Ian McGilchrist's extrapolations from organism-scoped attributes to psychsocial
(and beyond to society) scoping seems to commit a fallacy of composition along
the same lines as ascribing projection to nations/regimes. At the risk of
SteveS accusing me of false humility, know that I haven't read any of
McGilchrist's works and rarely know what I'm talking about anyway. My posts
here are as much a plea for assistance as they are anything else.
1) So the first problem I have is the inter-individual variation in brain
lateralization. It seems like a fairly large proportion of us (e.g. 19% for one
study) deviate from the normal bilateral pattern in 2 functions (where
functions are things like arithmetic, spatial processing, face recognition,
etc.). The recent turn from generalized/averaging medicine toward precision
medicine helps us guess that this composition from individual to populations is
suspect.
2) Then there's a jump from the disposition of functions to psychological effects. It
confirms my bias toward parallax to see studies that show increased "fluid
intelligence" in those that have significant hemispheric asymmetry. But given how
little we actually know about how mind arises from brain, any leap across this divide is
suspect.
3) The next jump is from patterns we're observing in these (usually low N)
studies to biological evolution. Admittedly, physiological attributes may be
well justified here. But mixing biological evolution with evolutionary
psychology is worrisome, especially given how often it's exploited in
Scientism-inclined culture war rhetoric like the transphobic/manosphere right.
4) And finally, as a cultural evolution rubbernecker, it's fairly easy for me to buy into
statistical trends in behavior and social artifacts like music or gender roles. But to
invoke loaded concepts like "Western society" and suggest we have any kind of
good handle on how how those behaviors and artifacts mix to result in consequences like
post-truth or conceptions of sanctity is a bit much.
Again, I haven't (and probably won't) read McGilchrist's tomes myself. And that
rightly limits the accuracy and efficacy of any worry I might have. But it's
also useful to recognize something like Stockholm Syndrome or Brandolini's Law
... or even the [multi|inter]disciplinary effect that naive outsiders can often
see features of some paradigm those fully embedded cannot. McGilchrist may well
be guilty of a kind of Gish Gallup, *because* of the length of the tomes.
Unlike a corpus of peer-reviewed publications, it's easy to get lost in the sea
of words, even *if* he's capable of walking up and down the metaphor stack.
It just seems to me like there's a significant risk of Scientism.
On 7/7/25 8:14 AM, glen wrote:
So if I read the "research" part correctly, the more complex (social) structure
allows them to read organismal expression as a signal/symbol and avoid the fighting that
would otherwise occur in the simpler (social) structure.
Specifically to Eric's question: "is it the reality, or the heavy weight on
metaphors ...?" This came to me this morning:
Bram Vaassen (Umeå University), "Mental Causation for Standard Dualists"
https://newworkinphilosophy.substack.com/p/bram-vaassen-umea-university-mental
I'd claim it needn't be either the reality of such compositions nor the reliance upon
the metaphor that needs demonstrating, at least to us lumpers
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumpers_and_splitters>. What needs demonstrating
is that those of us who do overly rely on metaphor are *capable* of
concretizing/literalizing our metaphors when necessary.
E.g. if some pundit claims the US is projecting ("engaging in projection
propaganda") when it accuses Russia or China of some motivation, a good interlocutor
will damage the flow of conversation and test whether the pundit can restate their claim
more concretely/literally. Another e.g. might be peri-entropy metaphors. >8^D
It seems to me this skill (the ability to walk up and down the metaphor stack) is
critical to good science and especially science communication [⛧]. Here's me testing the
waters for "projection propaganda": Going back to using the more literal as
signals in the meta-game, the set of behaviors surrounding patriotism et al have always
seemed to me like markers identifying people as uncomfortable in their own skin. And
there, Trump's crowd is the paper tiger, where Putin's and Jinping's crowds have the
advantage. I'm still on the fence re: Musk, though. Vitamin K may lend you some
organismal at-homeness. The primary damage Trump's crowd is doing to the US lies in
making us as uncomfortable in our skin as they are ... We're being infected with his TACO
cowardice because we're less and less coherent about who and what we are (even if
whatever we thought we were was a fiction).
