accepted to that end.--Pufendorf, Samuel and Barbeyrac, Jean. The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673, 2003). Liberty Fund, 1673. pp. 120-121
As regular readers know I have been directed toward Pufendorf's account of tacit consent because of my reading of Martin Lenz's entertaining and stimulating Socializing Minds (recall this post, especially; but also this one). Lenz (pp. 138-139) explicitly quotes the passage above, and notes four key anticipations of Locke in Pufendorf:
Lenz is surely right about this, and I accept his contention that Locke's account of the conventionality of language (especially at Essay 3.2.8 and 3.11.11) is inspired by Pufendorf's De Officio hominis civis, or at least that it would have evoked it to contemporary readers then.
So, this raises the question to what degree what I call recall 'the Humean template' for analyzing convention is already present in Pufendorf. The elements of the Humean template are: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit. And I argued (recall) that Locke articulates the Humean template at Essay 2.28.10 in the context of describing how moral terms are structurally the same in each language even though they can refer to locally different moral behaviors and characters/character-traits. (And that we can also find (recall) the template in the Second Treatise, paragraph 50 in his account of the value off money.)
If we then look at the quoted passage from De Officio, we can read that Pufendorf treats the convention in terms of an existing "custom." And while this is fully compatible with the elements of the Humean template, we are left without an account how the custom could arrise. That's to say while Pufendorf makes, as Lenz notes, the obligatory character of the convention quite clear, he leaves its origin quite mysterious. For, earlier, Pufendorf defines custom as "the frequent Repetition of Actions of the same kind does also incline the Will to do certain Things" (pp. 34-35). But why linguistic practices get repeated in particular patterns is simply contingent now.
This absence of a mechanism of how tacit consent arises is actually notable when Pufendorf explicitly treats of the practice:
Consent is usually made known by outward Signs, as, by Speaking, Writing, a Nod, or the like; tho’ sometimes it may also be plainly intimated without any of them, according to the Nature of the thing and other Circumstances. So Silence in some Cases, and attended with some Circumstances, passes for a Sign expressing Consent. To this may be attributed those tacit Contracts, where we give not our formal Consent by the Signs generally made use of among Men; but the Nature of the Business, and other Circumstances make it fairly supposable. Thus frequently in the principal Contract, which is express, another is included which is tacit, the Nature of the Case so requiring: And it is usual, in most Covenants that are made, that some tacit Exceptions and imply’d Conditions must of necessity be understood.--pp. 111-112
Pufendorf is undoubtedly correct that even in explicit covenants lots of tacit exceptions and implied conditions are presupposed and understood. (In a later passage he treats as plainly resulting "from the Nature of the Thing." (p. 127)) That there is often a social scaffolding on which a formal contract is built is pretty much a shared insight of all critics of Hobbes. But how we should think of the character and sources of this 'necessity' is left opaque in Pufendorf.
I don't mean to suggest Pufendorf never has a mechanism when he is discussing custom. So, for example, when it comes to price formation of prices in the market place (so called vulgar prices) he writes the following.
