I think this is essentially correct. However, it won't do anymore to convince Bryan than my shorter comments to the same effect because the real crux of the disagreement isn't over what you explained but about what 'mental illness' means.
Bryan gets himself into trouble because he tends to assume there are clear facts about the one right …
I think this is essentially correct. However, it won't do anymore to convince Bryan than my shorter comments to the same effect because the real crux of the disagreement isn't over what you explained but about what 'mental illness' means.
Bryan gets himself into trouble because he tends to assume there are clear facts about the one right meaning of a word that reflect his intuitions about the principled distinctions in the neighborhood. In the case of mental illness, he seems committed to thinking that a mental illness somehow must mean a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions and substitute in as an excuse where we'd accept a physical illness.
He doesn't seem willing to accept that the ascription of illness has multiple meanings depending on context ranging from: something we think should be fixed, to valid excuse for prescribing/subsidizing drugs, to a condition which justifies making allowances.
This is the same problem he runs into with his stuff on feminism. Sure, he's right that most people don't fully apply the definition the claim to accept about feminism being just the belief that genders deserve equal/fair treatment. But if he wasn't so stuck on the idea that words have a single true meaning he could just accept that (re) definition and make the same points rephrased as claims about how true feminism therefore requires equal focus on male mistreatment.
It's logically equivalent but he'd be a whole lot more likely to convince people like his daughter if he just accepted that many people simply don't want to have to say feminism is bad anymore than they want to say patriotism is and will change the meaning as needed to allow that.
Following the feminism discourse, I will note that Bryan seems to reach for not a "one true meaning" so much as for "what do people *actually* mean when they say it"? To the extent people have a meaning beyond "it sounds nice", I find his conclusion fairly convincing. I think if he were to apply the same microscope to the "mental illness" question, he would find that people do NOT use it to mean "a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility".
Of course people tend to have a lower standard for mentally ill people, depending on the severity of the illness, but it gives far from total absolution. And the extra leeway people give someone for merely being on antidepressants / anti-anxiety / ritalin, etc, is really small.
I'll be curious to hear his response at some point.
I think that's a good way to put the point and I've tried to make something like that point to him but not very well. I think ultimately people are more committed to the fact that skizophrenia and other archetypal mental illnesses qualify as such that they are in any particular definition.
And I think that might be a better way of putting my disagreement with Caplain about word meaning. He seems to think that the way people understand a word has to be something like a definition. That might be how they explain it but it's more a kind of Quinean holistic web of links.
And when it comes to a term like feminism, I agree that people sure as hell don't really understand it to be what they claim the definition is -- but nor do most people understand it as anything like the definition he gives.
I think if we want to understand how people actually use the term they use it to mean something like: a virtuous concern for stopping the unequal/unfair treatment of women on account of (or for essential aspects of) their gender. And that virtous part really is one of the strongest links in their understanding. For most people you are far more likely to be able to convince them lots of things that are called feminism now aren't feminism than that it's bad.
More preciscly, I think what people are really committed to is something like femists were the side back in the 60s and 70s fighting to let women into the workforce, get their own bank accounts (w/o husband auth) etc etc (especially the people who were alive then).
And indeed, I've met a number of people who say they are feminists because they supported that and who largely agree that now it's men who are in the worse position.
Plus the fact that every issue-identity wants to sneak "virtuous" into their own self-definitions.
It seems to me that your logic would also have us speaking to pro-life people (who no doubt see that as "virtuous concern tracing back to [blah blah]" about what the *real* pro-life policy is. And indeed some do try this, and that's fine I guess; especially for someone aimed at political change. It's an empirical question about what is most effective.
But I also think there's room for doing the analysis Caplan does. Regarding your view about the 60s and 70s, perhaps that's true of older feminists, but I don't get that sense talking to younger ones; they seem focused on what they see as current relative unfairness. My observations track the definition Caplan wants to use, so I'm sympathetic to it.
Regarding sympathy for the definition, the reason I personally wouldn't adopt it is because it's too belief focused. Someone out there trying to oppress women surely isn't a feminist (even if they think men have it better...and deserve to) and someone fighting for women's rights in Iran is even if they think at a global level women have it better.
But those are mostly quibbles and preferences of mine. If he was addressing people like me (contrarians who live in progressive America) or conservative america it wouldn't be much of a problem in communication.
However, he claims his desired audience are people like his daughters: young elites who, though perhaps not liberal themselves, are in a predominantly progressive social environment (children of academics at elite schools are playing at houses with BLM signs who watch Madow). They will be exposed to very strong positive associations with the word of the kind I described (could have been clear those won't be universal).
