As you know, I have a problem with this idea. I think I now understand this problem. Keep in mind, this is not a statement about its truth value. It may even be a reflection on my education. But here goes...
This is a kind of social theory. It is not a literature review or historiography. It is the kind of thing from which empirical statements are derived. I have two problems with this. The first of these is the easiest to understand. The second problem is quite difficult to explain.
1. This idea is completely ahistorical. It may have a history, but I don't know what it is. It is not derived from existing social theory of any kind. It has no precedent in the thinking of, for example, Marx, Durkheim or Weber. It is, in that sense, just some stuff you made up. This may not be a problem, but it makes it hard for me to follow because you are not addressing any of the central issues of social theory.
2. This problem deals with the huge number of empirical statements you make. It's vast. Almost every sentence is a statement with empirical value. Some of these statements have already been investigated extensively. I am going to focus on one of your central statement that,
" People believe things for feelings, not reasons."
But there are many, many, many....others.
I don't know what you mean by "people". Is this everyone? Or just some people? This is NOT a minor point to me. Is this meant to be a statement about the essentialist nature of people, like 'All people have a brain'? Is it a defining statement about what makes us human? And that someone whose beliefs are not caused by their feelings is not entirely a person? You are NOT saying that individual differences in feelings result in individual differences in beliefs? That people with more or less of some 'feeling' have more or less of some 'reason'? Or are you? So what is the nature of this relationship?
There is a whole literature that speculates on the origins of beliefs and the nature of believing. Some of it is philosophical. Some of it relates to machine learning. I don't know much about that work. There is also a vast empirical literature that gets collected together by psychologists. In this work, I think, it would be wrong to say that "feelings cause beliefs".
It is a vast literature. It is worthy of a lifetime of study. But let's look at your use of the concept of cognitive dissonance and see where that takes us. Cognitive dissonance is NOT an affective mechanism. There is reason to believe it is a physical mechanism in your brain and body. It happens all the time. Some educators describe it as a key aspect of learning. Festinger and others focus on errors that cognitive dissonance produce for the purpose of illustrating its existence, not because it has any logical connection to mistakes. You might be using the term 'feelings' to mean something different than affect, but that would make this a different kind of statement and one you would have to clarify.
Beliefs are predicted by a variety of factors. If we made an equation that predicted individual differences in beliefs, there would be many different types of variables in there. Some of them would be affective, but others would be individual or social. In fact, I think we all know this. This is what leads me to wonder if you don't mean this in some essentialist sense. This is also a point you would have to clarify.
I guess my problem is, where did this idea come from? It's almost like it's a bunch of stuff that makes sense to you, and you're going to see if you can convince some other people. This is very different from the kind of independently reproducible argument you'd want associated with data, for example with Covid. What I would like to know more about is where this line of thought came from. Is it just a common sense sort of argument, albeit a high level of common sense?
It's just a common sense sort of argument, in the sense that it's an informal, hand-waving summary of various ideas that either I'm not ready to formalize or which I've formalized in ways that are far enough outside of any scholarly tradition as to be practically incommunicable even if I had the interest in taking the years that that would require, which I don't.
I'm also trying to show people how scientists think in the formative stages of ideas. I talked a few weeks back about how scientists are generally way more confused than most people. This is me being confused, and working through a process that will put the confusion into some kind of order. At the end of it, I'll come back and ask: "So, does this actually make any sense? Is it good for anything?"
I think these ideas are potentially useful tools for thinking about the world even though they bear the same relationship to any well-supported social theory that the contents of engineering handbooks bear to any well-supported physical theory, which is barely any at all. Then again, they may not.
This is very different from the kind of "confused" thinking that I have when I approach a new problem. I don't know anything about engineering, so I can't really talk about your comparison, but I imagine that engineering books use math and all kinds of physical laws, like gravity. I have trouble imagining an engineering book that starts with the assumption that Newton didn't know anything that's going to be talked about in the book. I'm sure I'm saying this the wrong way, but you understand what I mean. What you're saying about hierarchies is understandable to me on a rhetorical level. But really, I don't even know what you mean by "people" or "feelings", or what you mean by this suggested relationship between feelings and beliefs. It's not a matter of confusion. I suspect - and forgive me for saying this - that you had no idea this could be an issue. This is very different from when I started investigating the cognition of judges when they are examining test items. Sure, I was very confused about the vast number of measurements I had and what to do with them. Of course I was. They are specialized information. They are not the kind of things that common sense has much to say about, though. My confusion did NOT include the kind of confusion about testing that you see in common sense discussion of the process. The confusion you are talking about comes from not knowing how to apply the vast number of principles and methods that your expertise has mastered. It exists precisely because your understanding of what's going on is so precise. This confusion exists because of all these theoretical models in your head, that were described in the research you cited to me about how experts think. The confusion is about figuring out how to fit new and oddly-shaped data into a new description.