But the Vulgar Price, which is not fix’d by the Laws, admits of a certain Latitude, within the Compass whereof more or less may be, and often is, either taken or given, according to the Agreement of the Persons dealing; which yet for the most part, goes according to the Custom of the Market. Where commonly there is Regard had to the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities, and also after what manner they are bought or sold, whether by Wholesale or Retail. Sometimes also on a sudden the Common Price is alter’d by reason of the Plenty or Scarcity of Buyers, Money, or the Commodity. For the Scarcity of Buyers and of Money, (which on any particular Account may happen) and the Plenty of the Commodity, may be a Means of diminishing the Price thereof. On the other hand, the Plenty of Buyers and of Money, and the Scarcity of the Commodity, inhanses the same. Thus as the Value of a Commodity is lessen’d, if it wants a Buyer, so the Price is augmented when the Possessor is solicited to sell what otherwise he would not have parted with. Lastly, it is likewise to be regarded, whether the Person offers ready Money, or desires Time for Payment; for Allowance of Time is Part of the Price.--pp. 143-144
Here it is quite clear that the customary price itself reflects underlying costs and even disutility of production and procurement ("the Trouble and Charges which the Tradesmen generally are at, in the bringing home and managing their Commodities") and also reflects supply/demand conditions ("plenty or scarcity"/"plenty of buyers...wants a buyer") in the market-place as well as what we would call inflation, but in Pufendorf's time is felt in terms of the availability of coins [say because the local gold/silver/copper value of coins has made it attractive to melt them down or export them], or "ready money." Interestingly enough buying on credit ("time for payment") is not treated as pure equivalent for buying with coin, presumably not just in virtue of the delay ("allowance of time"), but also the implied risk. Here Pufendorf has a relatively clear account of the mechanism by which the vulgar price can change, but again, he has no account of how it can become customary (except that conditions of change are not operative).
I have not done an exhaustive survey of Pufendorf. (You go read, Of the Law of Nature and Nations: Eight Books!--Seriously, I welcome suggestions.) But Locke deserves some credit for recognizing that Pufendorf's account of convention and tacit contract left too much unexplained. And while I have not defended the adequacy of the Humean template, the fact that Locke adopts it in non-trivial ways is no small advance over Pufendorf's analysis.
Thirdly, it is not enough that men have ideas, determined ideas, for which they make these signs stand; but they must also take care to apply their words as near as may be to such ideas as common use has annexed them to. For words, especially of languages already framed, being no man's private possession, but the common measure of commerce and communication, it is not for any one at pleasure to change the stamp they are current in, nor alter the ideas they are affixed to; or at least, when there is a necessity to do so, he is bound to give notice of it. Men's intentions in speaking are, or at least should be, to be understood; which cannot be without frequent explanations, demands, and other the like incommodious interruptions, where men do not follow common use. Propriety of speech is that which gives our thoughts entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage: and therefore deserves some part of our care and study, especially in the names of moral words. The proper signification and use of terms is best to be learned from those who in their writings and discourses appear to have had the clearest notions, and applied to them their terms with the exactest choice and fitness. This way of using a man's words, according to the propriety of the language, though it have not always the good fortune to be understood; yet most commonly leaves the blame of it on him who is so unskilful in the language he speaks, as not to understand it when made use of as it ought to be.--Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 3.11.11
In his entertaining and instructive book, Socializing Minds (recall yesterday's post), Martin Lenz calls attention to (and partially quotes) the passage quoted above. For Lenz the passage describes what he (Lenz) calls the "acceptance conditions" as "consolidated by other members of the speech community." (p. 130; see also. p. 131.) Lenz emphasizes, correctly, that for Locke the meaning of words is, in part, established by their proper common use. There is -- as Locke's use of 'propriety' signals -- something normative about this 'proper'. And this normativity is the effect of the desire to be understood and the fact that the correct usage (see below on 'speaking properly') has already been established.
Of course, at 3.11.11, the situation is a bit complicated because Locke defines 'propriety of speech' that 'which gives our thoughts entrance into other men's minds with the greatest ease and advantage.''And the 'advantage' here is to us (the speaker) and not to the community. So, that Locke is not merely describing acceptance conditions in 3.11.11 (although I do not deny that this is involved in the proper significantion and use of terms), but also the rthe art of persuasion (again not the role of skill in speaking) here. So, in context, Locke is not merely discussing acceptance conditions, but the role of such acceptance conditions in (a poetics of) rhetoric. (I don't think Lenz needs to disagree with this, but he doesn't mention it; and later in the book (p. 174) Lenz draws a a perhaps too sharp contrast between Locke and Hume on the significance of rhetoric to their account of language.)
