True Believer Syndrome

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience Archive' started by PsychoticEpisode, Mar 24, 2010.

  1. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    I think both philosophers and psychiatrists should have to 1) learn a foreign language and then 2) live in the culture and country where it is used. Philosophers no doubt get tossed into German and French, even these days, but I mean they must navigate and think their way through every day life - something that reading heidigger in the original has very little to do with. This is partly a response to Psychotic Episode's repeated attempts to pathologize beliefs he does not hold and the attendant believers. I think too many people think that reality can be divided up only one way and thus any other language dividing up that reality must be wrong. Further there is a general lack of understanding about how language and culture create experience and allow experience and disallow experience. I would also make both psychiatrists and philosophers - were I Dean of their program - intern with a foreign anthropologist studying whatever subculture the would be professionals are from. So a white suburban, middle class psychiatry student has to intern/research assistant with a Japanese person doing her dissertation on that very culture. And they should be able to defend the dissertation orally.

    My sense is temple grandin is primarily focused on others as ideas. She comes closest to empathy with animals, but here she is able to cut herself off completely from the context. Not unlike, I would say, the sympathy certain southern whites might have on occasion for 'that poor niggah ova there' without noticing the systemic abuse and their own role in that.

    I feel like it's a little harsh to speak of her that way and mainly I see her as fairly solipsistic. My harsh reaction is to the kind of dissociation her thinking represents. We all have it to varying degrees in varying contexts.

    I moved to another country and of course went through (a fairly mild) culture shock. I realized after a while that a large portion of this was because I had chosen my subcultures carefully in the US, and so when I moved to a new culture I was not simply experiencing the culture, but experiencing the mainstream of that culture. IOW if I had moved to one part of the US to another and been thrown into assimilation programs, I would have had at least as much culture shock. I would have to remind myself - ah, but they are normal, on occasion.
    I get along very well with both Scandanavians and the Navaho, though I have more sustained experience of the former. But I would say I am more comfortable with more immediately expressive cultures. But there are a number of factors here. I think the caution that runs through both Scandanavia and the Navaho is not cold but rather based on feeling.

    The delusions about what will make one happy, what one cannot live without, what one must never do in front of others, what 'saves face', what money is, who one is, what one believes, what language is and does

    as some examples off the top of my head

    seem pretty rampant.

    I strongly dislike this the whole

    theists, believers in ESP and UFO are mentally sick/delusional approach to dealing with what is a cultural tension. If the issue is delusion, then these delusion finders are being very selective, and I think the delusions finders are deluded about their own motivations.
     
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  3. PsychoticEpisode It is very dry in here today Valued Senior Member

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    The issue is mental illness. Or what constitutes it. Who am I to argue against Plato....

    If he indeed did feel this way then I think it wouldn't be to far out of line to suggest that the ancients were aware of mental illness and psychics, seers, prophets et al were thought of as afflicted. The cultural acceptance of the mentally ill did not come without someone thinking those people were sick.
     
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  5. Doreen Valued Senior Member

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    Well, agreeing with Plato means agreeing that the senses are not the way to find out things - IOW he was specifically NOT an empiricist - that the material world is less real than the world of forms and that democracy is not the right form of government - for example physical laborers should not have any influence on government. I dunno. Maybe you are someone who would argue with Plato.
    I don't think you read that quote carefullly. He says that some people had prophetic powers. This puts him at odds with your stance which is that if you think you have prophetic powers you are mentally ill.

    In any case, your post is an appeal to authority. An odd one since I don't think you actually agree with the authority in question, but an appeal to authority nonetheless.
     
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  7. heliocentric Registered Senior Member

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    Doesnt sound like a bad idea, actually just making philosophers read alittle philosophy from other traditions (Japanese, Indian) would be a huge step in the right direction. The problem with most metaphysics departments is that theyre attempting to challenge metaphysical assumptions within a western framework of what an 'assumption' constitutes. As Alan Watts once pointed out, the only responsible metaphysics is comparative metaphysics, if youre just going to practice metaphysics within a strictly western framework, then you may as well be practicing anthropology without ever bothering to interact with any other cultures - i.e without anything else to compare your situation with, you cant even begin to understand the deeper complexities of what your situation might actually entail.