You'd be utterly amazed by how engineers actually work. Part of the reason my specific discipline--engineering physics--exists is because so much engineering is pretty much devoid of anything to do with physical laws. Part of my work for one client has to do with precise thermal control and I had to argue a senior engineer out of an approach that literally ignored everything we know about thermal physics. Most of the world you live in has been designed along similar lines, and most of the time it works pretty well. So what I'm doing here is quite typical of both engineering and applied science and even some areas of pure physics.
Ideas can be useful heuristics while still being quite wrong. The two errors people make are treating useful heuristics as ontologies, and rejecting useful heuristics because they are not ontologies (even though they may sound like them, as may be the case here). One of the things we learned in the 20th century is how far we can take our ability to reason about the world in the absence of a coherent ontology. While I still am an ontologist at heart, I have no particular issue with setting ontology aside and seeing how far I can run without it. This is an extremely common process in theory development in the sciences and engineering, and getting hung up on ontology too soon can be stifling of creativity.
Dunno if that makes any sense, but it certainly helps *me* understand what I'm doing here, so thanks!
So engineering is truly a post-modern disciple. Anything is possible in it, as long as you have the power to make others believe it. We should be reading Bruno Latour in our science classes, I guess, since engineers are as close to modern physics as is the electric universe.
I think one of your points is that your post is devoid of the heritage of social sciences. So it's one of those attempts to start social sciences over again devoid of our hundreds of years of history. Honestly...my people see this all the time with physical scientists and people from the Humanities who start to dabble with social sciences. We chuckle about this. It's like talking to someone who keeps citing Aristotle or Plato as a source.
So when you talk about "feelings" causing "beliefs", you're not talking about any sense of affect addressed by scientific psychology. It's more like an historical sense of feeling. It's like a commitment to your ancestors or racial purity or some other sense of history that people with the correct characteristic. I'm sure this is not exactly what you mean, but you distinctly do NOT mean a trait with individual different that covaries with belief. At least if you do, this needs a lot of clarification. My point is that what you have written is not a scientific statement. It can not be addressed scientifically. It is a mythology. It is not testable. It is like Nazis talking about the beauty of the Aryans regardless of the problems of inbreeding - that racial purity is its own beauty. I have to apologize for appealing once again to the Nazis, but I hope you can see past the emotions involved in my example. What you writing is not testable in any sense. It is a mythology, and this is almost certain to happen to thinking about human behavior that isn't derived from historical social science thinking.
You're completely mistaken about the nature of what I'm doing here, and I'm not really interested in trying to clarify it for you further. Enjoy your day!
As you know, I have a problem with this idea. I think I now understand this problem. Keep in mind, this is not a statement about its truth value. It may even be a reflection on my education. But here goes...
This is a kind of social theory. It is not a literature review or historiography. It is the kind of thing from which empirical statements are derived. I have two problems with this. The first of these is the easiest to understand. The second problem is quite difficult to explain.
1. This idea is completely ahistorical. It may have a history, but I don't know what it is. It is not derived from existing social theory of any kind. It has no precedent in the thinking of, for example, Marx, Durkheim or Weber. It is, in that sense, just some stuff you made up. This may not be a problem, but it makes it hard for me to follow because you are not addressing any of the central issues of social theory.
2. This problem deals with the huge number of empirical statements you make. It's vast. Almost every sentence is a statement with empirical value. Some of these statements have already been investigated extensively. I am going to focus on one of your central statement that,
" People believe things for feelings, not reasons."
But there are many, many, many....others.
I don't know what you mean by "people". Is this everyone? Or just some people? This is NOT a minor point to me. Is this meant to be a statement about the essentialist nature of people, like 'All people have a brain'? Is it a defining statement about what makes us human? And that someone whose beliefs are not caused by their feelings is not entirely a person? You are NOT saying that individual differences in feelings result in individual differences in beliefs? That people with more or less of some 'feeling' have more or less of some 'reason'? Or are you? So what is the nature of this relationship?
There is a whole literature that speculates on the origins of beliefs and the nature of believing. Some of it is philosophical. Some of it relates to machine learning. I don't know much about that work. There is also a vast empirical literature that gets collected together by psychologists. In this work, I think, it would be wrong to say that "feelings cause beliefs".
It is a vast literature. It is worthy of a lifetime of study. But let's look at your use of the concept of cognitive dissonance and see where that takes us. Cognitive dissonance is NOT an affective mechanism. There is reason to believe it is a physical mechanism in your brain and body. It happens all the time. Some educators describe it as a key aspect of learning. Festinger and others focus on errors that cognitive dissonance produce for the purpose of illustrating its existence, not because it has any logical connection to mistakes. You might be using the term 'feelings' to mean something different than affect, but that would make this a different kind of statement and one you would have to clarify.
Beliefs are predicted by a variety of factors. If we made an equation that predicted individual differences in beliefs, there would be many different types of variables in there. Some of them would be affective, but others would be individual or social. In fact, I think we all know this. This is what leads me to wonder if you don't mean this in some essentialist sense. This is also a point you would have to clarify.