More importantly, the social price they would pay for agreeing with a thesis phrases that way is just too high for them to do it.
No you don't have to use the definition the group prefers. Bryan could have simply said: by 'gender inequality feminism I mean' and used his preferred definition. But if you want to persuade don't pick terminology which would get your target audience socially exiled if they agreed.
You make one of the more compelling arguments I've seen on this.
I struggle a bit with weighing this social exile factor you mention -- there's a lot of game theory in play there, and it's largely beyond my intuition regarding how to weigh it.
"excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions"
Bryan is very committed to a hyper individualist worldview where you are in control of everything (that matters). Someone not being in control chaffes against that.
This goes beyond mental illness. Anything that would lend credence to the idea that key outcomes are substantially beyond the individuals locus of control is anathema.
After writing an entire book about how parents don't matter much and shouldn't be tiger parents, now he's throwing off the idea that maybe they matter if you do 10x as much (like him).
Having an internal locus of control is often a good thing, but it isn't necessarily a factual statement about everything in life. I think Bryan identifies that having more of an internal locus of control is often a good thing for an individual and then decides that it must be absolutely objectively true and damn the evidence. He also links having an external locus of control with demand for government solutions, which he doesn't like. His stance may be more correct then not compared to some other standard(s), but its not absolutely true in all contexts.
I don't know about your feminism stuff though, seems shoehorned into the mental-illness debate.
It seems pretty relevant but I didn't explain it well. I don't mean the actual conclusion about what view he should take (yah that was shoehorned) but the observation that he seems to think that words have true meanings that look alot like a definition rather than a mish-mash of associations and attitudes with varying degrees of strength.
And that brings us to the bit about the locus of control etc. I don't necessarily agree with his view but why must that prevent there from being a mental illness? Maybe a mental illness is just be a certain kind of extreme tension between your meta-preferences (desiring not to be extremely afraid of spiders) and your short term prefs (extremely strong desire to get away).
And it relates to how people use words in that people are far more committed to the fact that certain specific things qualify as mental illnesses than any view about what that entails. People aren't going to stop calling skizophrenia a mental illness because you change their mind about what that implies about responsibility or etc. They might stop/start believing that mental illnesses excuse certain things or even start thinking of them as facts about relationships between various preferences but archetypal mental illnesses will stay mental illnesses because for most people the particular instances do more to pin down their word use than any theoretical commitments.
I think this is essentially correct. However, it won't do anymore to convince Bryan than my shorter comments to the same effect because the real crux of the disagreement isn't over what you explained but about what 'mental illness' means.
Bryan gets himself into trouble because he tends to assume there are clear facts about the one right meaning of a word that reflect his intuitions about the principled distinctions in the neighborhood. In the case of mental illness, he seems committed to thinking that a mental illness somehow must mean a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions and substitute in as an excuse where we'd accept a physical illness.
He doesn't seem willing to accept that the ascription of illness has multiple meanings depending on context ranging from: something we think should be fixed, to valid excuse for prescribing/subsidizing drugs, to a condition which justifies making allowances.
This is the same problem he runs into with his stuff on feminism. Sure, he's right that most people don't fully apply the definition the claim to accept about feminism being just the belief that genders deserve equal/fair treatment. But if he wasn't so stuck on the idea that words have a single true meaning he could just accept that (re) definition and make the same points rephrased as claims about how true feminism therefore requires equal focus on male mistreatment.
It's logically equivalent but he'd be a whole lot more likely to convince people like his daughter if he just accepted that many people simply don't want to have to say feminism is bad anymore than they want to say patriotism is and will change the meaning as needed to allow that.
Interesting theory.
Following the feminism discourse, I will note that Bryan seems to reach for not a "one true meaning" so much as for "what do people *actually* mean when they say it"? To the extent people have a meaning beyond "it sounds nice", I find his conclusion fairly convincing. I think if he were to apply the same microscope to the "mental illness" question, he would find that people do NOT use it to mean "a condition sufficient to excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility".
Of course people tend to have a lower standard for mentally ill people, depending on the severity of the illness, but it gives far from total absolution. And the extra leeway people give someone for merely being on antidepressants / anti-anxiety / ritalin, etc, is really small.
I'll be curious to hear his response at some point.
I think that's a good way to put the point and I've tried to make something like that point to him but not very well. I think ultimately people are more committed to the fact that skizophrenia and other archetypal mental illnesses qualify as such that they are in any particular definition.
And I think that might be a better way of putting my disagreement with Caplain about word meaning. He seems to think that the way people understand a word has to be something like a definition. That might be how they explain it but it's more a kind of Quinean holistic web of links.
