In which Parrhesia puts his finger on it

The problem... he puts his finger on the problem

Parrhesia writes a blog here on Substack that until this morning I was convinced I was subscribed to. Now having corrected my error I find lots of good things to read… as my dad once said ¹ “The best thing about having a bad memory is every day can be like Christmas.”

This post Playing Word Games with the Woke in particular really explicates a key problem with modern leftist thought, one that I have been having trouble explicating myself: thinking in words as primaries, instead of thinking using words to refer to primary objects or concepts. I can’t even really explicate easily still, but here is Parrhesia with two great examples:

To illustrate this sort of semantic ethical reasoning, imagine an ethical vegan who refuses to buy her child a stuffed animal. She argues that: a stuffed animal is an animal; it is wrong to purchase animals; therefore, it is wrong to buy a stuffed animal. If you think in words, then it makes sense. But if you start thinking about reality, you’ll notice an issue. Ethical vegans are usually vegan because they don’t want to cause animal suffering, and a stuffed animal—if you wish to call it an animal or not—does not experience suffering. Whether a stuffed animal is an animal is tangential to the ethicality of purchasing it.

Consider a more realistic example; selecting embryos for health is often called eugenics. Proponents of this practice sometimes retort with the reductio ad absurdum that choosing an attractive mate is also eugenics since attractiveness indicates favorable genes. What if the opponent concedes that it’s also eugenics and therefore immoral? That’s thinking in words again. Selecting an attractive spouse is clearly okay, and coercive eugenic practices like ethnic cleansing are clearly wrong. Both of these facts are true regardless of how a particular word is defined in English. The tendency would be to want to insist that selecting an attractive mate isn’t eugenics, but that’s tangential to the question of its ethicality.

I actually think that first, unrealistic example is the better of the two. It really drives home the problem.

One thing I often find myself saying during arguments is “That isn’t what you said. You can’t say X and then claim you meant Y, which is clearly not X at all, but since you meant Y you said Y. Words mean things!” The differences between a stuffed animal, a real animal and a real animal that has been taxidermied (stuffed) are at once critical in concept and not terribly clear in language.

The acceptable mistake is the vegan to say “I would never buy my child a stuffed animal” imagining a bear cub having been killed and then its skin sewn back together and filled with fluff to make a toy, while other people look at them thinking “What the hell is wrong with a teddy bear?” Ohh, haha, you meant an animal that has been stuffed, not a stuffed animal made from non-animal bits. That’s consistent with understanding what “animal” means, and it is the adjective “stuffed” that is confusing.

The unacceptable mistake is the vegan in the example, assigning anything with the label “animal” the reality of “was once a living creature.” That is a meta-category error, misunderstanding what categories actually are, beyond even what category something belongs to. It assumes at some level that placing something within a category determines its characteristics, as opposed to being placed into a conceptual category because it has certain characteristics. More likely, the failure is thinking the category assigned by the label is the thing itself, and there is nothing to be referred to underlying the word. The word is reality.

Where have I heard that before… that the discussion determines reality? Seems familiar.

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Quick blog news: I have a bit of a backlog (back-blog?) of things I want to get written up because I am trying to get a bigger external project written up over the next week. As a result I am writing short little bits as they crop up, because I procrastinate. Sorry… I will get back to commenting on two of John Carter’s recent rather great essays, writing about Lewis and Orwell, and other “He took 10 pages to talk about… what?” content as soon as I get enough of this other project done to stop panicking about it in the middle of the night. I will also share a draft of it soon, as it should be pretty interesting to you all.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I really appreciate it, and all the comments and discussion has been wonderful for me.

1. In reference to receiving packages in the mail which he doesn’t remember ordering.