The contrast between private property and a common measure (about which more below) that Locke invokes (at 3.11.11), of course, echoes his treatment of convention. And Lenz had prepared the reader to notice it not just by quoting these words, but because earlier he had discussed Locke's account of convention and tacit consent when he introduced the idea of 'speaker consolidation' (p. 110) which is how linguistic conventions are themselves established and (now I quote Lenz again) "set the standard for use." (p. 111). Lenz appeals to Locke's earlier account at 3.2.8, which I quote in full:
Words, by long and familiar use, as has been said, come to excite in men certain ideas so constantly and readily, that they are apt to suppose a natural connexion between them. But that they signify only men's peculiar ideas, and that BY A PERFECT ARBITRARY IMPOSITION, is evident, in that they often fail to excite in others (even that use the same language) the same ideas we take them to be signs of: and every man has so inviolable a liberty to make words stand for what ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same ideas in their minds that he has, when they use the same words that he does. And therefore the great Augustus himself, in the possession of that power which ruled the world, acknowledged he could not make a new Latin word: which was as much as to say, that he could not arbitrarily appoint what idea any sound should be a sign of, in the mouths and common language of his subjects. It is true, common use, by a tacit consent, appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly: and let me add, that unless a man's words excite the same ideas in the hearer which he makes them stand for in speaking, he does not speak intelligibly. But whatever be the consequence of any man's using of words differently, either from their general meaning, or the particular sense of the person to whom he addresses them; this is certain, their signification, in his use of them, is limited to his ideas, and they can be signs of nothing else.--John Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 3.2.8
What's neat about Locke's account is that he inscribes his account of linguistic convention into his political theory in two explicit ways. First, and less significantly, he argues that once a linguistic convention is established even an absolute ruler has very limited power to tinker with it. In fact, Locke goes much further than this and has Augustus deny that he cannot innovate in language by stipulation. A moment's reflection does allow one to recognize that on Locke's account, Augustus' power allows one to corrupt (by force law) existing words and disassociate them from established ideas.* (This is a sufficiently common phenomenon in political speech that I will leave it to the reader to find some examples.)
Second, the linguistic convention the implied measure or the existing common use of words and its stability, in particular, rests, and this might be thought paradoxical, on the inviolable liberty each and every one of us has to make words stand for any of our ideas! Notice, first, that this is a commitment to an egalitarianism of a sort that is akin to Locke's account of our relative status in the state of nature. Second, the analysis of the convention rests on a kind of methodological individualism. It is in virtue of the fact that 'naturally' all individuals have the power to innovate that Augustus is denied once the convention is up and running (in linguistic social life)! This fact (a kind of natural equality to innovate) is ground in the fact that 'naturally' we don't have access to each other's ideas (which are inacessible to others without some mediation of language or other signs).
What 3.2.8 adds is that convention isn't just needed for what Lenz calls speaker 'consolidation' or 'acceptance conditions' in making us adhere to pre-existing standards of use, but also helps explain why there can be different language communities. Because once there is (say) some geographic or political (or religious) distance between different language users, acceptance conditions can stabilize in locally different equilibria. Once they interact again (through trade or migration) these conditions may well shift given the needs of exchange and social persuasion. (From here, it's really a very small step to Adam Smith's account of certain kinds of language use as non-servile persuasion.)