I guess my problem is, where did this idea come from? It's almost like it's a bunch of stuff that makes sense to you, and you're going to see if you can convince some other people. This is very different from the kind of independently reproducible argument you'd want associated with data, for example with Covid. What I would like to know more about is where this line of thought came from. Is it just a common sense sort of argument, albeit a high level of common sense?
It's just a common sense sort of argument, in the sense that it's an informal, hand-waving summary of various ideas that either I'm not ready to formalize or which I've formalized in ways that are far enough outside of any scholarly tradition as to be practically incommunicable even if I had the interest in taking the years that that would require, which I don't.
I'm also trying to show people how scientists think in the formative stages of ideas. I talked a few weeks back about how scientists are generally way more confused than most people. This is me being confused, and working through a process that will put the confusion into some kind of order. At the end of it, I'll come back and ask: "So, does this actually make any sense? Is it good for anything?"
I think these ideas are potentially useful tools for thinking about the world even though they bear the same relationship to any well-supported social theory that the contents of engineering handbooks bear to any well-supported physical theory, which is barely any at all. Then again, they may not.
This is very different from the kind of "confused" thinking that I have when I approach a new problem. I don't know anything about engineering, so I can't really talk about your comparison, but I imagine that engineering books use math and all kinds of physical laws, like gravity. I have trouble imagining an engineering book that starts with the assumption that Newton didn't know anything that's going to be talked about in the book. I'm sure I'm saying this the wrong way, but you understand what I mean. What you're saying about hierarchies is understandable to me on a rhetorical level. But really, I don't even know what you mean by "people" or "feelings", or what you mean by this suggested relationship between feelings and beliefs. It's not a matter of confusion. I suspect - and forgive me for saying this - that you had no idea this could be an issue. This is very different from when I started investigating the cognition of judges when they are examining test items. Sure, I was very confused about the vast number of measurements I had and what to do with them. Of course I was. They are specialized information. They are not the kind of things that common sense has much to say about, though. My confusion did NOT include the kind of confusion about testing that you see in common sense discussion of the process. The confusion you are talking about comes from not knowing how to apply the vast number of principles and methods that your expertise has mastered. It exists precisely because your understanding of what's going on is so precise. This confusion exists because of all these theoretical models in your head, that were described in the research you cited to me about how experts think. The confusion is about figuring out how to fit new and oddly-shaped data into a new description.
You'd be utterly amazed by how engineers actually work. Part of the reason my specific discipline--engineering physics--exists is because so much engineering is pretty much devoid of anything to do with physical laws. Part of my work for one client has to do with precise thermal control and I had to argue a senior engineer out of an approach that literally ignored everything we know about thermal physics. Most of the world you live in has been designed along similar lines, and most of the time it works pretty well. So what I'm doing here is quite typical of both engineering and applied science and even some areas of pure physics.
Ideas can be useful heuristics while still being quite wrong. The two errors people make are treating useful heuristics as ontologies, and rejecting useful heuristics because they are not ontologies (even though they may sound like them, as may be the case here). One of the things we learned in the 20th century is how far we can take our ability to reason about the world in the absence of a coherent ontology. While I still am an ontologist at heart, I have no particular issue with setting ontology aside and seeing how far I can run without it. This is an extremely common process in theory development in the sciences and engineering, and getting hung up on ontology too soon can be stifling of creativity.
Dunno if that makes any sense, but it certainly helps *me* understand what I'm doing here, so thanks!
So engineering is truly a post-modern disciple. Anything is possible in it, as long as you have the power to make others believe it. We should be reading Bruno Latour in our science classes, I guess, since engineers are as close to modern physics as is the electric universe.
I think one of your points is that your post is devoid of the heritage of social sciences. So it's one of those attempts to start social sciences over again devoid of our hundreds of years of history. Honestly...my people see this all the time with physical scientists and people from the Humanities who start to dabble with social sciences. We chuckle about this. It's like talking to someone who keeps citing Aristotle or Plato as a source.
So when you talk about "feelings" causing "beliefs", you're not talking about any sense of affect addressed by scientific psychology. It's more like an historical sense of feeling. It's like a commitment to your ancestors or racial purity or some other sense of history that people with the correct characteristic. I'm sure this is not exactly what you mean, but you distinctly do NOT mean a trait with individual different that covaries with belief. At least if you do, this needs a lot of clarification. My point is that what you have written is not a scientific statement. It can not be addressed scientifically. It is a mythology. It is not testable. It is like Nazis talking about the beauty of the Aryans regardless of the problems of inbreeding - that racial purity is its own beauty. I have to apologize for appealing once again to the Nazis, but I hope you can see past the emotions involved in my example. What you writing is not testable in any sense. It is a mythology, and this is almost certain to happen to thinking about human behavior that isn't derived from historical social science thinking.
You're completely mistaken about the nature of what I'm doing here, and I'm not really interested in trying to clarify it for you further. Enjoy your day!