    Anyway, as a frustrated 3rd year Philosophy student im probably just sounding off here. but it does go to show that even within supposedly fringe/individualist subjects like philosophy you do often find yourself bumping heads with a jaw-dropping degree conformism and outright dismissal of anything 'foreign' or 'exotic'. Like alot of academic institutions, the temptation is often to defend the beliefs and assumptions of your own culture while making a few tokenistic gestures towards having 'covered all the rest'. But of course this is all old news to the social anthropologist - any culture will ultimately seek to promote its own values over the rest, even when masquerading under the guise of a liberal academic department.
     
    Last edited: Apr 4, 2010
  8. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Neither is the traditional view of art. The traditional view of art maintains that art exists objectively, and is supposed to be objectively ascertained.
    The traditional understanding is that true literature can be recognized as such by examining any small portion of a book.


    Sure. But being in a "one against all" situation tends to lead to that individual questioning their own sanity.
     
  9. wynn ˙ Valued Senior Member

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    Yes ...
    It can be really confusing, though: On the one hand, one is told over and over again to "think critically", to "examine different viewpoints" and such - yet it is entirely preset what the outcome of that "critical thinking" is supposed to be.

    Studying at college has been one of the most bizarre experiences I have ever had.
     
  10. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    i see the problems you describe as more relevant to anglo-analytic traditions, where as continental traditions (including anglos who follow such, of course) are more plagued by a sort of pathological "decentering." certain trends in post-structuralist thinking can be problematic in so many ways--the extreme relativism, insistence upon interminable differance, resistance to thesis, a sort of antinomianism, all this can be "read" as not really saying anything at all.

    i mean, from the time of schopenhauer onwards, continental thinkers have certainly made efforts to understand traditions well outside their own. and i would say from the time of heidegger onwards, they have also made concerted efforts to do so with an awareness of their own cultural biases and presuppositions. the problems seem to be more one of how one is to deal with the issue of "translation."
     
  11. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    this does see very much to be the case, and frankly i find it perplexing that such attitudes come from people with university educations. not that i really hold the "university education" in all that high regard, but i've got to wonder how so many people got through university without exposure to such ideas.

    i suppose, as per your suggestion, that for most such must be experienced in order to really sink in. my point is imply that i get the sense that a lot of people have never encountered these ideas even in writing, and i find that kind of bizarre.

    with grandin at least, such can reasonably be attributed to the sort of hyper-specific thinking which autism tends to invoke--that of seeing every little detail in the woods, but "not seeing the forest for the trees."

    agreed. and such thinking is even encouraged--and is indeed appropriate in certain contexts--so it's really not all that surprising, though disconcerting.

    for me, it's often less jarring as, because i am apt to be performing music, i am more likely to be immersed immediately within a subculture not dissimilar to that i know from "back home."

    this is what a lot of people seem to overlook. i would describe the behaviors and temperaments as conservative and efficient--and obviously i mean conservative in a different sense, as in conserving energy. which is not to say that in these cultures people do not go all out, it's simply that they only do so with respect to that which they actually feel.
     
  12. heliocentric Registered Senior Member

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    This is something that genunely interests me actually, if i go to France to study philosophy at a well-rated institution is it all sitting going on about Derrida and Debord all day? Do i get to write essays on existentialism and 'the other'? I cant say ive checked to find out, but ive a sneaking suspicion that it would be far more analytic Anglo/American than most of us would probably suspect.

    Either way, my real truck isnt with the lack of continental philosophy covered in English Universities, it's the primary question "what determines the good life?" and been largely replaced by heuristics and semantic nose-picking. Of course all these things are just academic fashions, but i do wonder why the central question of what a good life entails suddenly became too controversial to openly consider. I actually almost switched to theology in my 2nd year because i soon realised that these were the sort of questions that were only going to get lip-service within a course-structure dealing in Sufi, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. That didnt happen in the end, but it has left me wondering why western philosophy no longer wants to deal with this particular type of philosophical problem.
     