Given all these appeals to property and credit in the passage(s) above, it is tempting (recall) to look at Locke's account of convention in the second Treatise. But today, I postpone this and focus on an earlier passage in the Essay, where Locke explicitly appeals to tacit consent. And this passage makes explicit (in the context of discussion moral terms) the role of convention in linguistic diversity:
Thirdly, the LAW OF OPINION OR REPUTATION. Virtue and vice are names pretended and supposed everywhere to stand for actions in their own nature right and wrong: and as far as they really are so applied, they so far are coincident with the divine law above mentioned. But yet, whatever is pretended, this is visible, that these names, virtue and vice, in the particular instances of their application, through the several nations and societies of men in the world, are constantly attributed only to such actions as in each country and society are in reputation or discredit. Nor is it to be thought strange, that men everywhere should give the name of virtue to those actions, which amongst them are judged praiseworthy; and call that vice, which they account blamable: since otherwise they would condemn themselves, if they should think anything right, to which they allowed not commendation, anything wrong, which they let pass without blame. Thus the measure of what is everywhere called and esteemed virtue and vice is this approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which, by a secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world: whereby several actions come to find credit or disgrace amongst them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashion of that place. For, though men uniting into politic societies, have resigned up to the public the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ it against any fellow-citizens any further than the law of the country directs: yet they retain still the power of thinking well or ill, approving or disapproving of the actions of those whom they live amongst, and converse with: and by this approbation and dislike they establish amongst themselves what they will call virtue and vice.-- Locke An Essay Concerning Human(e) Understanding, 2.28.10
Locke here anticipates the Humean observation (in the appendix to the Second Enquiry) that there is remarkable stability in moral terminology while there is enormous diversity what the content (qua behavior or character) applies to. And this is an effect of the fact that the meta-ethical measure that regulates the local linguistic conventions just is local approval and disapproval (not again the role of credit here).
Again, at 2.28.10 Locke uses the contrast with an explicit political social contract to illustrate the nature of the tacit convention. And he claims that this convention operates orthogonally to the official political social contract. And that there are practices of approval and disapproval that are not regulated by law, but by independent judgment presumably in light of one's interest (like/dislike/approbation) and evaluation of what is (to use Smithian language) praiseworthy. The point echoes Hobbes's and Spinoza's observation that the law cannot fully control (although certainly corrupt) the minds of the ruled, and these maintain a kind of informal credit economy (or score in a language game) that tracks local judgments of merit. So, here, too, we see that the privacy of ideas is presupposed to maintain the conventionality of the shared linguistic social world.
I am struck, anew, how much of Locke's account anticipates Hume's official treatment of a convention, which has (recall) seven (or eight) parts: (i) a sense of common interest (i*) felt in each person's breast; (ii) and it (that is, (i)) observed in others; (iii), this fact (the existence of (i&ii) creates collaboration; (iv) the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways; (v) and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society. (I avoid the language of 'utility' to avoid issues pertaining to utilitarianism.) And (vi) a Humean convention is contrasted with practices founded in promises and in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition, (vii), the process (i-iii) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.
Of these, all are explicitly present except (i-ii), although (i*) is in Locke's account of linguistic conventions in the Essay (and so kind of entails (i)). And (ii-iii) are implied once the convention is up and running (as the example of Augustus illustrates). The fact that in his account of convention Locke embraces (i-vii), while being a bit ambigious about (i-iii) is as I noted (recall) also true of Locke's account of the conventions of property and money in the Second Treatise. So, that is to say, Locke has an internally consistent 'template' of what a convention is that he applies to a number of large scale social institutions, and this template anticipates in crucial ways Hume's account who refines it by making some features (and implied mechanisms of stability) more explicit.
That's enough for today on this topic. TBC with a nod to Pufendorf.
*It is worth reflecting on why Locke thought it prudent not to make this fully explicit.
Especially early modern explanations seem to construe the mind as something that is tucked away in a body and thus inaccessible by other minds. If this is correct, how could we even begin to think of a way that my thoughts influence yours? Are there ways of transmission or other modes of influence between different minds? I would like to call this the contact problem. Intersubjective explanations, it seems, must specify ways in which one mind can affect another mind. As I will argue, at least some early modern philosophers addressed this problem and provided intersubjective accounts of the mind. What is more, they relied on different models of intersubjectivity. To present three different but crucial explanatory models, I will focus on Spinoza, Locke and Hume: Spinoza will be shown to opt for a metaphysical model, Locke as resorting to a linguistic model and Hume as relying on a medical model that combines assumptions about contagion and sympathy.