And when it comes to a term like feminism, I agree that people sure as hell don't really understand it to be what they claim the definition is -- but nor do most people understand it as anything like the definition he gives.
I think if we want to understand how people actually use the term they use it to mean something like: a virtuous concern for stopping the unequal/unfair treatment of women on account of (or for essential aspects of) their gender. And that virtous part really is one of the strongest links in their understanding. For most people you are far more likely to be able to convince them lots of things that are called feminism now aren't feminism than that it's bad.
More preciscly, I think what people are really committed to is something like femists were the side back in the 60s and 70s fighting to let women into the workforce, get their own bank accounts (w/o husband auth) etc etc (especially the people who were alive then).
And indeed, I've met a number of people who say they are feminists because they supported that and who largely agree that now it's men who are in the worse position.
We're a bit off-topic now, but what about Caplan's point that the vast majority of people don't identify as feminist? https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/american-women-and-feminism
Plus the fact that every issue-identity wants to sneak "virtuous" into their own self-definitions.
It seems to me that your logic would also have us speaking to pro-life people (who no doubt see that as "virtuous concern tracing back to [blah blah]" about what the *real* pro-life policy is. And indeed some do try this, and that's fine I guess; especially for someone aimed at political change. It's an empirical question about what is most effective.
But I also think there's room for doing the analysis Caplan does. Regarding your view about the 60s and 70s, perhaps that's true of older feminists, but I don't get that sense talking to younger ones; they seem focused on what they see as current relative unfairness. My observations track the definition Caplan wants to use, so I'm sympathetic to it.
Regarding sympathy for the definition, the reason I personally wouldn't adopt it is because it's too belief focused. Someone out there trying to oppress women surely isn't a feminist (even if they think men have it better...and deserve to) and someone fighting for women's rights in Iran is even if they think at a global level women have it better.
But those are mostly quibbles and preferences of mine. If he was addressing people like me (contrarians who live in progressive America) or conservative america it wouldn't be much of a problem in communication.
However, he claims his desired audience are people like his daughters: young elites who, though perhaps not liberal themselves, are in a predominantly progressive social environment (children of academics at elite schools are playing at houses with BLM signs who watch Madow). They will be exposed to very strong positive associations with the word of the kind I described (could have been clear those won't be universal).
More importantly, the social price they would pay for agreeing with a thesis phrases that way is just too high for them to do it.
No you don't have to use the definition the group prefers. Bryan could have simply said: by 'gender inequality feminism I mean' and used his preferred definition. But if you want to persuade don't pick terminology which would get your target audience socially exiled if they agreed.
You make one of the more compelling arguments I've seen on this.
I struggle a bit with weighing this social exile factor you mention -- there's a lot of game theory in play there, and it's largely beyond my intuition regarding how to weigh it.
+1
"excuse you (completely) from legal/moral responsibility for your actions"
Bryan is very committed to a hyper individualist worldview where you are in control of everything (that matters). Someone not being in control chaffes against that.
This goes beyond mental illness. Anything that would lend credence to the idea that key outcomes are substantially beyond the individuals locus of control is anathema.
After writing an entire book about how parents don't matter much and shouldn't be tiger parents, now he's throwing off the idea that maybe they matter if you do 10x as much (like him).
Having an internal locus of control is often a good thing, but it isn't necessarily a factual statement about everything in life. I think Bryan identifies that having more of an internal locus of control is often a good thing for an individual and then decides that it must be absolutely objectively true and damn the evidence. He also links having an external locus of control with demand for government solutions, which he doesn't like. His stance may be more correct then not compared to some other standard(s), but its not absolutely true in all contexts.
I don't know about your feminism stuff though, seems shoehorned into the mental-illness debate.
It seems pretty relevant but I didn't explain it well. I don't mean the actual conclusion about what view he should take (yah that was shoehorned) but the observation that he seems to think that words have true meanings that look alot like a definition rather than a mish-mash of associations and attitudes with varying degrees of strength.
And that brings us to the bit about the locus of control etc. I don't necessarily agree with his view but why must that prevent there from being a mental illness? Maybe a mental illness is just be a certain kind of extreme tension between your meta-preferences (desiring not to be extremely afraid of spiders) and your short term prefs (extremely strong desire to get away).
And it relates to how people use words in that people are far more committed to the fact that certain specific things qualify as mental illnesses than any view about what that entails. People aren't going to stop calling skizophrenia a mental illness because you change their mind about what that implies about responsibility or etc. They might stop/start believing that mental illnesses excuse certain things or even start thinking of them as facts about relationships between various preferences but archetypal mental illnesses will stay mental illnesses because for most people the particular instances do more to pin down their word use than any theoretical commitments.