[⛧] Full disclosure, I believe science communication is more primitive than science. If
you can't enlist/coerce others to your methods, then you're not doing science. The lone
genius working on her "science" and whose notes forever remain encrypted
nonsense, is nothing but a mystic, even if it tracks perfectly with reality.
On 7/3/25 1:10 PM, Santafe wrote:
I don’t know that it holds up, or furnishes evidence, but it seems to me our
common language is strewn with metaphors showing that people cognize groups as
if they are individuals, whether or not they actually would deserve it under a
proper composition. I will give examples in a moment. But first a bit of
something that was research:
Before he became America’s Morality Guide, Jonathan Haidt did some work that I liked, looking at the language around social emotions, and arguing that it still showed explicitly metaphorical marks of its origins in body sensations. The cases I remember are things like social uses of “disgust”, which of course uses the roots for being (literally) food-sick. Haidt had a list of these, which he argued showed a common pattern, going from the more embodied-concrete to the social-abstract. It seems to me like i remember Jessica Flack’s making arguments of a similar sort within comparative primatology, for embodied actions, like grimacing, grooming, or things of that sort. That they are early attested in primate groups in concrete contexts, like aggression and submission, and then keep their form while mediating more abstract categories (in this case, more stable social roles) of dominance and subordination, in primate branches that seem to have more hierarchy in the social
structure and more complexity it its categories. The difference being stark: that in the aggression/submission dichotomy, these are behaviors that occur when fights happen, as parts of settling their outcome short of one of the fighters incapacitating or killing the other, whereas dominance/subordination are social roles that head off fights, by acting as if their outcome has already been established without actually having the fight. (the _actual_ function of the lightning rod, which precludes lightning strikes, as contrasted with its common-language gloss, which people think of as drawing them to itself).
Anyway, the obvious examples that everybody knows, in language:
Patriotism and Fatherland
Mother tongue
Alma Mater
I have a sense of knowing there are another 1 or 2 that use explicit
family-words that I am not remembering. There was a time when I was alert to
these things, and seemed to have a running list of maybe a dozen such
expressions.
So the question of whether individual behaviors _actually do_ compose to
group-level phenomena while preserving their type is a legitimate one, and the
thing that micro-to-macro in economist most relies on and doesn’t generally
fulfill. But for the projection effect Glen talks about below, is it the
reality, or the heavy weight on metaphors in people’s reception that needs to
be demonstrated?
This seems like Nick’s bread and butter, and also an area where EricC can
inject some much needed professional criticality.
Eric
On Jul 4, 2025, at 0:34, glen <[email protected]> wrote:
I'm used to interpersonal projection. E.g. Joe Rogan's supplements vs. his
accusations re the mRNA vaccines:
Rogan's Big Pharma Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder
https://youtu.be/bogYSu3cCLg?si=U1Jk93n5DC4gppdx
But I'm not habituated to the analogy of projection ("lady doth protest too
much") to national/party scale propaganda:
Projection as an Interpersonal Influence Tactic: The Effects of the Pot Calling
the Kettle Black
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672012711010
I expect man-babies like Trump to accuse their targets of their own misdeeds
(https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2ftheconversation.com%2fwhy-trump-accuses-people-of-wrongdoing-he-himself-committed-an-explanation-of-projection-237912&c=E,1,dsyRQszQSTlWaQaHOPF40m7xy43QaKWsPNAEXRnHbHFzA8jfwedUvqHsFVDlkQsR_FZO1zlBJ7LxxE8JR1bS_27IDlBZq91dUf32AtMWDN86gTzHCFEyuxQs&typo=1).
And to the extent that the right in the US (including SCOTUS) believe in and achieve the unitary
executive, the analogy between interpersonal projection and national or group projection will be
more accurate. This is one reason why "projection propaganda" worked well for Russia
and China but not so much for the US, because the difference in scope between an individual and a
regime was smaller there than here in the US.
So given that one of my whipping posts is that we bear the burden of showing how group
behavior composes from individual behavior before we assert that the map is in any way
coherent, I can't use "projection propaganda" without coming up with that
composition. If any of you historians or journalists have any clue sticks to hit me with,
I'd very much appreciate it.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
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