Before we take a brief look at these models, let us take a step back and look at the contact problem again. Taking human minds as individual units hidden inside a body suggests that a direct contact between minds is impossible. I can tell you what I think, but in doing so, it’s not my thought that is transmitted. Getting at the thought seems to require an inference on the part of the listener. By contrast, if I endorse a view of the mind that takes mental states to be ingrained in behaviour, such that my mental states are not hidden but part of behavioural patterns, then my mind does seem to be more directly accessible. It seems, then, that the contact problem poses an enormous obstacle for the former but not for the latter view of the mind. On this assumption, intersubjective explanations work well in a behavioural view of the mind but not on what has been called “mentalism”. Martin Lenz (2022) Socializing Minds: Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press), pp, 93-4 (emphases in original)*
I have to admit that when I first started to read Lenz's very entertaining Socializing Minds, I was a bit dubious about the so-called contact problem. It seemed to me, and sometimes still seems to me, an artifact of behaviorialism and some of Ryle's more dubious historiographic moves (which, alas, he was not immune to). But because Lenz's book is so much fun -- it mixes contemporary insights with very erudite and clearly written history of philosophy in refreshing ways easily moving between Avoerrism and memes-- I decided to revise my view. Reflecting on the contact problem is generative and so (by my lights) cannot be a mere artifact (which are sterile).
I have to admit that I don't understand why inference is thought to be a barrier to contact -- the contact problem seems to be rather the no unmediated contact problem --, but obviously for the contact problem to have real bite, by inference here (in this context) is meant something like 'not truth preserving' inference or distorting. And clearly it's true that many if not most early modern philosophers thought that language and other mechanisms of social contact are distorting of reality (and don't do full justice to our ideas of it). Lenz shows that despite this commitment, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume have different kinds of theories in which our minds are, de facto, dependant on other minds, although -- he may disagree with this -- the effect is that in interacting with others the vulnerability to embracing the false remains. (Perhaps, in Locke the vulnerability is also simultaneously the grounds for possibility of reaching some truths. About that some other time.)
Anyway, that the no contact problem seems so much an artificat of behavioralism made me wonder if one couldn't generate it in an alternative framework. This made me consider whether there are circumstances in which no contact is desirable. I immediately thought of Condorcet's Jury theorem which, formally, requires that voters do not communicate with each other and make up their own minds on a decision problem. Without such independence the result that (with rather weak assumptions about human nature) more folk do better than fewer would be unsurprising (and not so unsettling to the elitist and hierarchical mindset).+ Of course, the formation of Rousseau's general will also requires such independence.
Now, while Rousseau's account of the general will has non-trivial formal similarity with Condorcet's jury theorem -- and I would be amazed if it didn't shape Condorcet's thinking --, it is worth signaling that the nature of their independence pushes in different directions: (i) and skating over many interpretive disputes, in Rousseau's general will set up, independence is really designed to create a kind of impartiality not tainted by self-interest (and irrelevant personality features). And this is why this kind of independence is compatible with a kind of representative agent approach (familiar from, and perhaps an ultimate source of, Rawls' original position).
A representative agent approach would undermine the force of the Condorcet jury theorem; in it independence is really about a kind of authenticity of one's judgment. Other minds are corrupting (because they undermine independence). Now, I don't mean to deny that the previous two sentences are things Rousseau himself might say. I am just trying to track a conceptual distinction. (To be sure I think both directions have roots in Spinoza's debts to stoicism--but about that in a future post.)
That is, the no contact problem is no problem in two contexts: first, one requires or needs authentic judgments that give each of us weight. That is, if one takes democracy seriously. (And lurking here are also protestant ideas about conscience that I have not touched upon above.) Second, one is dealing with a decision problem that is best handled by an impartial agent that represents (the true interests of us) all. That is, if one takes a certain species of objectivity/impartiality seriously. Put like that the two sources of the desirability of no contact seem to be a feature and not a bug of a certain conception of modern political life. And so, to put it as a serious joke, Wittgenstein and Ryle are untimely.
*Full disclosure: I am one of the invited 'critics' to comment on Lenz's book in Budapest.
+I am not claiming here all the assumptions of the jury theorem are salient in real political life!
FreshRSS 