  13. parmalee peripatetic artisan Valued Senior Member

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    i've often wondered about this myself. from my own personal experience, i can only speak of american and canadian universities; but i know a few people who studied philosophy at both the undergrad and grad levels in the u.k. and germany, but no one who had studied in france, or italy for that matter.

    a friend of mine, who is now a musician by profession (as am i), obtained a phd. in philosophy from oxford and taught there for a number of years. funnily, we tend to argue when discussing matters of philosophy as she was very much entrenched in a tradition i have less appreciation for. it's hard for me to reconcile the music she makes with her philosophical positions.

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    interestingly, i don't feel that these questions are so much ignored in contemporary writings, but they do seem to be very much ignored in the universities--and the texts which profs choose to employ.

    taking derrida as but one example, consider his writings from the 80's until the time of his death. there is a marked turn from the days of of grammatology to matters of friendship, justice, ethics, and "the good life" so to speak, but universities are not yet using these texts. perhaps twenty years from now they will be focusing upon these texts, but who knows?

    amongst americans, some of my favorites--who bridge analytic and continental traditions, and also make efforts to understand traditions outside of the western--are people like stanley cavell, john caputo, cora diamond, cary wolfe, etc. and these folks certainly discuss your concerns in their writings, and likewise they seem aware, and acknowledge the relevance of, related disciplines such as anthropology, religious studies, ethology (a big one in post-humanism, for obvious reasons), social sciences, and even the "hard" sciences, to a degree. but as to what they actually teach is another matter.


    edit: i just recalled a really funny lecture i attended with a seminar group about 15 years ago. at the time, two important volumes on the early, pre-sein und zeit heidegger had just been published by theodore kisel and john van buren--one was more biographical in nature, the other focused upon his early work. one very important distinction between this heidegger and the later was that dasein referred to all things, not just the human. this has huge implications with respect to the whole of heidegger's work, and most especially from an ethical perspective.

    anyways, t. kisiel delivered an uncommonly boring lecture and then took questions for about an hour. one guy asked a question to which kisiel took nearly a half hour to respond. afterwards, i asked everyone--the prof and the students (most of whom were grad students in the philosophy department--i was in a another department, a centre actually--and the prof was actually a heidegger scholar)--if they followed that bit (the particular question and elongated response), as i was lost. no one, including the professor, understood what the hell he was talking about! one has to wonder: just how "important" was this "concern," if no one amongst a group of people who ought to have understood it, could follow any of it?
     
    Last edited: Apr 4, 2010
  14. heliocentric Registered Senior Member

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    Ive had similar experiences with Oxford philosophy Grads. No doubt theyre bright and can do lots of impressive things within a very strict academic environment, but outside of that regimented tradition theyre usually rather ineffective in my experience. I often find away from the academic saftey-net the temptation is to place every statement/assertion you make into pre-established academic categories: "ahh i see, so youre a depressive idealist with leanings towards epistemological contextualism?"

    Of course theyre not being pendantic on purpose, theyre just trying to figure out what academic game your playing, and If you make this process too difficult for them (i.e. if you start quoting the kind of woowoo mystics us lot are into) they'll just assume youre playing silly buggers and accuse of you not wanting a fair game atall.

    This is obviously a huge problem in philosophy - we're all trying to sort out the same problems and essentially 'do' the same thing, but noone can understand each other. Without being too unfair to the anglo-american tradition, this does seem to be rooted in a critical failure of modern analytic departments to make the same transition sociology/history/anthropolgy departments did in the 70s by including non-western perspectives into their remit.

    Some Philosophy departments will of course argue that stuff like Eastern Philosophy (for example) is just too fractured and incoherent to assimilate into a 3 year Philosophy degree. But then, you can hardly draw a straight line from the Ancient Greeks to the British Empiricists to the French continental philosophers, and modern Linguistics like Chomsky. Theyre all doing completely different things, working from within a staggeringly diverse set of assumptions.

    There's a good article in Prospect i found which talks about this very topic actually.

    http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2006/02/7320-thegreatdivide
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2010

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